How to start selling on online ordering platforms with my restaurant?

More and more restaurant businesses are realizing the great value it can contribute to start selling their food online. With the right strategy and good implementation, the online approach can become an ideal sales channel to increase sales, find new customers and promote customer loyalty.

But, first of all, you need to know what you have to prepare in your restaurant and what the differences are among the different chains of home delivery, so that starting to sell online becomes a reality and one more success of your restaurant.

The first operational decisions

This is the most critical point of all: how to organize home deliveries in your restaurant. Before starting, you have to take into account the main changes you will need to make and the problems that can arise for caterers who start working with home deliveries:

• Manual entry of orders at the POS: during peak service hours, most online and customer orders are concentrated in your restaurant. The manager or an employee must stay on top of entering the orders coming in via 4 different tablets.

This means not only a waste of manager time and reduced customer service capacity in the restaurant, but also a problem for the online end user, since manual entry means that approximately 15% of orders contain errors. in the information that reaches the kitchen. Hence the importance of being integrated with your POS, so that you receive each order automatically on your POS.

• Maintain attention on 5 screens: if the restaurant is registered on 4 platforms, it will have to be keep up with 4 different tablets in addition to the POS or management system you use. A job that is usually done by a single person, which represents a significant cost and loss of overall productivity in your business.

• Menu management: without proper integration, several different menus must be managed, each of them from your tablet, with the consequent complication if you want to change prices, products or if you want to update the restaurant’s range of services. With integration systems like Bistrohub you can centralise your menus and update them from a single environment, as well as create different menus for different times of the day.

Inventory management

As soon as you launch your new home deliveries channel, it is to be expected that there will be a considerable increase in the number of orders.

In this regard, it is important to be ready for an increase in demand and prepare your inventory management. With a home delivery management system integrated with your POS you will have access to inventory updates in real time.

Specific spaces to prepare online orders

Any restaurant that starts selling online has to make sure, within its possibilities, that it sets up a space for the order bags that may accumulate and where it can pack without hindering the normal activity of the business. Also, you need to think about a suitable waiting place for riders, especially in winter.

What platforms do I start with?

Today, there are many platforms through which it is possible to offer your food delivery service. UberEats, Glovo, Deliveroo, Just Eat … being on all of them is possible and recommended. But, do you know their main differences?

• Average Commissions: They range from 30% for Uber Eats to 35% for Deliveroo, for example.

• Activation cost: in some cases, this cost is zero, as in the case of Just Eat, and in others, registering costs between 50-320£, depending on the platform.

• Market share: The differences are significant, from Uber Eats’ 20% market share to Just Eat’s 40%.

• Profile of the associated restaurants: it is important that you decide which food delivery profile you want to identify with and who you want to contact. For example, Just Eat is more associated with user profiles that prefer fast food.

In any case, what must always be kept in mind is that participating in any of these platforms, on average, increases restaurant sales by 35-50%. A growth that can be undermined if it is not minimally planned and solutions are found for some of the problems we have mentioned.

By integrating the orders from all the delivery platforms and your letters in one place, integrating with your POS and your printer, Bistrohub enables you to save time and resources, avoid mistakes and offer a better delivery service to your customers both on-site and online.