Mobile food delivery service Eat24 is rolling out a new mobile and desktop point-of-sale and management system for restaurants to help simplify the ordering process as volume continues to grow.

Restaurants such as Sicily’s Pizza and China Ginger will soon be able to leverage the new Yes! POS from Eat24 across mobile or desktop to manage tables, reservations, phone orders and drivers. The system leverages GPS tracking, provides driving directions and takes electronic signatures upon delivery.

“This is one part of the logic, to help the restaurants handle better, faster, more efficiently the online orders that they’re going to get [from the new Yelp partnership],” said Amir Eisenstein, chief marketing officer of Eat 24, San Francisco. “For them, to be able to focus on the food and give better service this is one part of it. The tool will help make their lives easier.

“The other part is that a lot of restaurants asked us before to do it,” he said. “But any time that we approached any POS company to integrate, all of them said no, so we weren’t able to.

“Instead of going through all the different companies we decided to create our own POS to give the restaurants the tools that they need to manage online orders. This will allow them to get online orders from us and manage the orders easily and efficiently.”

Cloud POS
According to Mr. Eisenstein, Eat24 has seen a large increase in orders placed on mobile versus desktop. By the end of the year, he expects that 50 percent of orders will come from mobile.

Helping to spur this growth is a recent partnership between Eat24 and Yelp for mobile ordering, which the companies claim will quadruple orders by the end of 2013. With this in mind, the delivery company realized it needed to increase operational efficiency.

Eat24 decided to create its own mobile point-of-sale platform, Yes! POS.

Yes! POS also integrates with all major payment processors, including PayPal.

Additionally, it lets restaurants manage shift scheduling and employee operations.

Restaurants will be able to manage everything from a mobile application, easing the process and quickening the service.

The POS is currently in private beta and only available to certain restaurants, but Eat24 hopes to start rolling out the system at all of its more than 25,000 restaurants in the next few weeks.

Mobile delivery
Earlier this month, Eat24 partnered with Yelp to let users order food on mobile devices (see story).

Now that consumers will be able to access Eat24’s services via mobile, it only makes sense to expand that option to the restaurateurs as well.

Eat24 also rolled out an iPhone, iPad and Android app in the past couple of years.

“The flexibility [mobile] gives them, both for the customer and the restaurant – it’s changing the market,” Mr. Eisenstein said.

“The POS will fit pretty much any business, wireless or not, conforming with a click or a phone call,” he said. “Whatever they want to do, the POS will be able to be customized to do it for them, to get the payment from wherever they want.”

Final Take
Rebecca Borison is editorial assistant on Mobile Commerce Daily, New York