ChowNow in Playa Vista provides branded online ordering systems for independent restaurants across the US — via restaurants’ own websites, on Facebook and Google pages.
$119
Per Annual
Square POS
Score 9.3 out of 10
N/A
Square POS is a point-of-sale software solution with features such as accept credit cards with your iPhone, Android, and iPad along with the flexibility to accept credit card payments anywhere, from Square headquartered in San Francisco, California.
The ChowNow platform is rock solid with daily use. It is easy to set up and train new staff. Lower pricing with competitors is the only reason for the 8 of 10
Square POS is by far the easiest POS software to use at events and train additional team members on - even with temporary or first-time employees. It's easy to see how each event is doing in live time. It gives the event manager a real-time view of revenue earned. Its really easy to create/manage/delete users to keep the platform secure.
Mobile transactions (not like from a phone, but in terms of the ability to physically relocate rapidly).
Simple setup.
Generally uncomplicated pricing.
Widespread customer familiarity: because it's so regularly in use in our industry (musicians/entertainment professionals), people know and trust it in a way that you might not with a different provider.
Better structure of Pizza menus to ease 86 toppings
The new interface could use some work. Smaller fonts make the "tickets" difficult to determine correct information. The system defaults to the last ticket time - The standard system was actually more accurate
I don't really foresee anything being able to dislodge Square from our organization—we're not evangelists or anything like that—it's just the best solution we've found for our use case. Being able to quickly handle transactions from customers and then track all of those sales for analysis/bookkeeping later on.
We find Square POS is very user friendly. Its interface is customizable to our needs and very easy to use. Before we adopted Square POS, we used a combination of solutions from different manufacturer to try and achieve a portion of the functionality that Square POS provides under only 1 login
An admission - I have NEVER had to use Square POS support. The system is seamless, it just works! I have never had any queries about how the system worked as everything is so clearly laid out. I have never had any problems with payments. If their support systems are anywhere near as good as their software, I think we'll be in good hands.
I push customers toward ChowNow instead of the references apps because of a) ChowNow has lower commission costs b) ChowNow gives customer data access c) ChowNow allows me to better issue refunds or adjustments. ChowNow however does not provide as much visibility to "new" potential customers. This is just my guess -- there are less average users on the ChowNow app on a nightly basis vs. the UberEats, DoorDash, Grubhubs of the world.
We only used Square POS while we were getting set up with Authorize.Net. It isn't as flashy or recognized by the general public, but in our industry, that isn't a priority. We do very large transactions so the higher rates and fees from Square add up insanely quickly making the lower rates and fees from Authorize.Net the nail in Square's coffin for us.
The opportunity cost of waiting for payments and manually bringing them to a bank means that we don't have to visit our bank branch. That alone saves us several hours each month.
We can use ordinary computers and mobile devices with Square instead of paying for expensive software or terminals.
Our clients appreciate not having to process payments to us, and anything that helps our clients and makes them happy carries more import than I can explain in this space.