Square is Testing a New App for Ordering Food: Square Pickup
Square, the mobile payments startup, is testing a new app called “Square Pickup.” It's a simple app that lets you order food from a Square merchant ahead of time. The app is currently in testing with several San Francisco restaurants.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is an early move rather than a milestone: there is no prior Square ordering product in the record, so Square Pickup marks the first time the mobile payments company has been reported building a consumer-facing app for placing orders, not just taking payments. The pilot is confined to several San Francisco restaurants, per the company's confirmed test.
What makes the test notable is how far the story travelled on day one — SlashGear, Engadget, MacRumors, and Business Insider all carried it on or about February 25, 2014, which signals broad press interest in a payments startup edging toward the restaurant ordering experience itself.
First-order effects
- The San Francisco restaurants in the pilot gain a prepaid order-ahead channel through Square Pickup, letting them prepare food before the customer arrives while Square captures the transaction at order time instead of at the counter.
- For Square, the app shifts its role upstream of the register: from processing a merchant's card payments to generating the order that triggers one.
Second-order effects
- Any competing order-ahead service selling to restaurants now faces a rival that can bundle ordering with the card-processing relationship many Square merchants already have, lowering Square's cost of winning each location.
- Square's existing merchant base becomes potential distribution for the app — a reach advantage that competitors would need to replicate restaurant by restaurant.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, point-of-sale providers will tend to absorb the ordering layer of the restaurant transaction, keeping order, payment, and fulfillment data inside their own stack rather than ceding it to standalone ordering apps.
- How much of the market consolidates around such integrated stacks versus independent order-ahead services is the open structural question the pilot is an early test of.
The trend: Mobile payments companies are moving upstream from processing transactions to originating them, folding ordering into the merchant relationship they already control.