Take-Out and Delivery Food Ordering Is Moving Online…Is Your Restaurant Prepared?

While e-commerce has been around for over a decade, closing the gap between food and the Internet has taken much longer. The first restaurants to adopt online ordering services were big corporations, such as Pizza Hut, Domino’s, and Papa John’s. But recent technological advances have made it possible for any restaurant or catering business to offer its own online ordering system.

Much like a customer placing an order in-person or over the telephone, customers ordering online can browse your restaurant’s menu, choose from the available items, tailor the dishes to their liking, and provide the necessary delivery or take-out information. And much like any online retailer, an online food ordering service allows customers to pay via credit card or PayPal and store their personal information to make frequent ordering that much easier.

According to a July 2012 study by HighTable.com, 40% of adults have placed orders online and 10% of all restaurant orders are now made online. Online ordering is most popular among fast casual and casual establishments, but restaurants of all types are benefiting from the move online. Among those restaurants that have added online ordering, 43% have reported an increase in take-out orders and 29% have reported a rise in deliveries.

But none of this should come as a surprise. According to the Pew Research Center, 85% of US adults use the Internet and 45% own a smartphone, and these numbers are increasing every day. If restaurant ordering moves to the Internet, much like newspaper reading and ticket ordering has, will your restaurant be ready? Online ordering benefits restaurants in the following ways:

Boost take-out and delivery orders
Improve order-taking speed and accuracy, especially when dealing with customers whose first language is not English
Increase search engine hits by including menu text in website’s page ranking (PDF menus’ contents do not factor into Google search results)

Webika Design has developed, WPMenuMaker, an interactive online ordering solution for restaurants and catering businesses. In addition to all of the above benefits, WPMenuMaker: