Port Chester's Bartaco Gives Discount When You Pay The Check On Amazon

PORT CHESTER, NY — Bartaco in Port Chester is the first restaurant to let diners pay the tab with Amazon and for a limited time, they are even offering a discount for those who do so.

Bartaco integrated Amazon Pay with OneDine, an all-in-one checkout system that combines tap-scan QR codes on tables and receipts to streamline the process of ordering and paying the bill.

"Our goal is that we want you to feel like you’ve escaped. You want to enjoy the people that you’re with," bartaco founder Scott Lawton explained. "We don’t want it to be a cumbersome or time-consuming process to place an order."

At bartaco, customers typically order several small plates, each priced at just a few dollars. This dining style leads to guests placing orders multiple times during their visit. However, bartaco’s previous digital ordering system required customers to pay for each order separately as they made them. This disrupted the relaxed, communal atmosphere of the restaurant and, in some cases, deterred customers from ordering additional food and drinks, according to the company.

"I realized that we had to find a solution where you could scan the QR code, order from the menu, and keep a check open," Lawton said. "The one thing that I had noticed was my per-person average had dropped by 25 percent because people got tired of having to pay every time."

To streamline the dining experience, bartaco wanted to let customers keep their tabs open and pay at the end of their meals rather than after every order. After exploring different solutions, the restaurant landed on OneDine.

"OneDine was the only solution out there that could integrate with my legacy point-of-sale system and keep a check open," Lawton said. "We asked OneDine to team up with us and develop what became a very customized solution."

Bartaco began to look into ways to reduce the amount of time guests took to input their payment information at the beginning of their dining experience. For guests, entering payment information and going through the verification process when they’d just sat down with family and friends was frustrating and disrupted their ability to engage with one another, so bartaco began to explore less cumbersome payment options.

During a chance encounter at a conference, Lawton shared the company’s vision with an Amazon representative. Intrigued by the potential of the project, the Amazon Pay team reached out to bartaco to start a collaboration.

When you dine at bartaco, you can now initiate an order by tapping a QR code, which opens a tab on your device through OneDine. You can tap the Amazon Pay button to integrate OneDine with the credit card information stored in your Amazon Pay account and select your preferred payment method stored in your Amazon Wallet.

The system also incorporates a preauthorization feature unique to Amazon Pay.

"When you place your very first order at bartaco, you’ll have to go through the preauthorization stages that Amazon requires, which are less tedious than actually keying in your credit card." Lawton said. "When you’re in the system, though, you’re in the system for all of our locations. So, when you order, you just tap the Amazon Pay button to pay, and you don’t need to preauthorize again. It’s now easier, and it’s a one-and-done solution."

At the end of the dining experience, guests can close their tab directly through OneDine, charging the final amount to the preauthorized card.

For a limited time, diners are even earning a $5 credit for a future visit when they use Amazon Pay to check out.