Are you tired of having to wait in long lines when you’re shopping in a store? Some companies have realised and are focusing on making your shopping experience a lot easier. After the most common mobile payment methods or the smartphone digital payments, there’s something new now. San Francisco-based OrderAhead has the intention of putting a stop to that. It’s a startup that allows you to make your shopping online with anyone of its six hundred merchants by means of an app, and then picking up without having to make a long queue or paying for the item.
Trying to avoid making lines is something that has been tried to do and is still being tried to do in many ways, from streamlining the payments process with apps such as Square or using local delivery services such as Postmates to remove the act of going into the store.
But as delivery isn’t always possible, there are times when it’s just more simple to go to the store. In this case you can use OrderAhead.
It started as an iPhone app eighteen months ago but because of the great demand from users it has expanded to Android. With its power users buying three or four items a week through OrderAhead and its power merchants making thousands in revenue every week, the app has received incessant demand.
But now the company is planning to expand to more areas. Some merchants have signed up around the country through the self-serve part of the app, but the next six months will experience a bigger push to expand into new regions.
OrderAhead is turning more and more into an on-demand society, and everybody is after ordering from their phones and getting things without being inconvenienced or having to wait in line. Retail today doesn’t support that but OrderAhead allows you not to have to wait to place an order or to pay for an order no matter where you are.
What it does is take a commission on every order that is sent to the merchant, but the end user always sees the same price.
Since it was founded eighteen months ago, OrderAhead has raised $2,500,000, and among its major investors are SV Angel, Matrix Partners and Quora co-founder Adam D’Angelo.
Local commerce has three different layers, payments, the operational layer and the commerce layer. Right now payments are being attacked by Square and the operational layer is being attacked by Amazon and others.
Being live in more than 600 merchants it is quite big, with specially an increasingly large presence in LA and the bay area, but right now they’re building out a self-serve platform with a large amount of merchants spread throughout the US in Mineneapolis, Denver and Houston.
What this OrderAhead app really is is just another form of mobile commerce or m-commerce, which as you know is like e-commerce but only for transactions that can take place from mobile phones or other mobile devices. What it is is a term which refers to the practice of conducting promotional and financial activities with a mobile device. Apart from cell-phones, m-commerce also recognises that transactions can be carried out by personal digital assistants and other hand held devices operating with Internet access.
To read more about mobile commerce read our article Mobile Commerce Statistics.