CARDFREE, a mobile payment app, has made its order-ahead interface available to merchants to develop through the CARDFREE mobile development kit, according to a press release from the company. The development kit allows for in-app payments and uses credit cards and mobile wallet apps.
Based in San Francisco, CARDFREE provides order-ahead and mobile payment capability to restaurants. Since the launch of its app, CARDFREE says it has done more than $600 million in transactions. The CARDFREE service, which allows customers to pay from their phones in a variety of ways, was designed to handle large volumes of data and traffic.
In addition to restaurants, the service is also now available to convenience stores and grocery stores, and can be integrated into an already existing app or through different channels. The service is available either as a hosted solution or as a continuous license for businesses wanting to keep the service in-house.
Jon Squire, CEO and founder of CARDFREE, said modern customers now see pay-ahead models as an ordinary option.
“Order-ahead has become a must-have solution, as consumers now expect the benefit of ordering and paying in advance to skip lines,” Squire said in the release. “We’ve seen demand not only from restaurants, but also from grocery and convenience brands that want to increase prepared food volume and deli sales.”
Squire also explained that data will belong to the merchant and not the provider. “And unlike other order-ahead providers, with CARDFREE, merchant data is just that, the merchant’s to own and mine,” he said. “Some merchants who jumped into this space early were eager to satisfy consumer demand and, frankly, got taken advantage of relative to who owns the data long-term, as well as tokenized card information tied to accounts. CARDFREE has always worked to empower our merchant partners, giving them 100 percent access and ownership of their customer data.”