What influences a customer when making a purchase online?  Although these stats* apply to all online purchases, they are very much applicable to restaurants and restaurant online ordering.


Site Speed and Visuals:
•    After waiting 3 seconds, 57% of visitors will abandon a site if it’s still loading.  80% of those people will never return.
•    Visitors will leave a site within 10 to 20 seconds if it doesn’t immediately resonate with them or provide value.

This is why it’s critical your online ordering site is fully branded to your restaurant.  Customers need to ‘connect’ with your brand immediately or you may lose their business.  If your website links to a portal – you’re most likely losing a lot of business.

•    92.6% say visuals are the top factor influencing a purchase decision.

Showing high quality images of items on your menu can really benefit online sales.

Checkout Process:
•    67.4% of shoppers across all types of sites will abandon the checkout process.  That means just over 30% of visitors complete a purchase they start.  

With NetWaiter, nearly 80% of visitors complete a transaction after they select their first item.  That’s a HUGE difference.

Top Reasons for Abandonment Include:
•    41% - Hidden charges at checkout.
•    10% - Lengthy checkout process.

NetWaiter’s goal is to get the customer through the ordering process in as few clicks as possible – hence our very high conversion rate.

Other Interesting Information on Abandonment:
•    Men are more likely to abandon a purchase.
•    25 to 44 year-olds are the worst offenders when it comes to giving up on a purchase.

Considering the importance of this age group to online ordering.  This is why it’s critical to make the online ordering experience quick and easy for customers.

*Credit to The Marketing Donut and other sources.

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Advertising, Branded Online Ordering, Communicating to Employees, Convenience, Customer Experience, Facebook, Marketing, NetWaiter, Online Ordering for Restaurants, Restauarant Order Customization, Takeout, Yelp, Word of Mouth

Has your restaurant ever been blindsided by an online complaint?  It doesn’t matter if it’s about your online business, or an in-restaurant experience – it’s not a good feeling.  Whether it’s legitimate, or something totally unwarranted – you need to know how to respond. 

Often it’s based on a misunderstanding or a failure to respond early, when a complaint is fresh.  A recent webinar from the National Restaurant Association had some tips on how to respond to these online complaints.

• Don’t be the last person to find out about a problem at your restaurant, or with a takeout order. Get familiar with the tools.  Use Google Alerts, monitor Yelp.  Have systems in place. 

• This isn’t personal, so don’t get defensive.  Your goal is to neutralize these incidents. 

• Take responsibility online.  Denying that it happened is usually the wrong tactic.  If it’s a completely false or bogus complaint, contact the site (i.e. Yelp) and have them remove it. 

• Get the response public and prominent.  Don’t be the 75th person to comment.  Tell the complainant that you want make it right.  Make sure everyone sees it. 

• Treat your online communication as carefully and as thoughtfully as you would in-person.  You don’t want these things going viral.

• If you are posting online, keep everything positive.  If a customer persists with negativity, take the conversation offline by suggesting they call you. 

• Train employees with your approach to handling complaints so that your staff speaks in one voice. 

• If complaints are routine or happening in patterns, it can indicate a weakness in your operation.  Use that information to your benefit and correct the issues. 

Be persistent to make things right.  People tend to remember the last thing you did for them.  It could be a big problem or small dilemma, but if you bend over backwards to make things right, that’s what they will remember most. 

 

In a blog post earlier this month, we talked about how NetWaiter’s online ordering system can help you cater to increased demand for customization - requests for extra meat, double avocado, or other add-ons.

To help accommodate these requests, in addition to upselling the order, it’s important to include any paid option as a selection customers can click to add.  But what happens if a customer enters a separate request in the Special Instructions field that should incur an additional charge?

These special instructions, which restaurants are happy to fulfill, can cause a difficulty when an order is pre-paid. Do you honor the request for extra turkey, even though you haven’t been paid for it, or do you hold off and not include it?

To address this, NetWaiter has developed a Secondary Transaction Feature to allow a restaurant to run a separate charge on a customer’s card, after the initial transaction, to pay for that special request.

This is also a handy feature to add a tip.  A customer may not have thought about a tip when placing their online order, but the Secondary Transaction Feature allows delivery drivers to add a tip to an order, after the initial payment, if the customer tells them to.

Another new addition to NetWaiter is the Hidden Item list.  NetWaiter has always allowed restaurants to “hide” items on their menu, most often because the kitchen has run out of a key ingredient or the item was a limited special that may come back in the future.

This new feature shows “All Hidden Items” in one section of the Management Console for easy management.  Managers can see all items on their menu that are hidden, in one place, and then unhide those that they want to be available again.