Everyone at the San Francisco GoPago headquarters is familiar with Piper’s Cafe and the owner, Chip Adkins. He was one of the first to sign up for GoPago LIVE and has provided our customer support, marketing and engineering teams with great feedback, praise and suggestions. His contributions have been invaluable. As a startup looking to provide the best POS system for all brick and mortar merchants, there’s nothing more important to us than engaged customers who partner with us to improve our product and service. We welcome and encourage that level of feedback from all our GoPago Live users: enterprise corporate cafeterias, food trucks and small mom and pop shops.
Here is an in-depth look as to why Piper’s Cafe in Kentucky chose GoPago LIVE as their solution to transact and interact with their customers.
Piper’s Cafe in Covington, Kentucky, took five years of planning and dreaming before Chip Adkins and Charles Killian were able to make it a reality. They wanted the whole cafe and the whole customer experience to be different, new and totally in line with the future. From their homemade ketchup to their locally sourced ingredients everything had to be well thought out and have their seal of approval.
The point of sale system was a vital component in their plan. A simple cash register would never cut it. Dumb, old fashioned technology would hold back the promise of their vision. Originally leaning towards Square, because of fixed rates and sleekness of a tablet POS; they wanted more in a POS solution.
They wanted the ability to broadcast their business to their customers smartphones and gather smart data from those transactions so they could really understand the purchasing behavior of their customers.
They started conducting online research and realized that most tablet solutions require a few to several thousands dollars of upfront capital for a robust POS system.
Thankfully, the right combination of words in a Google search (tablet POS) explaining what he was looking for led him to an article about GoPago and had the news that we were going national with an all-in-one tablet POS that included the mobile application of their dreams.
They were hooked by GoPago’s concept of integrating a tablet POS with a mobile ordering and mobile payments application. While they love iPads, the Square solution was not, in their analysis, as compatible to their business needs as GoPago on an Android tablet. Chip commented, “I read your blog on why not an iPad and I understand. As much as Apple appeals to me with their closed ecosystem, I totally understand why you couldn’t use it for the comprehensive POS system you wanted to build.”
Chip had one response, “Let’s see if we can get in on this.” As a self-proclaimed “techie by heart” Chip knew that GoPago was the best solution for Piper’s Cafe and all future cafes in an urban environment.
Kentucky may not instantly conjure up images of city life, but according to Chip the cafe is located in, “A historic development overlay, with commercial space on the bottom and residential on the top. Most people don’t drive and both live and work in the area. The median age is around thirty and we are surrounded by plenty of local hotspots and several annual festivals.”
Their average customer doesn’t carry cash so the mobile storefront has a huge appeal for Piper’s Cafe. Chip believes in the same way that his customers will begin experimenting by ordering his oatmeal with flax and chia seeds, instead of sticking to the typical bar food in neighboring restaurants, they will begin the process of ordering ahead and making mobile payments.
Chip sums it up best, “You guys sold me a long time ago. Your customer service is second to none. A lot of things that I suggested were already on the product roadmap and things that were already thought about. We were onboard with a subscription pricing model. It is all about the total package for us. Everything we do involves agonizing over the image and what we want to project. GoPago gets that. Your big picture is the same as mine.”
We couldn’t agree more on the shared vision and the tagline of Piper’s Cafe, “It’s time for something different.”
The owners of Piper’s Cafe, Chip Adkins and Charles Killian (pictured in the center surrounded by their family) are now a very welcome and integral part of the GoPago family. ')}