Deliveroo partners with Doshii to bring down restaurant costs

Doshii is excited to announce a significant integration with leading food company Deliveroo. The partnership will streamline the processing of orders and make the delivery of Australia’s favourite restaurant foods to customers’ doors even more seamless.

Restaurants who partner with Deliveroo can utilise Doshii’s API to connect customer ordering direct to their POS. This eliminates the need for restaurants to manually process orders that come through the Deliveroo app. Doshii’s platform will be available to the more than 10,000 restaurants that partner with Deliveroo across Australia and to POS vendors as the preferred platform to connect to Deliveroo.

Deliveroo orders typically take around 90 seconds for restaurants to manually enter and process. The Doshii-Deliveroo integration will provide significant savings by allowing restaurants to focus their efforts and resources on front-of-house operations, reducing errors and making it even easier and quicker for staff to process orders. It will also help eliminate costly mistakes during the double handling and manual entry of the order from Deliveroo to the POS system.

Integrating directly with the POS will also remove the need for restaurants to reconcile between the Deliveroo App and the POS. This creates further time efficiencies for restaurants and their staff, who may have multiple order ahead apps that all need to be reviewed and matched up at the end of the month.

Doshii founder and CEO, Sean O’Meara, explains: “Doshii is more than just connectivity of Apps to venues’ POS systems. The platform and marketplace of Apps are designed to allow venue operators to select, trial and evaluate Apps to suit their business, all connected to their POS.

“The addition of Deliveroo to our growing number of connected Apps is extremely exciting, and fits with our expansion goals of providing a common platform to connect Apps to POS for the hospitality and retail markets in Australia and across Asia.”

Deliveroo Country Manager in Australia, Levi Aron, said: “At Deliveroo we are constantly innovating and looking for ways to help our restaurants grow. POS integration is the number one feature restaurants are requesting around the world, and it’s a key way that Deliveroo can help improve the performance of their business.

“Not only will this Australian partnership lead to cost savings for restaurants, but it will also see customers benefit from meals that are prepared and delivered faster.”

The Doshii platform, which connects Apps with POS in real-time, allows venues a variety of choice based on an open ecosystem. It currently allows connection to over 6,500 venues across Australia; however, this number is set to increase in coming months. With recent investment from Coca Cola Amatil, Doshii will continue to develop its technology to deliver value back to venue owners by allowing them to connect their favourite Apps direct to their POS.

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To contact Deliveroo, email joanne.woo@deliveroo.com.au, phone +61 409 330 731, or visit their website.

 

About Deliveroo      

Deliveroo is an award-winning delivery service that operates in 13 cities across Australia, with a network of over 6,500 riders. It is headquartered in London, with over 2,500 employees in offices around the globe. Deliveroo operates in over 500 towns and cities across 14 markets, including Australia, Belgium, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and the United Kingdom.

About Doshii

Doshii has been developing and providing leading API services for integration since 2016. It is supported by an outstanding team with more than 40 years of collective development experience. Doshii reduces the cost of building and maintaining integrations while providing a robust, safe and secure experience for customers.

More than 130 POS systems exist across Australia alone, and it’s technically impossible for this quantity to connect to the ever-expanding number of Apps being developed. Doshii solves this problem by allowing any POS or App to connect to its platform via a standardised API. This allows App and POS developers to focus on building great products, instead of trying to manage hundreds of potential integrations.

Based in Melbourne, Doshii is backed by Westpac Reinventure and Coca-Cola Amatil-X. It operates throughout Australia and is now rapidly expanding into Asia.

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Architecting Multiple integrations via one API

Original Article: Architecting Multiple API Integrations

Overview

The complexities of integrating with third-party API’s can quickly multiply due to the rapid proliferation of competing API’s and standards. This significantly increases development, testing, and maintenance time/costs, but can be mitigated against by integrating with a middleware API that delegates to various third-party services.

The Proliferation Problem

While the rapid growth and adoption of webservice API’s and standards have been a real boon for the software industry, nothing comes without a cost. The cost, in this case, is a rapidly expanding and constantly evolving frontier in which there are often multiple offerings in any given domain, several of which often proving desirable candidates for integration.

