Who’s loving wamo? This series of case studies gets feedback from real businesses who are enjoying the difference that wamo has made to managing their business finances.
Club Sushi is a restaurant in St Julian’s, Malta, and manager, Matthew, was kind enough to sit down with us for a feedback session. When we first met Matthew he was immediately intrigued by the QR code feature for payments having seen how successfully QR codes are utilised in China…
wamo’s QR payment solution is the perfect fit for restaurants
“In China,” says Matthew, “there was no Visa, MasterCard, no swiping cards and definitely no cash. You use your phone and QR codes to pay for your taxi, groceries, meals, everything.”
Club Sushi signed up for a wamo business account without hesitation and set up the QR code payment system in the restaurant right away.
Were there any initial problems adapting to wamo?
The trouble, according to Matthew, was that at first it seemed too easy: “To be honest, in the beginning we were skeptical, the staff especially were like: Can it really be that easy? Are you sure we got paid, we don’t have a receipt or anything?! It was a bit like getting an email in 1995!”
In most restaurants in Malta as at Club Sushi, the waiting staff are used to using POS machines (card-readers) that print out receipts, one for the customer and another which must be kept for accounts. With wamo, the ‘receipt’ is a ‘ping’ notification from the dashboard to announce a payment made. Staff who were used to having a stack of receipts to show at the end of a shift were initially disconcerted by switching to simply accepting a notification of payment received on the wamo dashboard. But not for long! As Matthew pointed out, anything that decreases paper and increases speed is ultimately a big benefit.
A business account with features that save you money and time
For any business but especially for smaller businesses, keeping costs down is, of course, of utmost importance. The costs of renting or owning a POS machine is not the end of it, the ongoing charges for taking card payments through them, can really add up. These costs are painful when you’re counting every penny. So, we asked Matthew…
Laine Redpath
Is wamo more affordable and faster?
“It’s faster yes definitely - through Apple Pay it’s instant. Cheaper? Absolutely - if everyone paid us through wamo we’d be taking in significantly more earnings every day because the interest /commission rates are that much lower.”
For many businesses we meet who have established payment systems set up, the switch to something new can be daunting. For this reason we have made sure that switching to wamo is as effortless as possible and we aim to take on as much of the work as we can to facilitate a smooth transition.
Is this what our customers experience?
On this Matthew shares, “The wamo team came in and set up the system. It didn’t take more than an hour, then they trained us how to use it. Then they gave us some breathing space before following up. They check-in weekly. If there is ever a hiccup they are there straight away to sort it out. Hand on heart I have never seen a follow-up like this, not even in my (Food & Beverage) Industry which is all about service.”
When you choose to introduce wamo, our team will be with you every step of the way.
We believe that a wamo business account with its multiple payment options, team features and free wamo-to-wamo transfers (community building) feature, make it particularly suited to the F & B industry. We asked Matthew if this sounded true from his experience:
“Yes, it’s a particularly good solution for the F & B industry, because it just saves time. When people pay with cash you are there at the end of the day counting and recounting and there’s always the possibility of human error. Even with credit cards, there’s that extra bit of work - when the chit comes out we need to keep a copy to present to accounts. With wamo at the end of the week or month you just request a statement from the system, done.”
Matthew finishes by saying that he would strongly recommend wamo to every restaurant, cafe, bar and pub. “We’re really happy with it and I love knowing that I have the wamo team there to support us whenever I need them.”
Parts of this blog first appeared in this Times of Malta article.
