With the whole world forced to look for alternatives and upgrades in these uncertain times, restaurants have been hit the hardest. Without the fine dining and ambiance up their sleeves, they are left a little helpless. All of them are trying to make up by adding online ordering systems to their arsenals.
These restaurant online ordering systems are not just a fancy addition at this time, rather they are a dire need of time. With the options of dining and takeaways being reduced to bare minimums, online order placement and delivery options are the most viable options available.
If you think you can survive these tough times without taking extreme measures, it’s not happening. Even with the best taste in your cuisine, you need to upscale your business to stay in the race.
For the digitally advanced age, this is the first time a pandemic has brought a business recession. The whole plot of a pandemic stricken time is different compared to a normal recession phase.
In our case, restaurant businesses, the whole construct of business needs to shift to an online approach from the convention. This shift of approach is pivotal during a pandemic stricken time.
You need to keep up the brand reputation as well as your business performance, and that is only happening if you are adjusting well with the digitally enabled world of today.
Running your restaurant business in this pandemic
Let’s start with the first step: You need to be digitally approachable and accessible to all of your potential clientele during all of your operative hours without a halt.
That can be done by creating a website for your restaurant and adding the options for online ordering for restaurants on the website. Once you have a website that works, you have something to work on.
The next part involves the whole website management and maintenance concept. You need to make sure your website accepts transactions and works well as an eCommerce site. You should go for a restaurant theme WordPress website if you take our suggestion.
Once you have figured out these things, you can focus on marketing your business to potential customers. You can use marketing tools and plugins on your WordPress site to help you with this.
With these figured out, you can move on to the part where you can choose the right restaurant ordering system to get that online ordering for WordPress working for your business as well.
Great online delivery systems to choose from
There are a few things you have to keep in mind when you are looking for a restaurant ordering system. You need to make sure you have payment options with it and a few other things that the customers would want.
Online ordering for restaurants means the whole construct of food quality gets an additional critical point relative to order placement, process, and delivery too.
We think we might be able to help you with 4 great online delivery systems that we have found to be perfect if you are looking forward to a successful online endeavor.
MenuDrive
When you may undergo all of the onboarding in less than an hour, you already know that the tool goes to be simple, efficient, and beneficial for your business with the least time invested.
MenuDrive offers you a simple and economic delivery management system for your restaurant website. It has the simplest and most user-friendly control panel for your ease.
You can set your open hours, delivery locations, order types, minimum values, etc. within the control panel in a few easy steps. Its exquisite menu builder helps you immensely.
You can create upsells to increase the order size and add the maximum or minimum quantities per order for an item on your menu with the menu builder that comes with MenuDrive.
With MenuDrive, you can allow group orders, a choice between delivery, pickup, or curbside, customer segmentation, loyalty programs, and an automated email marketing option too.
You get the best functionalities with MenuDrive, but the only thing that you might not love about it is the slightly higher credit card transaction fee. Compared to the standards, it is set at 4.5 percent for MenuDrive.
Overall, MenuDrive is one tool that you cannot afford to miss out on if you are running a restaurant and you want to upscale everything with exquisite digital options and outreaches.
UpMenu
With over 2 million orders processed, UpMenu is richly rooted in the restaurant industry over the globe. It is one of the finest ordering systems that you can use on your website.
UpMenu comes with one thing that you would rarely find with any other online ordering system and that is the website theme for your restaurant. UpMenu comes with a website template that you can use to create your restaurant website in cohesion with the niche.
In addition to that, you get to have customer reviews and ratings from successful orders. These reviews will be visible to everyone, hence giving you the reputation as well.
With UpMenu, you get to have delivery options, loyalty program and reward system, table reservation option, branded mobile applications, and numerous third-party integrations.
With the restaurant marketing tools that come with it, you can create upsells and cross-sells for menu items, add discount coupons, and run email campaigns for your business.
With regards to pricing, you would surely want more than 90 orders a month included in the basic plan, and the premium plan costs $169 a month. Pricy but still, an exceptional online ordering system.
Restolabs
Like every other ordering system, you get to have the menu building, the upsells and cross-sells, the emails, loyalty programs, payment integrations, and design options with Restolabs as well.
What does RestoLabs offer that makes it unique? To be accurate, there is more than one reason we are going to mention that makes this tool unique and a great choice.
RestoLabs makes sure your menu and online ordering system is seamless across devices and platforms by providing an exceptional interface across devices, especially mobile devices.
It provides you with a POS integration that connects your offline and online sales on the front end as well as the backend allowing you to process orders, discounts, and vouchers without a hitch.
You also get to have Facebook ordering with Restolabs as it integrates your Facebook page to the ordering system and a payment gateway. Your customers can directly order food from your page without having to come to your website at all.
With its real-time analytics and multilingual support, you are going to love Restolabs as the choice for your online ordering system. The basic plan costs $49 and the premium is just $85. Isn’t that smooth?
GloriaFood
If you are looking for something that can cover your online order deliverability for the least in costs, you should go for GloriaFoods
as it is the only free tool on this list.
It allows you to create menus, upsells, cross-sells, and delivery timings and options on your website with the greatest of ease. You can get customer reviews or create loyalty programs for your customers.
It also allows you to take orders from Facebook directly. The Gloria Facebook integration allows you to take orders from your customers directly from your Facebook page.
The downside to all these great features is the fact that you cannot process online payments in the free plan. For a payment of $29 per month, you can do that as well.
All in all, still the best solution for your online ordering worries. It comes with a plugin that you can add to your website and create menus with drag and drop options. Perfect. Isn’t it?
Conclusion
If you have an online ordering system on your website, you are more likely to stay in business in these desperate times and you can continue to serve food to people when they can’t reach you.
Just make sure you choose the right tool for your restaurant orders and keep the standard of food and delivery up to the mark and according to the standard health and safety requirements. Good luck then!