Commerce overview
The accesso Guest Experience platform's Commerce services enable mobile food and beverage (F&B) ordering and purchasing functionality.
The Guest Experience platform’s Commerce module supports the development and implementation of native commerce solutions in the form of mobile-based eCommerce apps.
The platform supports—but does not require—integration with payment processors (such as Stripe) as well as external point-of-sale (POS) systems.
This flexibility lets you implement the platform’s Commerce services in a way that best fits the unique needs and setups of your venues.
Food and Beverage (F&B) purchasing
The main implementation of accesso Commerce services is food and beverage (F&B) ordering and purchasing through a mobile app.
The Commerce APIs, coupled with the platform’s identity management services, enable order and purchase actions.
These provide an intuitive eCommerce workflow to your users that can include*:
- menu browsing (including browse-by-category)
- add-to-cart item selection
- cart total and submission
- electronic payment processing (including optional digital wallet management)
- order check-in
From the venue’s perspective, these APIs can validate inventory, pricing, payment and tax calculations, as well as support commerce reporting and user tagging functionality.
* Note that supported commerce functionality depends largely on whether the app is integrated with your venue kitchens (i.e., payment processors and POS systems).
Products, menus and places
Products are the center of the accesso Guest Experience platform’s eCommerce model. These represent the individual items (typically a physical product) that can be purchased by your guests (e.g., a soda at a restaurant). You can assign each product a price, a category, description, and nutritional information, as applicable. They can also be modified and bundled during ordering.
Menus represent a catalog of selected F&B products that can be ordered. For example, a pizza restaurant would have a menu of all available products (such as pizza types and toppings, sides, drinks, and desserts).
Places represent the locations where guests can purchase products from a given menu (such as a cafe or a hotel’s room service). These are assocated with physical locations—either a point of interest (POI) or the venue itself.
Each place can have multiple menus, and each menu can be associated with multiple places.
Menus and places can be assigned a category for searching and filtering purposes. Places can also be assigned day and time availability to ensure that mobile ordering is only supported during open hours and if the place has an associated menu and connected POS system. Additional business rules can also be defined as needed (for example, special hours of operation to support happy hours or holiday closings).
Order workflow
The order workflow represents the possible steps of the F&B mobile ordering process, which occurs after the guest submits their order through the app.
Note that this process can differ depending on how Commerce services are implemented for your venue, specifically if the platform is integrated with your external point-of-sale (POS) system:
- Integrated ordering: The platform is integrated with the external POS system. Orders are automatically validated with the POS system, and payment is collected from the guest when the order is placed.
- Non-integrated ordering: The platform only records the order and triggers an email to the F&B kitchen. The local staff must manually enter the received order into the kitchen’s POS register and collect payment from the guest at pick up.
The workflow consists of the following main compenents:
| Create order | The guest’s order is validated. Tax and total is calculated. |
| Update order | (optional) Created order is modified by guest. Ordered items are revalidated, and tax and total are recalculated. |
| Enter payment | Credit card details are entered and tokenized by payment processor. |
| Submit order | Order and tokenized payment information submitted to the POS system associated with the place. |
| Cancel order | (optional) Submitted order is cancelled. |
| Check in | Order is released for preparation (typically triggered automatically by proximity to place). Funds are captured. |
Payment service
The Guest Experience platform leverages integrations with external transaction processing service partners to obtain anonymized tokens.
Tokenized card information is used for F&B mobile payment to ensure only anonymized payment information is passed through the platform.
Commerce services also support card management for tokenized credit cards for increased ordering convenience. Guests can choose to save credit cards in the app for later use; saved cards can be set as default and later deleted.
Learn more
Learn more about accesso’s Guest Experience Commerce services with the following resources and API documentation: