Are you thinking of taking your restaurant online? Allowing online orders is a terrific way to boost sales and get your name out there in the community — after all, who doesn’t appreciate having a tasty meal delivered right to their door?
Customers nowadays expect their favorite restaurants to provide food delivery or click-and-collect services, and doing so will help you stay competitive.
However, before you can start delivering, you’ll need an online meal ordering system that’s straightforward for clients to use and for you to track. There are various things to think about.
To begin, you’ll need a website that can handle a variety of information, is fully mobile responsive, and makes it simple to order food with only a few clicks.
Fortunately, there are numerous tools available to assist you in setting up a good food website — and once you get past that step, you’ll have a great chance of picking up a lot of business. Here are some top tips for starting your own online food ordering site.
Should You Build Your Own Site Or Join A Food Delivery Provider?
You may be wondering why you shouldn’t just sign your restaurant up to Just Eat or another popular ordering site. Well, there are several reasons why you may be better off creating your own website.
It’ll give you much more control over configuration, prove more cost-effective through not requiring you to be signed up to limiting schemes, and provide you with a better chance of earning customer retention (after all, food marketplaces naturally encourage users to spread their custom around various eateries).
There are some pros to using existing food-delivery networks, of course, most notably including the following:
- Food delivery networks have their own teams of developers to cover all the technical elements, meaning you can focus on your core business (preparing food) and proceed with confidence that the core functions are going to be reliable.
- Popular delivery services have huge built-up customer bases and are great at advertising and engagement. If you’re trying to get noticed in a competitive marketplace, being listed through such a service can make a big difference.
Overall, though, it’s reasonable to say that these negatives outweigh the positives:
- You have less control over the customer experience while using a set food delivery provider, meaning that you can’t do much if there’s an issue with the platform. You also can’t do anything to stand out from the crowd.
- You have to pay a fee for every order you receive via the website. In the long run, this could have a big impact on your total earnings, making it extremely difficult for your operation to stay profitable. What’s more, those fees could always go up.
- Food delivery networks aren’t invested in individual eateries, caring only about getting their cuts. If you get one or two bad reviews, they won’t do anything to help you gain ground, leaving your potential customers to go elsewhere.
3 Tips For Building Your Food Ordering Website
Building a food ordering website may seem like a daunting task, but with good planning it doesn’t need to be. To make your job a little easier, here are three top tips that will make your website professional, efficient and simple to manage.
Use A Restaurant Toolkit For A Fast Launch
As a business owner, you’ll want to get your website up and running quickly without compromising the quality of its usability. However, with many different elements to think about, it’s easy to overlook important features that could halt the launch of your website. You need a way to cover the bases without requiring too much of your time or energy.
This is why using a restaurant toolkit is a great solution. Cloudways, for example, offers a great startup kit that’s free of charge for customers already hosting with them.
Developed for quickly launching food-ordering websites, it makes it trivial to deploy a restaurant-ready WordPress theme, create a menu, plan your order process, set up payment methods, and arrange delivery, all without requiring any technical expertise.
Create A One-step Checkout Page
Customers who are hungry don’t have time to read several pages before their orders are confirmed! A single check out page is perfect for processing orders rapidly because the customer can quickly and easily provide all the required information, swiftly getting through the delivery address, special notes, discount coupons, and payment method.
If you can make the process this fast, shoppers will be less likely to become frustrated and head to better-running competitor sites. When things can be added to cart and paid for quickly, you’re more likely to get orders – just make sure you deliver on time!
Add High-quality And Authentic Images
People appreciate seeing photographs of each item when ordering food, especially if they have never eaten from you before. According to a survey, adding digital menus can raise a restaurant’s sales by 25% to 30%, while a digital menu with stunning visuals can increase sales by up to 65%.
Including high-quality photographs on your website will inspire clients, and genuine portrayals of your food will increase credibility.
When a customer orders food and it arrives looking radically different than they imagined, it can give the wrong impression about your company.
Ensure that you have clear photographs that accurately reflect the quality of your food. To help with this, you can read up on how to photograph food, or allocate a budget to hire a professional photographer with the skills to make your dishes look as delicious as they sound.
Customers are always looking for easy options, so taking your restaurant or takeaway online could be a great idea. Follow our top tips and you’ll soon have a food ordering website that’s easy to use and a valuable asset in growing your business.