As we saw in the previous articles What is API Integration, and
API Integration Basics, the answer to “How do I do X or integrate with Y?” is almost always “There’s an API for that”. However in many cases, the answer actually comes back more along the lines of “There’s 5 or 6 different API’s for that, which one do you want to use?”, and then as an app developer or POS integrator you have to choose. What’s the one API you’re going to integrate with? Or do you invest the time and effort that it takes it to integrate with several of them? And the extra time it takes to maintain those integrations?

For Example

Say you’re creating a solution that allows a user to browse and purchase digital music from within your application. Amazon offers an API that will let you do exactly that. And so does Apple. And so do Bandcamp, Spotify, Murfie, and others. Each one may offer some catalog items that the others don’t. And wouldn’t it be great if your solution could seamlessly integrate with all of them?

Certainly, it would! But the cost of doing so is very high. Although each API ostensibly performs the same function, each one is independent and structured differently from the others. Where one codepath should logically suffice, you’re going to need five. Each one is going to have its own credentials, its own authentication strategies, its own API quotas and limits, and its own quirks that need to be smoothed over if you want your users to have a seamless experience. And once you’re done you’re going to have to track changes to each API and ensure your app is updated and maintained accordingly.

Thus the proliferation problem should be obvious. Unless you’ve got the development might of a Google, Apple, Amazon, or Microsoft there are more API’s out there than you can realistically integrate with. You’ve either got to settle for an integration with a single API and dealing with frustrated users upset that they can’t find any content from ‘API B’ within your solution, or else dive in and try to support as many parallel API’s as you think you can get away with.

A Better Solution

Imagine if instead of talking to a bunch of related API’s individually your application or POS system could talk to a single service that internally handled communication with each of those related API’s and then just shipped you the result. It might look something like this:

We’ve added a “middleware” layer that sits between your solution and the rest of the world. And now instead of talking to a whole bunch of completely different and differently-structured API’s your solution only needs to integrate with one API; the middleware’s. It’s connecting to the same amount of information, if not more, however, the complexity on the application/POS side has been drastically reduced. This carries with it a corresponding reduction in development, testing, and maintenance effort; or in other words, time and money.

You’ll notice that the middleware has a proper name. It’s called Doshii. Doshii provides API integration, management, and aggregation as a service. This frees up your time to focus on your actual product and saves you from having to worry about whether to integrate with one service or several and from the complexity and overhead associated with the latter option. And of course, it’s all accomplished through an API.

Strangely enough, it seems that the answer to the proliferation problem is yet again “There’s an API for that”. By leveraging a middleware API such as Doshii, your solution can gain the benefits of multiple parallel API integrations without any of the added development costs. There’s no longer a need to implement and maintain multiple codepaths that all accomplish the same logical task. And dealing with changes, updates, and maintenance as all of those API’s evolve? Well that all becomes Doshii’s problem; you don’t have to worry about it!

By placing a ‘middleware’ webservice between your solution and the webservices that it ultimately wants to communicate with, multiple integrations can be replaced with a single implementation and API proliferation becomes much less of an issue. The power and flexibility that this kind of solution provides are difficult to overstate.

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Doshii-PosPay integration connects the digital and offline worlds to drive customer engagement

Doshii is pleased to announce an integration with mobile customer engagement and payment platform PosPay. Doshii’s API, which connects Apps with POS in real-time, links PosPay with access to thousands of venues to provide an enhanced customer experience for large hospitality operations.

PosPay delivers seamless, location-based ordering for customers at restaurants, hotels and festivals by customising their personal preferences when they are in range of a venue. This provides a strong branding experience for any venue wanting to promote itself to customers in a particular geographic location.

Once in-venue, PosPay allows customers to enjoy meals and entertainment hassle-free, with payments transacted quickly and easily on their mobile phone.

The Doshii-PosPay integration provides a seamless experience for venues too. Staff receive orders directly through PosPay, reducing multiple order-handling and minimising the amount of training required for new staff members. This eliminates costly misplaced orders and frees up staff for more productive value-added customer interactions.

Doshii GM, Greg Williams, says he and his team are excited to be partnering with PosPay. “I appreciate their goal of bringing the digital and real worlds closer together to improve the customer experience,” he says. “The hospitality industry is becoming increasingly personalised and augmented and PosPay is making big inroads in this area.”

