Eat24 releases POS system to help restaurants keep up with demand for delivery

Ordering food for delivery online is about as lazy as you can get when it comes to feeding yourself. Eat24 is trying to make this blissful modern convenience even more convenient by offering a new point-of-sale (POS) system that helps restaurants manage all their orders efficiently.

Eat24 is a San Francisco-based food delivery startup that powers online ordering and delivery capabilities for over 25,000 restaurants in 1,000 cities. The site features a range of local restaurants, and consumers place their orders online for free. They can search by cuisine type, read reviews, and see estimated delivery times. The service competes with companies like Seamless and GrubHub, which also enable online ordering.

At MobileBeat 2013, Eat24 and Yelp announced a partnership to integrate online ordering and delivery into Yelp’s platform. This announcement was a big deal for Yelp because it is a step towards becomong more than a review site — it is becoming a part of the commerce it enables.

“The idea is that there are all these consumers shopping on the site, and Yelp Platform allows them to take that next step — to transact,” said founder Jeremy Stoppelman in an interview with VentureBeat. “The Yelp experience is all about going to local businesses. As you switch between different services, you as the consumer will have a one-stop shop.”

Partnering with Yelp is also a big deal for Eat24. Eat24’s marketing guy, Amir Eisenstein, said that the company received thousands of new requests for restaurants to join its service in the days after the announcement and that restaurants are excited about opportunities to increase sales in this way.

“Our phones were ringing off the hooks,” he told VentureBeat. “Restaurants understand the power of this kind of integration. Our main goal is to create more business for restaurants and we try and provide them with all the tools they need to do what they do best — make great food. This is the reason we are rolling out this POS system. We want our clients to be able to handle more orders and deliver them to customers from one easy-to-use space.”

The POS industry is going through a major transformation as companies like Square, PayPal, Vend, and others create connected solutions that are more flexible, user-friendly, and affordable than legacy systems. Eat24 decided to build its own system specifically tailored to the needs of restaurants that accept a lot of online orders.

Eisenstein said that while restaurants have existing POS systems, Eat24’s Yes! system will be free and integrates with existing solutions. In addition to processing online orders, it includes delivery-centric features like GPS tracking for drivers, driving directions, and electronic signature upon delivery. There are also tools for in-house table management, reservations, and phone orders. Restaurants can easily edit their online menus, prices, and hours, and provide up-to-date delivery time estimates.

The company predicts that orders to its partner restaurants will quadruple by the end of the year, and as a result, restaurants will be looking for new technology to keep up.

The POS system is still in private beta.