NetWaiter recently released several new features for its restaurant online ordering service, aimed at giving customers more convenience and choices, building loyalty, and making your restaurant marketing efforts more refined and targeted.  Here’s a summary of the features:

Birthday Promo System – Configure a Birthday Promo for customers and NetWaiter will automatically trigger the promotion, emailing it to each customer before their birthday.  The promo can be valid for a pre-determined amount of time after a customer’s birthday.  The Birthday Promo System allows you to recognize your best customers with a ‘Happy Birthday’ wish and continue to build their loyalty.  The best thing about the system – your restaurant can “set it and forget it.”  NetWaiter manages the promotions and redemptions automatically.

Dine-In Option – Rather than offering only Takeout and Delivery options, you can now provide customers the option to place Dine-In orders.  This is ideal for the customer that wants to order in advance, but eat at your restaurant (and it saves you money on takeout packaging).

Delivery Driver Alerts – Send incoming delivery orders straight to your delivery driver/company.  If you want to notify a third-party delivery company of a new order, you can send them the order information, in full, including when the order will be ready at your restaurant and when the order is scheduled for delivery to your customer.

Enhanced Reporting Section – The new Menu Stats page is located in the Reports section of the NetWaiter Management Console.  The Menu Stats page allows you to sort through the most popular categories and items during a particular date range, using an assortment of variables, including: Pickup vs. Delivery vs. Dine-in, day of the week, and the time of day.

End-Of-Day Reports – The new End-Of-Day reporting feature allows managers to see an order summary and a list of all orders that were sent throughout the day.  The order summary includes information such as: Pickup vs. Delivery vs. Dine-in, mobile vs. non-mobile, and paid online vs. paid-in-person.

We've seen rumblings of this in a few places across the media - as the economy crawls out of recession, diners are shifting back to the casual dining segment. Nation's Restaurant News cited this in an online article in late May.

According to the article: "Respondents devoted 37.7% of their restaurant spending to limited-service restaurants during the quarter, a decline from 41% - 42.1% during the previous year.  Meanwhile, consumers said they spent about 41.1% of their dining-out dollars on casual dining restaurants, up from 38% - 39.4% seen in 2011."

The market for casual dining is coming back and casual dining is a huge user of online ordering services like NetWaiter.

Also, according to Restaurant Hospitality, 84% of those restaurants that have a stand-alone mobile website see an increase in new business activity.

"We're starting to see the beginnings of a perfect storm for online ordering," said Jared Shimoff, a Sr. Director at NetWaiter.  "The market is shifting more towards the casual dining sector, and at the same time, we are seeing an explosion in the popularity of smartphones."

"All the data we've seen tells us that mobile websites, with the ability to place orders, continue to increase as a major influence on the restaurant market.  Thankfully, we’re able to keep our clients on the forefront of this growing trend."