PosPay CTO, Blake McIntyre, says the integration with Doshii means a more seamless customer experience and improved staff engagement. “The two go hand-in-hand,” he says. “Our integration means staff can operate more efficiently, and with less training, so they can focus on delivering an enhanced customer experience.”

PosPay features and benefits include:

• Free installation and set-up in any restaurant, hotel and festival venue.
• Real-time ordering and tracking.
• Integrated payment gateway with orders paid upfront.
• In-app venue branding with fast notifications when a customer is in range.

Get started with a free trial of the Doshii API

Do you have an App you’d like to see integrated with your POS Software? With no upfront costs, what are you waiting for? Our secure sandbox trial environment gives you full access to App and POS API integration examples, documentation and dashboard – with simulated orders and transactions.

To contact PosPay, email info@pospay.com.au, phone (029) 5613111, or visit their website.

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Doshii welcomes Silicon Valley Product and Marketplace specialist as strategic advisor

Doshii is pleased to welcome former Head of Product across the Uber Developer Platform and Silicon Valley maven, Chris Saad, as a strategic advisor to the team advising on Product development and go to market strategies both locally and across Asia. He has come on board to lend his vast experience and skills to further develop the Doshii platform and Doshii App marketplace and ensure best-practice and insights for developers and venues connected to Doshii.

Chris has an impressive track record in the tech sector, including founding and building a series of successful startups – running most as CEO. He was the former Head of Product for the Uber Developer Platform, co-founder of the Data Portability Project and co-founder and Chief Product Officer at Echo.

“Using my background in Silicon Valley, my goal is to help startups avoid common mistakes and fast forward to the best possible answers,” says Chris. “My approach is very tactical and hands on. I’ll be helping the Doshii team execute a holistic go-to-market strategy and exponentially grow their two sided marketplace with developers and venues.”

He now works with a handful of selected startups, including Doshii.

Chris enjoys sharing his skills and expertise with companies that are making a significant and meaningful impact on their world. “Doshii unlocks the heart of a venue – the POS – and makes it cloud-accessible for third-party developers,” he explains. “This is the same type of ‘unlocking’ of potential that the iPhone did by making the phone a computing and apps platform in people’s pockets.”

Doshii’s modern, Silicon Valley-style approach to tackling innovation is what attracted Chris to the company that he had been keeping a keen eye on for over 12 months. “They come at it with a holistic worldview – not just payments or ordering. Their solution is unique in the market across a variety of use cases,” Chris says.

Chris is Australian and has been based in San Francisco for the past 10 years. While he shares his expertise with companies all around the world, he has a particular passion for helping Australian startups take on the world.

Doshii CEO and Founder, Sean O’Meara adds, “Chris and I have been in discussion for over 12 months. He is a welcome addition to our team and brings immense experience and value to what we have set to achieve – a platform to allow venues, Apps and POS to test, evaluate and connect with ease. The developer experience is just as important to us as to the venues’ experience in working with Doshii, and Chris is assisting us across these two key aspects.”

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Doshii and Waitrr integration creates a seamless dining experience

Original Article: Doshii and Waitrr integration creates a seamless dining experience

Doshii is pleased to announce another App integration. The latest is with Waitrr, a mobile ordering and payments app that creates seamless dining experiences. Partnered with more than 150 food and beverage outlets across Singapore, Waitrr allows customers to select a restaurant on their mobile device, browse the menu, place a customised order, then pay quickly and securely. 

Tim Wekezer – CEO (left) with Sean O’Meara – Doshii CEO (right)

With Waitrr’s takeaway service, customers can order from their office or home via the app, pay, and choose their preferred collection time. Once they’re at the restaurant, customers simply collect their food without having to queue to order and pay.

This seamless customer experience works just as well for clients who dine-in. They simply order and pay with Waitrr and their orders are sent directly to the POS system and kitchen for preparation via Doshii. Using the QR code on the table at ordering time means their meal is delivered as soon as it’s ready. After customers have finished eating, they may simply leave; There is no need to wait for the bill, making bill splitting a thing of the past.

