iPad-based point-of-sale market leader Revel has just completed its biggest single deployment to date, outfitting the entire Alabama State University stadium with Revel POS equipment. The brand new stadium for the ASU Hornets now has Revel-powered iPads at all 30 concession stands throughout the facility, and progress and sales at each can be monitored in real-time by facility managers.
The stadium-specific retail installation has some neat tricks over other vendor offerings and traditional POS, because it doesn’t require Internet connectivity to function. Revel says this has already proven its worth at the ASU facility, since during a power outage at a recent game the Revel-powered systems continued to operate so concessions could continue to make sales. Also, the San Francisco-based company says its POS software is about 14 percent faster per transaction than a traditional POS, which means it can process a higher volume of customers more quickly.
Since its founding in 2010, Revel has been steadily expanding its focus. The company initially started out serving the restaurant and fast food industry, and then later moved into retail businesses. Back in June, it raised $10M to help its business grow in markets beyond the U.S., but this latest development shows it’s still concerned with expanding its client base at home, too.
The arena food and goods market is one that resembles Revel’s existing clients, but with the twist of scale. Concessions can serve thousands of customers per hour, and often see extremely high-volume busy periods at key lull points in the game. Revel says it has designed its system to be ideally suited to these kinds of hurry-up periods, increasing the rate of customers served and therefore increasing customer satisfaction and overall sales.
Revel is clearly angling for more sales in this arena (oh yeah, I went there). which could prove a lucrative opportunity not only among U.S. colleges and professional sports teams, but abroad as well. The biggest challenge in this market is that these organizations don’t do mass retrofits all that often, but Revel has ease of onboarding as well as fairly cheap installation going for it to help overcome that perceived barrier.