Lunch line a little long at your favorite sandwich shop? Soon you may be able to order your lunch from your phone while you're headed to the shop, pay for it, and breeze past the line to pick up your meal rather than wait thanks to a mobile payment service called GoPago.
Starting this week the app is also running a promotion called Heros, which give you $10 to spend on that lunch and the ability to be the hero of your group of friends and give $10 for lunch to anyone you want for free.
What is GoPago?
From a customer perspective, GoPago is a way to make buying your next lunch a little easier. Once you've linked a credit card with the app you can log in, check out the menu for restaurants near you, and place an order for what strikes your fancy including any special requests like extra mustard.
Once it receives your order the restaurant accepts it, and then lets you know how long the wait will be. For instance, if the restaurant currently has no line it might tell you your lunch will be ready in 5. If the line is out the door, then you might be quoted a 30 minute wait time. Restaurants can also refuse orders if they're too swamped to get to your order, or are out of things that you've requested. They can also suggest substitutions or ask you questions about your order.
Since the app lets you pay for your meal as well as order it, when it comes time to pick up your lunch you can go right to the pickup window and grab your meal.
The service can be used for any type of merchant, so you could also use it to schedule and pay for your next haircut or even buy a pair of shoes.
Founded in 2009, the San Francisco based company works with merchants in San Francisco and Mountain View, Calif. and the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas. The service currently has 240 live merchants in San Francisco, with plans to expand that number to 550 next month. It also has 200 merchants signed up and ready to go in Dallas in July, more than 800 for Chicago at the beginning of November, and 1400 set to go in NYC on December 1.
A Win For Merchants
While definitely a nice service for customers, the real win with GoPago comes form the merchant side. In addition to being able help customers more efficiently, the service keeps track of what customers have been in the store today, what they purchased, and how many times they've shopped using GoPago. The app also has the ability to report what customers have looked at a particular merchant, so if you're always menu shopping at a local ice cream shop the shop will know and can reach out to you to suggest you come in.
"We believe that merchants greatest asset are their customer," Leo Rocco, Founder and CEO of GoPago told Mashable. The company sees its tools as empowering merchants and giving them the ability to directly connect with customers they might have otherwise lost or never had.
As a merchant you can give customers cash to spend in your store on the fly. So, if you see that someone has been checking out your menu but has never stopped in, you can offer them some cash to give you a shot. Likewise, if you see a customer regularly shops with you then you can give him or her some money to get a drink or item on you for being so loyal.
In addition to keeping track of who's shopping, the app on merchant side also keeps an accurate account of what people are buying, even those not using GoPago. Rocco says that many merchants have opted to replace their point of sale program entirely with GoPago "They want to take our point of sale system and use our reporting, because our reporting is a lot better than what they're used to," he says.
GoPago has partnered with JPMorgan Chase, and the bank is giving merchants who bank with them free Motorola Xoom tablets to get started using the service.
More than just a tool for small businesses, GoPago also offers some unique marketing options for larger businesses including Chase who plans to use the app to reward its own customers for making purchases. The app could also ultimately be used by big brands such as Coke, to offer free drinks to certain users.
Be a Hero
The hero program is an expansion of the function that allows merchants to gift customers, and puts the power of gifting in the hands of the customers themselves making them a hero for their group of friends. Individuals are given a code, that they can then distribute to friends and share an offer for an allotted amount of time. For instance, a person might be given the ability to give people a free cup of coffee with a code for 24 hours, with everyone using the promo code being given the ability to get their next cup of joe for free for a day.
The Hero program launched this week, and currently the app is offering a free lunch to anyone who signs up with a code. If you want to give it a whirl, you can have a $10 lunch -– or any other meal you choose — by entering the promo code Mashable into the app when you sign up (or from the More tab on your profile page if you're already a GoPago user). The promo code is only good for 48 hours, so if you want to give it a try with the free cash, you'll want to do it soon.
What do you think of GoPago? How do you think it compares to other mobile payment apps? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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