3 Best Restaurant Order Online Software for Restaurants

As an up-and-coming food business startup owner, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind when you hear: “Restaurant Order Online Software”. If you don’t have the slightest clue, this post is going to help you get the right information on everything required to partner up with a food services vendor, and get your business up and running in no time.

What Is Restaurant Order Online Software & What You Need to Know to Get Started?

In basic terms, a restaurant order online software helps your customers to place online food orders through your restaurant food ordering app or your branded restaurant website. Customers get the option of paying through multiple payment methods and selecting a preferred delivery mode – i.e. Contactless delivery, or regular doorstep delivery at the time of checkout.

The actual scope of a restaurant order online software goes beyond the usual norms of placing online orders, processing them, and getting them delivered. At least, that’s what your concerned customers are worried about.

You, on the other hand, as a restaurant owner, need to make sure that the software that you have selected is the right one, and it comes with enough features to support future scalability concerns.

The question is: why do you need a restaurant order online when you can get your own mobile food ordering website, and a branded app created?

It turns out that the cost of getting a fully functional restaurant ordering website, and an associated app easily costs around $10,000 to $35,000. Yes, it’s expensive, which is all the more reason to divert your startup funds to marketing and partnering up with a direct food ordering services vendor that’ll take care of everything on your behalf.

Why Do You Need to Partner With a Direct Food Order and Fleet Management Services Provider In the First Place?

A direct food services partner offers multiple solutions to your food startup conundrum – and that too, without raking up the price chart. Technically, these service providers are a low-cost platform where you can sign up for a restaurant vendor account within a few minutes.

In exchange for signing up, you get the following perks from the service provider:

• Low-cost fee model where a flat price has to be paid at month’s end.
• Your very own white-labeled restaurant order online mobile application and website
• The restaurant services provider markets your services at the front, center, and back end, instead of the other way around.
• You get access to insightful customer data analytics, reports, and a marketing panel to monitor everything in one place.
• Take control of your order delivery statuses, order volume, and rider performance statistics through a dedicated fleet management portal.

There are plenty of other features too, but it depends on the direct food order service provider that you sign up with.

Moving on, the next logical thing would be to illustrate an example of a low-cost vendor.

That’s where Blink Co. comes in. Here’s what they have to offer as a trusted vendor operating at competitive rates.

Preparing Your Business for Restaurant Online Order Software

The procedure of handling online orders can be intimidating if you’ve never done it before. We’re here to highlight the procedures you must follow in order to select the best food delivery service and position yourself for success with a new stream of reliable income with a restaurant online order software.

• Know the Top Third-Party Apps in Terms of Popularity

When selecting an online restaurant ordering system software or third-party software, you should consider factors other than just price. You must first determine which are more popular in your area.

Additionally, each region differs.

Grubhub, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Eat24, and Postmates were the top five third-party apps reviewed by Restaurant Business, which also examined their market shares in several of the largest U.S. cities.

Depending on the location of your restaurant and the most popular app(s), you might only need to concentrate on one to get the majority of customers and a large number of orders (like in New York, where Grubhub claims to have more than 85% of the market share). 

Finding the finest meal delivery software for your restaurant requires research, which is why it’s crucial. To find out how many users there are of each third-party app in your area, do some market research and investigation. Make the most of that information to decide how to best engage this audience.

• Get Your Team Ready for the New Workflow

In order to prepare your team for the flood of new consumers, as well as the onslaught of takeout and delivery orders, you’ll need to complete your research, add restaurant ordering system software to your website, or select one or more third-party apps.

Decide how you want your customers to flow through your restaurant, keeping in mind that there will be a significant increase in the volume of takeout orders. Improve customer service by having your front-of-house workers keep track of the flow of customers and their orders.

Designate a designated location for clients and food delivery drivers to wait so that your team can better control traffic flow. Waiting areas should be located distant from the restaurant’s primary flow of traffic in order to reduce congestion.

At least one person per shift should be dedicated to entering takeout orders from third-party apps into your point of sale system. This employee may be able to take on additional duties if you’ve chosen an online ordering interface that streamlines orders right into your POS.

Look for someone that is meticulous in their work. Because of the volume of orders, they have to keep a close eye on each one and make sure it’s entered accurately.

• Assign Additional Tasks

In addition to monitoring and manually entering orders, your takeaway specialist should be trained to communicate with delivery drivers and the kitchen about order times and 86’d goods.

When you run out of an item, your POS will immediately enter an 86 into your inventory tracking system. To ensure that clients can only place orders for items that are currently in stock, make sure that your team is aware of this information and that it is shared with any third-party apps.

Look for someone that is meticulous in their work. Because of the volume of orders, they have to keep a close eye on each one and make sure it’s entered accurately.

• Create A Process For “Declined Orders.”

For third-party apps that aren’t integrated with your POS, you’ll need a “declined order” process in place for your team to complete if an out-of-stock order comes in before they can 86 it.

