After this post sharing my experience pilling a Turkish restaurant, I got to learn different aspects of WOS, and more details can be found here. I also started to improve my pilling strategy, so here is a follow-up with a better APP with more thoughtful features for restaurants and cafes.
The main thing that triggered me to change for a better APP was that the restaurant staff couldn't charge me in Bitcoin when the owner was away - I never run restaurants, so I couldn't predict this when I was on-boarding the owner with WOS, and I remembered @lux exactly mentioned this about Blink.
Any of his employees can charge lightning payments directly to the owner's wallet by opening the lightning cash register in any browser
I tested it, and it worked like a charm, even with to the print receipt option! And many stackers prefer Blink over WOS as the first APP onboarding newbies, so I started to play around more with Blink to see If I was missing more hidden features, and I went to the restaurant again to show the owner the power of Blink!
Blink Wallet ⚡️
Advantages:
- Easy onboarding
- Custom LN address
- Cash register, super handy for restaurants and cafes
- Built-in BTC map
- Built-in contacts
Downsides:
- Need to link a number to register ( I didn't link it, and I don't put many sats there )
- Stablesats, which could lead to confusion, especially for newbies ( this was the main reason why I chose WOS to pill instead of Blink in the first place )
Powerful Features for Restaurants or Cafes
In-person
- Print out a QR code on site so people can scan and pay.
- Lightning cash register💥 :staff can charge payment without the owner on-site while keeping the funds safe - simply with this feature, Blink wins other wallets miles away for restaurants or cafes.
Online ordering
- Repeated customers can send payments directly in the Blink circles.
The owner also asked me how to cash out Bitcoin, which is probably a really normal question as they need to pay for many things still dominated in Fiat; And how to calculate sats to BTC? this one was quite funny, I need to write down all the zeros in a paper, and started to explain: There are only 21 Million Bitcoin in total, while there are endless fiat money being printed everywhere; But we don't spend the whole BTC as a unit, since it's too large value, we use sats instead, and 1 BTC = 100 Million Sats; The easier way to do the math is to use 1M sats =0.01 BTC, otherwise our brain might be a bit slow with so many zeros.
He got it quite fast, oh so satoshi is like coins...( me: yes, you use smaller bank notes or coins to buy a bottle of water instead of using a 200TL banknote right? ) As the conversation continued, I also found out the main pain Bitcoin is solving for the owner - he told me after all the expenses, tax, takeaway Apps, and bank, there isn't much left - too much middlemen in between, I then asked him if it was okay to share some data for reference:
-Rent 10%
-Product 35%
-Staff 25%
-Tax 10%
If partnering with the delivery Apps, they charge 11%-12%; If delivered by them too, they charge 50%. There is a specific type of card for restaurants to withdraw money from these Apps, which charges another 6%. And if customers use credit cards to pay in Apps, the processing fee from the bank is 4.5%. The owner said it's roughly 10-15% left if working with these takeaway Apps; it was pretty depressing at a point during the conversation, with so many fees and Businesses needing to accept that!
Then I had this picture in my mind:
- Banks subconsciously form consumers' habits by encouraging them to pay for everything with credit cards, spending the money they don't even have.
- Merchants saw more and more people using cards and then started accepting cards, but they needed to pay so to use a POS machine to charge and got changed again when they top up; cash slowly became obsolete in many places.
- Software companies offer many discounts to get customers and habits forming, claim to improve efficiency in the first place, yet slowly get in between and attempt to get a big chunk of the cake.
The final big boss comes in and demands tax from everyone - thanks to all the detailed transactions in banks; And last but not least, launching the ultimate tax: inflation.
Bitcoin can solve many problems in this case: if people can't spend the money they don't have, they will pay less for junk or stupid things; Merchants getting paid directly from people, no longer need to pay absurd fees to endless middlemen, and they would need to compete on quality or word of mouth to win customers instead of burning money for attention.
The only way to win is not to play - maybe the good pilling point for restaurants or cafes could be the endless fee they need to pay right now, and Bitcoin is a good tool to solve this problem:)