Square Launches Order App for Food Collection

Square OrderMobile POS firm Square has launched Square Order, an iOS and Android app which can be used, as the name suggests, for ordering food on mobile.

Users can locate a participating restaurant, café or shop, then place their order and pay for it via the app. Once the food is ready for collection, they receive a notification and pick their order up without needing to queue.

The firm has simultaneously pulled Square Wallet from app stores, clearly pointing to Order as its replacement.

“We want to make it really clear to people looking for Square in the App Store that Order is where we see the future,” Square director  Ajit Varma told Re/code in an interview, admitting that the Wallet app “didn’t have a lot of the utility value”.

Square Wallet was Jack Dorsey’s startup’s big bet, launched three years ago, to allow coffee shop patrons and restaurant goers to use payment information stored in the app to pay for goods by checking in to a shop via the app and then simply giving a cashier their name at checkout. The theory was that cafe or restaurant patrons would find that method of payment easier than swiping a physical payment card.

The service, first spotted by The Next Web, is initially only available in New York and San Francisco, following a closed trial in the two cities that has been running since February.

Order works in conjunction with the business-facing Pick Up service launched at the end of last month for merchants who want to accept pre-orders from customers – which is in turn integrated with Square Register POS systems.

The launch not only gives Square additional sources of revenue – Pick Up charges an eight per cent processing fee for each order – it could also potentially build a closed ecosystem for mobile orders and payments where Square has control over each aspect.