Olo in New York provides an on-demand interface for the restaurant industry, designed to drive digital ordering and delivery for restaurant brands.
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Square POS
Score 10.0 out of 10
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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.
OLO Is great for companies that need an easy way to channel online orders into one centralized place. If a company uses several third-party delivery companies, with each tablet on its counter, OLO helps cut down on the clutter and allows everything to flow through the POS properly. OLO has served us well since we started.
Square was absolutely fantastic when I first started using it. Easy to set up, use, changing settings, and the like. It has evolved over the years, almost too much, to an insane amount of options, apps, settings, et cetera. I would like to see options for just utilizing specific parts, such as invoices, versus the entire system being set up for daily sales. It makes the tracking side of things a little wonky when you only send 2-5 invoices/month for larger projects. Overall, I like that it’s familiar to me, which is why I continue to use it
Olo makes the guest experience easy and understandable while placing their orders. They can easily customize their order, modifying each item to their liking using the guidelines we at our restaurant have given.
If there are issues with our equipment, Olo is quick to respond and get us back online.
After you set a daily processing deadline time, charges processed by that time are deposited the next business day.
The reporting dash board looks overwhelming but that's because it has all of the the information that you've processed before. That was invaluable when we recently went to look at the detail on a two year old transaction and were able to find the information by ourselves.
The ability to use multiple devices is great. We can process charges on a computer, a tablet, or even a smartphone.
Receipts are automatically sent to the customer's preferred email or texted to their phone.
The cost of the hardware (specific scanners and receipt printers) was prohibitive for my company, and whilst we managed without them, they would have been nice to have. The range of scanners and printers that integrate with Square is small, so despite our devices' capabilities to read barcodes (we used ipads) and the Zebra receipt/label printers we had, we couldn't use either as the system wouldn't integrate with them.
Whilst Square's credit card reader is nifty in design, it's a bit small and lacking substance to have as a customer-facing reader so it really needs the dock the company offers. The dock is awkward to open to reset or pair the reader. We often found pairing the reader with the device running the system tricky and confusing, relying on pressing one button and then interpreting a sequence of lights that often caused confusion. The pairing process might have been clearer presented through the device rather than the reader.
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.
Olo's usability is great. The only area that keeps them from being a 10 is menu management. Menu management is absolutely workable, but it could be better. The rest of the system works well and is very usable and user-friendly. To the extent that their menu management has opportunities, the Olo Expo product helps this out with the people that need it the most, and thus why they score a 9 overall. Without Olo Expo, I'd score it an 8.
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
No product is ever perfect and support is there to help when that is the case. The vast majority of time the Olo support team is quick, transparent, and resolves the issues. However, I can't say that they are absolutely perfect (but few support teams are). The only thing keeping them from a 10 is the LVL1 support teams will often not read a ticket fully and see that the troubleshooting steps they are about to give have already taken place.
Square POS support is good, I would not say they are great. There is a good knowledge base that you can access and there are other service providers who support Square POS who can assist you, but I find that the lack of help and support for setting it up for different industries is a let down. We had to research for hours just to find a solution to fix our need for a billing option for services for example. It would be great if Square POS broadened its support and solutions for various industries.
Revel is my POS provider and they want to charge way to much for online integration so I have not tried it. What I have tried is each companies own apps on their tablets. I would rather have 3 or 4 different tablets that are good at what they do for their respective company then use your "all-in-one" solution that honestly is much worse.
Square POS is just the easiest to use and therefore the easiest to onboard new users to. I'd also like to point out, that if you're missing or lost one of the readers it's so easy to buy one at an Apple store or even other merchants like T-mobile or Verizon. WePay had less fees but was harder to onboard new users to. Eventbrite had really high fees.
Time savings for employees has been a positive impact.
Our takeout business has increased from less than 10% to over 30% in the last 2 years, we could not have been as successful with this increase without the help of Olo.
The transaction fees and charge rates are much higher than other options available. We only used this system for a short time while we were switching to a MUCH cheaper option (Authorize.net).
I have also used this system with a charity that I volunteer with who only uses it during a couple of fundraisers a year when they have a small gift shop set up to sell donated goods to raise money. For such low volume, the fees aren't as big of a deal and the convenience of being able to take cards no matter where the event is located makes it worth it.
This is a system your average consumer will recognize and trust, so there's that.
