GoWaiter: A Marketplace for Online Payments
By: Khizrum Ahmed
Tags: Online Payme, Gowaiter, Cashless, Marketplaces, Apps

In late 2018, I made a wrong purchase, as I bought a salad on suggestions of the restaurant staff, when I wanted the other type of salad. At that moment, I felt if I had a digital menu with pictures, so apparently, I wouldn’t have made a fool out of myself. Thus, I and my cofounder Fatima Ahmed, in early 2019, started to develop an app, GoWaiter, where diners could see a digital menu of restaurants they were visiting. As I started the sales, the major problem, excluding the design issues, came across as the revenue model. Restaurants weren’t ready to pay an upfront fee for the software, and the commission model didn’t really apply to the existing framework. Therefore, we decided to include an ordering service in our digital menu app.

The initial ordering service allowed users to order by scanning a QR code placed at the restaurant. This restricted users to only order, when they were within the restaurant’s premises. This irked restaurant owners as they wanted a greater footfall, also, for the users to download an app to order, when they had waiters around, didn’t make much sense. This prompted us to convert our app to a preordering service, where the users could preorder their meals for pickup or dine in, as this would remove the waiting element from their dining experience, and would provide restaurant owners with a greater table turn over. The plan seemed perfect except there was one big requirement now, which was to enable online payments for the preordering.

We spent the entire 2020 reaching out various payment service providers to enable online payments for our platform. I have discussed this issue particularly in a previous article titled, “Personal Experience with Payment Gateways in Pakistan”. Eventually, we were able to partner up with Foree for the cause, but still the challenge of enabling online payments is too great for the majority of business owners in the country. Currently, there are only 2,164 Ecommerce merchants, when our mobile banking users are 8.9 m and the number of credit/debit cards is over 28 m. Once the neobanks would start their operations, the number of online payment users would easily go over 50 m in the near future. Yet, due to the regulatory restrictions the Ecommerce merchants won’t see a similar growth.

Currently, enabling offline businesses to accept online payments, is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities present in Pakistan. At GoWaiter, from providing digital menus to restaurants, now we have broadened our vision to enabling cashless payments at offline businesses for any commodity, service or valuable on our platform. The businesses that will be listed on our platform will be able to accept payments through all online instruments, and the onboarding process would be much easier than banks or PSPs. This would particularly benefit businesses that are undocumented, and are not registered with the government. Furthermore, as the online transactions would grow in number, so the tax theft would reduce as a result.

Our immediate challenge is to create a recurring early userbase, as we would only add more verticals, once the present situation becomes stable. Restaurant industry has suffered immensely at the hands of COVID-19, we also had our fair share of suffering through the pandemic. We started our preordering services last year in October, and only a few months in our operations, we had to back track because of the second lockdown on dine in. We had planned to expand the number of restaurants to somewhere between 50–100, currently we stand at 20. We also couldn’t materialize on the marketing that we had done with university students, as the universities are operating online. Furthermore, we were in talks with investors to raise an angel/preseed round to grow our team and market the product, but owing to the pandemic it couldn’t materialize.

Pakistan is expected to receive 1.2 million COVID-19 vaccines by the end of January, and in the first quarter all of the frontline workers, will be vaccinated for free. By the end of the year, majority of the population would be vaccinated too, which would mean finally returning to the normal. The current lockdown on dine in is also expected to end by the end of January or the start of February, which would mean that restaurants would be required to operate under the government specified SOPs. Thus, once the lockdown on restaurants’ services is lifted, we will resume our business activities including marketing to facilitate restaurants in sales. Furthermore, we are also planning to initiate a reservation service, where a user would be able to reserve a table by paying PKR 100/- as a security fee, which would be readjusted in his/her bill, if he/she shows up. This would reduce the bounce rate on reservations, and we will also be introducing discounts on reservations too, a first in the country’s history, to encourage more loyal customers.