The good folks at the coffee shop Joe are using an iPad-based cash register at their location in Grand Central Terminal, New York. As seen in this video, it’s compact, fast, and efficient:

Shopkeep.com is the company behind the iPad register, and provides the software and hardware to make your iPad into a cash register. Designed specifically for coffee shops, bakeries, or specialty shops with fewer than 150 items, the iPad POS prints receipts and even pops the cash drawer, but takes up very little space. A simple cash drawer, receipt printer, and stand for the iPad starts at $850, with add ons for credit card scanning and barcode scanning available. They also provide BackOffice, a web-based back end that syncs all the information from the register to the cloud, allowing businesses to easily keep track of daily sales, backup data, and export the information straight into QuickBooks.

Touch screen cash registers are nothing new, but this is the first to integrate a consumer tablet device into the system. Of course, if you don’t need a cash drawer, receipts and back-end monitoring, something simple like Square allows you to accept credit cards and issue email receipts from an iPad or iPhone.

The iPad is not included, and monthly fees for ShopKeep start a $49/mo.

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Looks like the cash register is dead. Or soon will be. The iPad is already an essential business tool for some small business’ and a new cash register application should make it even easier for small businesses to take payments via their iPad. The application created by shopkeep.com has been put into service in the Joe coffee shop in Grand Central Terminal in New York. The new point-of-sale app will also print receipts and even makes the mandatory ka-ching when sales are rung up.

It will also transmit sales information to its web-based system so that managers using ShopKeep’s BackOffice software can track sales in real time, manage their inventory, run reports and export the data for use in other applications.

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The Pitch: “Point-of-sale software can be expensive — some popular applications cost close to $1,000. ShopKeep is an affordable Web-based point-of-sale system designed for small businesses. Because our software runs online, retailers can track sales and manage inventory from anywhere. What’s different about our software is that it also runs locally on the cash register, so even if a store’s Internet connection goes down, the business can still ring up customers. ShopKeep works on both PCs and Macs, and it integrates with QuickBooks and e-commerce software. We’re raising money to hire a sales team and launch an online advertising campaign.”

Founder: Jason Richelson
Location: New York City
Employees: Two
Product Launch: April 2010
2010 Projected Revenue: $20,000
2011 Projected Revenue: $300,000
Price: $49 to $129 per month per register
Number of Customers: 60
Funding Sought: $500,000 to $1 million
Background: Richelson came up with the idea for ShopKeep after co-founding The Greene Grape, a wine and grocery chain with three locations in New York City.

The Experts Weigh In

Hire a Marketing Expert
This pitch makes me a little nervous. It sounds like Richelson has sold this software to some customers door to door, but there’s no indication that he knows how to acquire customers efficiently. Before ShopKeep tries to raise money, it should hire someone with strong Web marketing experience who can help the company lower its cost of acquiring new customers. This isn’t the sort of business that’s going to provide big returns for investors — point-of-sale software companies typically sell at two to five times revenue — so ShopKeep needs to get everything right.

Jon Chait
Partner, Dace Ventures
Waltham, Massachusetts

Prove It Can Scale
ShopKeep is in a fairly crowded space, and selling to small businesses is challenging. It tends to require more capital to reach this market: You have to have a lot of feet on the street. But using commissioned salespeople means giving up a lot of margin. I don’t think ShopKeep should look for venture funding. Instead, it should raise seed funding from friends, family, and angels and focus on gaining adoption in a specific geography or vertical market, such as convenience stores. If ShopKeep can show evidence of scale, it will be more attractive to investors.

Dan Ciporin
Venture partner, Canaan Partners
Westport, Connecticut

May Be a Lifestyle Business
ShopKeep is a very nice application that clearly grew out of a retailer’s frustration with traditional point-of-sale systems. This has the potential to be a lifestyle business with a recurring revenue stream, but it is not likely to be funded with outside equity capital. At least half a dozen other companies offer virtually identical solutions at even lower prices, and those firms have been unable to ramp up sales significantly. Paying a sales force to sell a low-priced product like this is unlikely to work. Richelson would be better off trying to find a scalable, self-service way to market and sell online.

David S. Rose
Chairman, New York Angels
New York City

Details

Ottawa’s Shopify announced today that they have hooked up with online point-of-sale provider ShopKeep to create the first point-of-sale system for brick-and-mortar retailers that is fully integrated online via Shopify.

ShopKeep allows brick-and-mortar retailers to ring up sales, take credit cards and cash, print receipts, track sales tax, manage inventory and track customers easily from their web browser. And, the ShopKeep Register keeps ringing customers up even when the internet is down.

The new Shopify-ShopKeep integration allows retailers to keep their inventory in sync whether the sales are coming via brick or click.

Create items in ShopKeep.com and they are automagically pushed to Shopify.com where you can add pictures and descriptions. When you sell an item at the point-of-sale within seconds the inventory is updated on Shopify.com. When you sell an item on Shopify.com your ShopKeep.com inventory will also be adjusted.

This made-in-heaven integration could be the beginning of a NEW bricks-and-clicks model for small retailers.

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