Headquartered in Australia, Idealpos Solutions Pty Ltd., provides businesses comprehensive point-of-sale (POS) systems. Producing hardware, powering POS software and delivering customization services, Idealpos powers consumer purchasing across industries—from restaurants and cafes to bars, hotels, and service stations. For over 16 years and more than 11,000 installations, Idealpos has become the ‘home of point of sale.’
Keeping a close eye on the market, both domestically and internationally, Idealpos began their modernization journey years ago. First, by developing their online licensing system, followed by the creation of their multi-tenant environment for online product delivery. As a leading edge company, new development never stops. With their mindset focused on the long-term to continue to serve the needs of customers, “it’s more about longevity rather than staying static,” with web-enablement a key part of their strategy, according to Mark Beeley, Managing Director at Idealpos.
After revamping their website in 2015, they began offering free trials of Idealpos to their customers. Customers would sign up for a trial, download a 400MB file and then install the software. In addition to a 20 minute elapsed time to download, customers would run into all sorts of installation compatibility issues. Idealpos support staff would help customers troubleshoot issues associated with different versions of Windows, like different versions of Microsoft SQL that they already had installed that conflicted with the Idealpos demo install, for example.
Modernizing the Software Trial Experience
So for customers to simply see what Idealpos software was like, if there were issues, could take hours—and of course, without any commitment or investment from the customer to purchase the product. “It was actually costing us and our partners money, potentially for no future business at all.”
A reseller in North America, who was looking to expand the market, asked: Is there any way to demo Idealpos online? Without having to remote into a PC, or installing it locally? That prompted Idealpos to adopt Cameyo for ISVs.
Within a week of collaborating with Cameyo, Idealpos had a branded, online trial up and running—and without any customization of their existing software. Currently from a “LAUNCH IDEALPOS IN YOUR WEB BROWSER NOW” button from their traditional software free trial page, within 2 minutes, customers, prospects, and resellers can use a fully-functional version of the solution for a limited period of time.
They’ve eliminated the historic issues associated with compatibility—the software runs from any browser, any device, anytime. This new way to trial their software compliments Idealpos’ mindset of being public about their offerings, already having the user guide and feature details online.
“The actual performance of the software, after the session has loaded and the software has started up, is really fast. You can perform Idealpos transactions, run a report, and everything loads up almost as quickly as if it was installed locally. That’s a really big benefit for us. Not seeing any lags in performance when Idealpos runs in the web helps us put our best foot forward with new customers.”
What’s more is that Idealpos can now capture more information, and more easily—knowing from the Cameyo report the customer’s time with the trial, what functionality was explored, and even if the URL was shared with others.
Idealpos knows that a lot of Independent Software Vendors are in a similar position, just like they were. With software built products like Microsoft Visual Studio and all of it’s programming languages, they want to let others know it can be fast, scalable and easy to modernize demonstration software to the web.
With their Cameyo-powered online software trial, Idealpos has seen an order of magnitude increase in the number of sites on a weekly basis already. And that’s without even promoting it. Their next planned step will be “to put it on the homepage, on the web banner and really promote it, in addition to marketing it to our resellers—making it easy for them to demonstrate to their customers,” said Beeley.
Knowing that online demonstrations and trials help drive their sales, Idealpos has seen immediate value from their Cameyo-powered solution. “We’ve already saved money previously spent on historic trial support and had a ton more customers try our software. Once we promote it, we’ll see even more.” And Idealpos knows that making it easier for people to buy is at the heart of any good business strategy; it’s what they do for their customers.