Online Food Ordering Solution

There are many services and apps out there that can help but, quite frankly, if your passion is cooking and creating delicious food, you may not have the skill, time or patience to teach yourself the ins and outs of an online ordering app and who could blame you?

Some large companies have cashed in on that skill-vacuum and have quickly gone on to take over the world using a large slice of your profits! I won't mention any names here and give them a free SEO boost, but if you are in the restaurant trade, you will know who I am talking about.

As part of my research in developing this new service from Island Web Design, I discovered that one of these food ordering giants will charge you £295 + VAT just to sign up and will then take 14% + £0.50 (+VAT) per order after that, for the rest of your natural life. According to the statistics, the average fish & chip shop in the UK turns-over roughly £3k per week. I don't think it is a huge leap of the imagination to expect, if managed correctly with a powerful online presence and marketing effort, maybe half of that income can come in from online orders (whether for collection or delivery). Do your sums if you like, but with the figures above, that will equate to almost £4.60 per £20 sale or roughly £1,500 per month! 

That is just crazy. I went back to their website to check if I had missed something. Maybe this figure included pay for the delivery driver as well. It doesn't...

However, there is a better solution, or should I say solutions! There are many apps out there that promise the world, and that they will solve all of your online ordering woes for free. And yes, they are free. Up to a point that is. They are free to sign up to, free to create a menu in and give free advice on how to add an 'Order Now' button to your website. Heck, some of them even automatically create a free website for you as part of the service. Case closed, you don't need me - stop reading!

You still here? Excellent. Being from a family that has spent 30+ years in the hotel & catering industry, I think I share with you all a healthy dose of cynicism and the sure knowledge that nothing is really for free. And so it is with these apps. They are free until such time that you want to add a payment processor to the platform and then the monthly charges start. Not a lot, mind you, but no longer free. 

And let's face it, is having the app enough? Well, no, not if your customers can't find you. So you need to make sure your website is set up correctly, your SEO is fine-tuned and that Google holds you in high esteem. Otherwise, you are just wasting your time and money.

So, after researching a number of these alternatives and signing up to some of them, I have partnered with Global Food to bring you what I believe is one of the better ones. I say 'one of' because, quite frankly, many are very similar. 

What I like about this one is the flexibility of the menu design process and the fact that the restaurant owner can confirm the order and delivery/collection details in real-time. 

It can also double as a table reservation app and allow your customers to place their orders even before they arrive at your restaurant, cutting down waiting times and allowing you to get more use out of your tables during busy times.

Have a look to see how a typical order for delivery is placed and dealt with:

If you already have an all-singing, all dancing website, let me know and we'll take a look, run some tests and decide how we go forward after that.

You will also need some equipment if you choose to use this app. You will need a dedicated phone or tablet for the restaurant manager to receive the orders and update the delivery times (as seen in the video). Any phone or tablet will do as long as it not too old. 

You will/may also need a printer to print out the orders. The app will only deal with thermal printers made by Epson, Seiko or Star and you can buy them for anything between £100 and £300. The printers connect to the app via your restaurant's WiFi or are hard-wired into your router (recommended). When you send the order to the printer, it will print 2 receipts: one has all the order and delivery details for the manager, the other is a 'kitchen essentials' receipt for the chef. If you have a large operation, you can have more than one printer and choose which printer prints which receipt.

I am happy for you to buy the equipment yourself or we can supply it for you. 

Part of the set-up service includes your menu loaded up into the new app. We can take care of all this for you and will work with you make sure it offers your customers all the options and choices they are used to getting at the counter. This is quite an involved process in the first instance although, once done, it is a cinch to make changes on the fly (such as taking a dish that has run out, off the menu and so on). Of course, if you want to do this yourself, that is fine too and will save you some money. Your call.

After we've loaded up the menu, there are a couple of dozen steps we need to do to make the app live on your website. Among this is setting up a payment processor. delivery parameters, optional service fees and so on. All part of the set-up service.

The overall total will depend greatly on what equipment we'll be supplying so get in touch for tailor-made quotation. But, to give an idea, it will be significantly less than ONE month of the commission payment mentioned at the top of this article. 

The on-going monthly subscription will also be tailored to your requirements and is influenced by the level of support you choose. It starts at £89 per month and, to be honest, that is suitable for 90% of customers.