Nowait Adds Mobile Payments to its Waitlisting App

4/12/2016
Nowait, the restaurant waitlisting service, has rolled out mobile payments. By adding mobile payments into the application, customers are able to pay when they want, rather than having to wait for a check.
 
The Nowait mobile application already allows customers to virtually put their name in for a table at restaurants that typically don’t accept formal reservations. This reduces friction and cuts down on the amount of people milling about a hostess desk waiting for a table to open up. With the rollout of mobile payments, the customer can reduce lag time at the end of their meal by paying whenever they wish.

The mobile payments system, which will be available as a separate subscription, works with major point-of-sale systems, including Micros, NCR, POSitouch, which cover around 85 percent of Nowait’s target market of casual dining restaurants. The suggested tip amounts can be customized by the businesses and, in the future, will be able to use the service to push offers to customers through the platform.

Initially, the company has been testing payments in Pittsburgh, and the company CEO, Ware Sykes told TechCrunch that restaurants are seeing faster table turns, servers are seeing substantially higher tips, and consumers save five to ten minutes at the end of the meal. The company reports that ten restaurants have gone live with mobile payments and that a total of 20 have signed up to beta test. The service will be rolled out to Nowait’s other customers later this year prior to being made more widely available.

With nearly 4,000 restaurants utilizing its platform, Nowait offers a suite of subscription-based tools that help restaurant operators manage seating, server rotation, waitlists and reservations, and more. Clients include: Chili’s, Buffalo Wild Wings, First Watch, On the Border, and more.  

The mobile application is available for iOS and Android.  According to TechCrunch, Nowait is seating over 25 million diners monthly, up from 5 million+ in 2014 when it raised its $10 million Series B round of financing. To date, it has seated 250 million diners, also up from 50 million at that same time. (The number of diners sat includes mobile app users and those who are sat by a restaurant using Nowait’s tablet app.)
 
X
This ad will auto-close in 10 seconds