Doshii, Uber and CommBank walk into a bar… to fix messy ordering systems

Exclusive: The Commonwealth Bank and Uber have joined forces with Australian venue management platform Doshii. This multi-year partnership has been 18 months in the making and aims to bring Doshii’s hospitality technology to restaurants across Australia.

The plethora of restaurant apps that have flooded the modern Australian restaurant scene has made things quite messy, especially when it comes to connecting them to legacy point-of-sale (POS) systems.

Launched in 2015, Doshii allows for a single point of integration in and out of a venue. This means that all of the popular delivery apps are connected to one system.

“When lockdowns were on, venues were looking for any way to try and get something out there,” Justin O’Donnell, CEO of Doshii, said on a call with SmartCompany.

In some cases, front-of-house have multiple tablets on the go to keep up with the different apps that orders are coming in from. And often they have to manually punch in those orders to their POS to shoot it through to the kitchen.

“There was a fish and chip shop in Tasmania that had 30 tablets set up in their venue just bringing different platforms through. And then someone had to sit there and re-enter those orders,” O’Donnell said as I, a former restaurant worker, groaned with lamentation.

“The problem is when there’s that much coming through, how do you stay on top of it?”

Over the past eight years, the Doshii system has served almost 300 million orders. That is now looking at a large expansion with the new Uber Eats partnership allowing for the app to be woven into a restaurant’s POS through the Doshii system

“It’s been a tough few years for the hospitality industry, with many venues still struggling to find staff and keep a lid on rising costs. With Uber Eats joining Doshii’s integrations marketplace, we’re excited to be able to help venues get orders out faster and serve more customers,” O’Donnell said.

The launch of this partnership comes within months of Uber Direct — the company’s white label service — partnering with Tablevibe to bring a 0% commission fee model to restaurants.

Doshii and the Commonwealth Bank introduce a Smart Hospitality product

Beyond order integration, the Doshii platform can also streamline loyalty programs, reservations and even analytics.

This includes the ability to generate insights on spending, demographics and busy time periods. This allows restaurants to make decisions around staffing by looking at time-of-day sales, which is particularly important with staff shortages across the industry. It can also allow for decision-making around things like waiting lists for repeat customers.

“Staff shortages is one we never really thought about until January last year,” O’Donnell said to SmartCompany.

“The pandemic was horrible obviously for a lot of people — we helped a lot of venues automate their operations. And then part two was they couldn’t get people. This was a way that they could start ordering from tables — QR code ordering became the standard for a while and it’s still going strong.”

After being acquired by CommBank’s X15ventures in January 2021, Doshii and CommBank are launching a Smart Hospitality product that allows for splitting payments at the table, challenging apps like Beem It and Splitwise.

“When a waiter walks up to a table it can be quite an awkward experience around,” O’Donnell said.

“Can you split it by six? Hey, can I pay $100 and someone else pays $20? Who ordered alcohol and who didn’t?”

The Smart Hospitality system will allow for the payment terminal to be left on the table.

“It keeps talking to the POS to bring the bill down. So if that person does order a really expensive bottle of wine and says they’re going to pay, they can on the payments device.

“They just click that bottle of wine, tap their card and it will then clear it. And then you might want to split the rest by four.”

This partnership also coincides with Uber becoming CommBank’s rideshare partner for team members.

“Uber remains laser-focused on deploying our technology to unlock magical experiences for customers and merchants. This three-way partnership will spark added convenience for thousands of small businesses,” Lucinda Barlow, Uber’s senior director and head of APAC marketing, said in a statement.

Looking into the future, Doshii hopes to become a standard utility for when restaurants are setting up shop, as well as an education tool. O’Donnell hopes that the sales and menu data it collects could help venues understand what they can be doing differently to make the business more profitable.

“Let’s say [a venue] sells chicken schnitzels and somewhere in a 20km radius someone else sells it better at a different price point. How could you let a venue know what that looks like from an aggregated point of view,” O’Donnell said.

“Obviously we would need a large chunk of the market and our goal over the next two to three years is to get about 30-40% of venues in Australia connected to Doshii.”