Automating the time-consuming order taking and payment processes allows restaurants to increase the operational capacity of their staff. This frees them up to focus on providing a more personalised, premium service for guests. And for customers, Waitrr can save up to 18 minutes each day by removing the need to queue, order and pay – allowing them to maximize their lunch breaks!

Endorsing the benefits of the Doshii-Waitrr integration, Jake Pang, Managing Director of Wafuken says, “People in a rush can still have a pleasant experience at your shop instead of giving up queuing altogether.” This experience is sure to have a positive impact on any venue’s bottom line.

The Doshii API, which connects Apps with POS in real-time, supports Waitrr’s high volume quick service restaurant segment.  With the Doshii integration, customer orders go straight into the POS of their restaurant partners, fitting seamlessly into their operation. Customers enjoy the resulting improved frictionless dining experience.

Get started with a free trial of the Doshii API

Do you have an App you’d like to see integrated with your POS Software? With no upfront costs, what are you waiting for? Our secure sandbox trial environment gives you full access to App and POS API integration examples, documentation and dashboard – with simulated orders and transactions.

To contact Waitrr, email kim@waitrr.com, or visit https://waitrr.com/

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What is API Integration

Original Article: Everything about API Integration

Application Programming Interfaces (API’s) provide a documented pathway for accessing the features and functionality of third-party systems through a (typically) stable and controlled interface. By leveraging API’s effectively, a developer can quickly and easily integrate with or expand upon a preexisting external system.

API Integration Background

Prior to the widespread adoption of web-hosted REST/HTTP API’s, service-oriented architectures, and other supporting aspects, integrating with a third-party solution could be a mammoth undertaking. In the worst-case scenario, it could mean attempting to reverse-engineer a way to communicate with the system using disassemblers, packet sniffers, and similar tools. Often this would mean dealing directly with the solution’s inner workings, with no guarantees that its core business rules would be enforced should a developers’ code accidentally break them. Often the next update to the software being integrated with would break some or all of the integration, requiring hasty and sometimes extensive revisions.

Such is the developer’s world in the absence of a published API. And such is the importance of having, and being able to effectively use an API. What an API brings to the table is an officially supported, documented, (hopefully) stable, and (hopefully) safe roadmap for integrating with an external system. APIs provide access to a service through a consistent interface, regardless of the technology being adopted by the client

In our case, we at Doshii have a common interface into all of our POS, regardless of their underlying technologies, allowing Apps a re-usable communications layer to interface with POS systems.

Gone are the disassemblers and the packet sniffers, and the need for the developer to worry about any of the system’s business logic, security constraints, or other internal machinations. If the API is well-managed (not every API is), breaking changes should be a rare occurrence that comes only after plenty of warning. In essence, an API frees a developer to focus purely on their own solution and allows them to talk with external systems in a safe, secure, and maintainable way.

Modern Era

The importance of being able to understand and work with third-party API’s had only increased as technology has trended towards a more cloud-based, SaaS-oriented model. Even with small projects, giving users the option to authenticate using their Facebook, Google, or Twitter account is nearly a de rigueur requirement these days, with far deeper integrations hardly uncommon. And with a huge budget and a large team of world-class hackers maybe you could find your own way into the massive and extremely complicated systems operated by these top-tier technology companies. But why would you bother, when every one of these companies provides a public API supporting authentication (amongst a myriad of other things)? The only answer is that you wouldn’t, and it would be crazy to even try.

Instead, you would check the published API’s, and quickly discover that all three companies have authentication API’s standardized around something called OAuth2. And you would integrate using that, confident that your integration will be secure, stable, and maybe even flexible enough to accommodate any other OAuth2 provider out there. And after that, the sky’s the limit. Want to integrate with Slack? There’s an API for that. Or maybe Jira? There’s an API for that as well. Or maybe you just want to sell some stuff from Amazon or stream some cool music. All of that can be accomplished, and in every case, it’s accomplished by using a published webservice API. So, as we move into the modern era of distributed, cloud-based solutions, the answer to almost any question is “there’s an API for that”. Being able to navigate, understand, and leverage those API’s effectively is key.

