Revel Systems, the company behind iPad-based POS products that have mostly been focused on restaurant customers, today announced the addition of two major new retail clients to its portfolio, as well as new features aimed at retail uses and hardware integrations to help clients switch from existing systems and provide retail users with easier onboarding.
The retail partners for Revel this time around are Belkin, which has just opened its first dedicated retail outlet over this past summer in LA, and plans to open many more locations complete with Revel’s system in place in the future. Goodwill has retired its existing POS solution in 23 Goodwill stores across Florida, where the second-hand goods company is piloting the solution as a low-cost alternative to its previous POS. Revel’s system costs less than half what Goodwill is replacing it with, the company shared in a press release.
Alongside the new partner announcements, Revel is also announcing variable pricing (which allows retailers to charge differently by volume or by weight), and a new retail inventory module that allows its customers to create, change and print labels for stock in real-time from their iPhone, iPod touch and iPad/iPad mini. Finally, there’s new integration with Honeywell’s Bluetooth barcode scanner for processing inventory, which means that stores already using the fairly popular Honeywell hardware can leverage their existing devices, and also provides a way for Revel to avoid having to build additional components for its existing system in order to promote retail growth.
The retail push is something that Revel will be focusing more on, co-founder and CTO Chris Ciabarra told me in an interview, now that the company has been profitable for three months and is pleased with the traction it has managed to achieve in the restaurant industry.
“We’re going to focus more on the retail sector just because restaurants is taking off, and it’s pretty much going, so there’s not much more we need to do in terms of getting the word out about that,” he said. “It’s going to be both a marketing and product focus on the retail side now.”
As mentioned, Revel announced achieving its recent profitability just last month, and I asked Ciabarra about the company’s progress since then. He said that they’ve been pleased with their progress, with business growing at a steady rate of around 20 percent per month. With this new aggressive push into retail, it hopes to build on its initial pool of customers in that space and drive adoption across new types of establishments to help increase the rate at which it’s picking up traction.