Restaurants that link an online ordering portal to their website are turning business away and paying to do so.

If you have an online ordering link to a portal showing on your restaurant’s website, you are sending customers from your site, where they are completely focused on you, to a place where they can order from a variety of restaurants.  You are essentially inviting them to order from one of your competitors.

Within the overall marketing strategy of your restaurant, the purpose of a portal is to bring you new customers, not the other way around.  When you point customers to a portal to place an order at your restaurant, you pay extraordinary fees for that business.  If you’re sending repeat customers to place orders through the portal, it’s even worse.

The average portal fee at Grubhub/Seamless is about 14% of each order.  With your own, individually-branded online ordering site, like NetWaiter, you would pay a small fraction of those fees.

Customers come to your website because they are interested in your restaurant.  Don’t send them to a portal where you will either lose them to a competitor, or pay the portal’s huge fee.  Keep them on your site, accept their order directly, retain all of the customer information, and save money while doing so.

A recent article from Nations' Restaurant News talked about how the large chains are getting away from value, convenience, service, and speed in their advertising. Evidently their studies are telling them to focus more on the menu and the quality of ingredients.

 

That's good, if focusing on those elements helps bring customers through the front door.  But it is also important to remember that study after study reminds us that customers who order online are a different breed. They look for other things. 

Consider:
•    A sizable portion of customers that come to you for takeout have been to your restaurant.  They know the quality of your dishes and they have a high degree of trust that you will deliver on it.  By converting them to online customers, you take good customers and make them better.

•    Thanks to the proliferation of multi-restaurant portals, there are also an increasing number of customers who are coming to you based on your portal presence (and remember, almost 50% of customers who see you on a portal will check out your proprietary website before ordering because they don’t fully trust the information on the portal).  If these folks are new customers, they are going to judge your restaurant by your own website.

•    Either through first-hand experience, referral, or a sense of adventure, many online customers are already sold on your menu and quality.  They are looking first and foremost for convenience and control.  They want it quick, they want it right, and they want it when they want it.

The Bottom Line:  When it comes to promoting online ordering, stick to the basics – the added convenience and control.  You might also add that your takeout items are always as good as what they would be in your restaurant.  Just keep your website looking good and the orders will keep coming in!

Google's Think Insights recently published statistics that reminded us that not only is it important to have a mobile website, but it is also important to have a mobile website that delivers users quickly to what is important.

First, the broad view:

• When they visited a mobile website, 74% of people say they're more likely to return to that site in the future.
• 67% of mobile users say that when they visit a mobile website, they're more likely to buy a site's product or service.
• 48% said that if a site didn't work well on their smartphones, it made them feel like the company didn't care about their business.

Then there is the importance of a functional mobile website.

• 61% of users said that if they didn't find what they were looking for right away on a mobile website, they'd quickly move on to another site.
• 79% of people who don't like what they find on one site will go back and search for another site.
• 50% of people said that even if they like a business, they will use them less often if the website isn't mobile-friendly.

Think in terms of what an online ordering customer is looking for. Menu is at the top of the list. On the mobile website pages NetWaiter makes available for client restaurants, we design them so that the prospective customer is taken directly to the menu.

When designing a mobile  website, make sure a link to the menu is clearly visible on the first screen.