With Doshii this means that:

• No matter how many businesses you connect with through Doshii, you only need to maintain one integration
• You can be sure of a stable Interface where any changes will be announced in advance and backward compatibility is of paramount importance
• Detailed documentation of an existing standardised connection
• Simplified process for development and integration
• An experienced API Development team available for support, consultation, and implementation
• Allow your development team to focus on product development rather than integration and maintenance
• You have confidence in a trusted, secure connection
• And a Dashboard to monitor all your integrations and help troubleshoot issues

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Round up of the new Doshii API Platform features from 2018

Original Article: https://doshii.io/round-up-of-the-new-doshii-api-platform-features-from-2018/

Doshii’s API platform grew significantly during 2018. We saw a number of
leading App & POS companies join the Doshii network. which has led to some 
new features coming directly through our partner community. This allowed our 
App and POS partners to focus on their core strengths, leaving us to take care 
of data transfer and connectivity via a single, one-time integration with our API. 
Here are some of the highlights of the new features added this year.

Doshii Dashboard

The release of the Doshii API Dashboard provides an easy way to manage and
monitor all API integrations from a single location, in real-time. It provides a 
valuable window that gives users confidence all their integrations are working 
smoothly.

Through the Doshii Dashboard, users can quickly and easily view and manage all
registered venue locations from a single console, which also shows all
connected App and POS instances. The user-friendly interface allows quick 
venue onboarding, issue debugging and configuration of new connections. 
Easy-to-read, meaningful statistics are also presented for monitoring connection 
points.

READ MORE HERE

POS Initiated Payments (PIP) and Pre-orders

POS Initiated Payments were developed through consultation with Doshii’s
Community Forum. With PIPs, POS initiates a transaction using Terminal ID and
Application ID, which are optional. Payment Apps are then notified of the new 
transaction request and may handle it as per the current process.

The pre-order feature developed in 2018 allows customers to pre-order their
meal when making a reservation, leading to a more pleasurable and relaxed 
dining experience. This is facilitated by new endpoints, which support dine-in 
options ahead of check-in, using a booking ID.

READ MORE HERE

Webhooks, health checks and Gift cards released in version 3.2

Another initiative that came out of the Doshii Community Forum – and released
in v3.2 – is the development of webhooks, in addition to existing support for 
WebSockets. While most web service APIs support a standard RESTful request/ 
response mode of interaction, some may provide additional or alternative 
options via webhooks or WebSockets. This enables different means of 
communicating with an API, with strengths and weaknesses of each option 
that vary depending on the context in which they’re used.

READ MORE HERE

Also released in v3.2 is improved health check monitoring of connected
venues, including the ability to monitor real-time health of connected venues, 
telemetry around  POS version and network latency between the Doshii API 
and the venue.

Gift card activation and balance enquiry endpoints were also added to v3.2.
Functionality now exists to activate gift cards with the gift card provider via POS
in real-time.

Bulk Data API, image support and added product codes released in 
version 3.4

Released in v3.4, the Bulk Data API provides the capability to retrieve large
amounts of data in bulk through an optimised asynchronous process.

This version also supports images and other digital assets, allowing venues’
POS and Apps to link images of venues, menu items and members to partners, 
improving the customer experience. This feature supports ordering, payment 
and loyalty Apps that all face the same challenges: constantly changing menus 
at venues as well as new, modern payment options, including being able to 
identify customers via facial recognition.

Doshii’s image processing ability facilitates this by displaying the image of a
customer’s face (if they choose to opt-in) on the POS in real-time as a payment 
method and also allows recognition with loyalty App partners. Biometrics 
dramatically improve the customer experience and make purchasing more 
secure – giving future-facing companies like Doshii a head start over the 
competition.

READ MORE HERE

Version 3.4 also added support for menu item product codes. To improve
product identification, most standard product codes (SKU, PLU, GTIN-#) can
now be pushed to Doshii from POS to help Apps enrich the end-users’ 
experience. They do this by obtaining assets such as images, as well as 
extended descriptions from external sources.

Comprehensive API integration series

Doshii CTO, John Twomey, produced an excellent series of articles covering
everything our partners need to know about API integration. Topics include:

• What is API Integration
• API Integration Basics
• Architecting Multiple integrations via one API,
• App Integration
• POS Integration
• API Integration Best Practices,
• API Integration Maintenance,
• Real-Time Communication

With more articles on API integration security, and integration monitoring
coming soon.

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