They can easily “reject” the purchase on the third-party tablet so that the customer is not charged, but you’ll also want to send a message through the app with an explanation and some attempt to make up for the aggravation: a comparable item, a rain check, a special offer, etc.

Blink Co: The No. 1 Direct Online Ordering and Fleet Management Services Platform

For food business operators, one of the main reasons for signing up with Blink Co. for a vendor account is the company’s low fee structure. At the moment, Blink charges somewhere around 2% – 2.5% flat fee, regardless of whether you make 100 sales, or 1000 sales a month.

On the contrary, if you were to sign up with a 3rd party food services app, although they’ll handle logistics, deliveries, and marketing for you, such companies charge up to 40% fee in the form of per order commissions. As a result, if you are running a startup, it will become relatively difficult to generate profit – let alone breach your break-even quota within any fiscal year.

Moving on, here are some additional key features that Blink Co. offers:

• Get a white-labeled food ordering app designed and customized for your brand.
• Increase brand value by rendering online food ordering services through your own custom website, and mobile phone application.
• Hyperactive customer support.
• Blink Co. has a dedicated dashboard for menu creation, customer data analytics, and fleet management.
• Rider app with GPS monitoring to help you and your customers keep tabs on order delivery status.
• Extensive focus on quick commerce and social commerce business model.
• Unified ordering solutions through multiple nodes, such as your front end restaurant website, restaurant order online mobile app, and social media pages

Signing up with Blink is easy. Head over to the Blink for Restaurants page to book a demo.

[INSERT_ELEMENTOR id=”2061″]

3 Best Restaurant Order Online Software For You To Consider

If Blink Co. doesn’t sound like your cup of tea, we’ve got three more recommendations for you. Regardless of which software or company you choose to go for, bear in mind that it’s going to take a while before profits start streaming in. Keep at it, with a consistent and smart approach to see the desired effects in the long run.

1. OpenTable: Cloud-Based Restaurant Order Online Software Solution

OpenTable is a cloud-based restaurant management portal that guarantees 24/7 data security, services uptime, and much more.

The key takeaway with OpenTable lies in two main features – i.e.

• Connect Center

With Connect Center, the module will record all your reservations data and showcase it to your guests to give them accurate information on different data points. For instance, if guests are interested in ensuring seat availability before walking into your restaurant, OpenTable’s Connect module will churn out the information and push it to your guests either through email or through a targeted SMS.

The Connect Module is also great for capturing information regarding guests’ seating preferences, personal requests, and vice versa.

• Guest Center

If you are looking to replicate your existing restaurant floor plan on a mobile device, you can use the OpenTable Guest Center module. As a restaurant owner, you can also keep a close watch on table availability, average turnaround time, and service performance for each guest that your staff renders in real-time.

Overall, OpenTable is a good choice for medium to large-scale restaurants that want to integrate loyalty programs, gift campaigns, and incentives in their front-end restaurant order online software application.

2. Clover POS For Restaurants

Clover isn’t exactly a fully-fledged restaurant order online software, but rather it’s a sophisticated POS solution. The company provides a custom hardware design that’s tailored to your restaurant requirements.

In addition to offering countertop hardware POS solutions, Clover also integrates multiple payment options, contactless payments for contactless deliveries, mobile POS options, and much more. You can also check out the exclusive Clover Dining mode, as it is a POS system built specifically for restaurants. In a way, Clover has been known for replacing dated processes involving cash registers, paper trails, and label printers through online solutions that are maintained in the form of cloud-protected reports.

Lastly, as a reliable restaurant order online software, Clover integrates QuickBooks, with the addition of Time Clock for tracking check-in and check-out times for your active duty staff. If you are looking to upscale your restaurant business profile, Clover’s Go Card Reader, Mini POS Station, Flex Mobile Payment platform, and their dedicated app should be more than enough to getting started.

3. Gloriafood

Up next, we’ve got Gloriafood on our list of restaurant order online software. It’s a popular cloud-based online food ordering and delivery system that also handles POS operations for restaurants.

Price-wise, Gloriafood may not be the best solution for your restaurant. Especially, if you just founded your restaurant and have no clue on how online restaurant management software works, the $59 monthly fee at Gloriafood’s end will go to waste during the first few months.

The fact that the first 4 – 6 months during a food business startup’s lifetime do not get a high order volume and restaurant owners are engaged in learning the basic ins and outs of how the online food ordering system works, that $59 cost can be saved and redirected towards something else.

That being said, Gloriafood comes with enticing perks, such as a customized digital menu creator, social media integrations for your online restaurant social media pages, and an Android & iOS app to render services on the go.

If you’re still confused about selecting the right type of restaurant online order software, give us a holler. At Blink Co. we take pride in answering restaurant owners’ queries to help them understand the benefits of a low-cost platform that comes with a hyper-active focus on the latest quick commerce business solutions.

You can view our top products on our official website, or contact us for a quick demo through the ‘Blink for Restaurants’ webpage today.

[INSERT_ELEMENTOR id=”2061″]