Scaling Entertainment Centers and Transforming Guest Experiences cover art

Scaling Entertainment Centers and Transforming Guest Experiences

Scaling Entertainment Centers and Transforming Guest Experiences

Listen for free

View show details

About this listen

 Richard Moot: Hello and welcome to the Square Developer Podcast. I'm your host, Richard Moody, head of developer relations here at Square. And today I'm joined by Eric and Alex from Headpinz. Eric, tell us a little bit about Headpinz and what it is that you do there.Eric Osborn: Sure. Absolutely. We're a chain of entertainment centers in Southwest Florida. We have everything from bowling to laser tied, the game zones, multiple restaurants, bars, and, soon to be adding an indoor racetrack. The chief information officer for head beans. And then I'm also joined by Alex here, one of our lead developers.Alex Trepasso: I'm Alex. Piggybacking off Eric there with all those different entertainment options and attractions we offer. I pretty much take over integrating them and making our whole ecosystem kind of work as one when we're dealing with all these different systems, you know, from scheduling all the way down to buying a burger, basically integrating those and overseeing the IT operations side of it.Richard Moot: Awesome. And so I don't know if this is quite mentioned, but like how many locations are you guys in the Florida region?Eric Osborn: Right now we're operating two. Well, actually three, two in which our Headpinz, we're actually making a transition from a traditional type bowling centers to more of, a hybrid type environment where we have those leagues on Monday through Friday that people are used to, you know, seeing for the traditional bowlers. But then on late night, Friday night, Saturday, Sunday, we're very much an open bowling venue, open up for families and all that good fun with laser tag and such.Richard Moot: Very cool. And so part of the reason that we're, we're talking today is you have built an integration with Square and it's it's quite interesting, but I'd love to hear the story about, you know, where you using something before. What made you go into using Square. Like tell me a little bit about like, you know what drove you into, you know, using Square through your locations.Eric Osborn: Yeah. So a little bit of a back story. We're actually use Square before our current POS provider decided to do a partnership with Square. We originally started using it for to-go orders during the Covid era when the bowling centers were shut down and we needed to find a way to get our that working.So we were online, and they were doing to-go orders and meeting them right at the door and delivering that food that has since grown into where we've actually made Square our base, then our truth of everything. And that's been a multi-year project. But everything that we do now, including the front end point of sale, our kiosk, our web reservation, anything that is touching financials are now funneling through the Square ecosystem.So a big change over the past three years. And, and that matter of fact, just over the past couple of weeks, as we've finally moved our final processes over to the Square ecosystem. So that's been great. Then where, Alex comes into play and, and, and where the development actually came from was there was some third parties that just simply did not work with Square, such as one of our kiosks, and a couple other small little things like our group function where they actually sign a contract and actually take a deposit.Those things weren't working with Square Alex along and, and worked with, the Square ecosystem on a solution to that. He can speak a little bit about how our kiosks work and such, even though they're not a native, you know, Square partnership that we got to work in on our own.Richard Moot: Yeah, I'd love to like the I mean, that's one of the things that really piqued my interest is you know, you have, well, I don't want to steal thunder here at like, the front of the venue. You have these, like, sort of kiosks where, like, it allows somebody to be able to purchase, you know, various other things, like, other than bowling.And you built this all yourself, essentially. Like, tell me a little bit about, like, the integration that you built with these kiosks and how that all works.Alex Trepasso: Yeah. So it started from a position of when we first got the kiosks, one of their native integrations was another payment provider. And kind of where we came in was, okay, we have these two different systems. You have Square on one side and this other provider on another, both doing, you know, different transaction fee rates, different handling, different view of transactions.And it came up one day in our operations and kind of just our discussions of can we unify these systems. And that led kind of down the rabbit hole of the Square terminal API was kind of our first dive into everything Square developer. And it came along, okay, we know that Square offers this, that we can use this for payments even without sending, you know, a forward or, or doing a whole POS based Square install.Let's try some things from there. We used the terminal API to start listening for those transaction...
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.