Ordering systems compared: what a good one actually does

What happens after your guest taps order

Most comparisons start with the feature list. The first question is simpler: where does the order get completed? On your address, or on somebody else’s?

It sounds like a detail for whoever builds your site. It is the difference between a guest who is yours and a guest who belongs to the platform. If they check out with you, you have their name and their order history, and no commission comes off. If they check out in an app, you get a payout and nothing else.

It carries into what happens the time after that. Someone who ordered through the app once will open that app again, not your site. There your pizza sits between three other people’s, with a discount code next to it.

It also carries into what Google sees of your site. If your order button points at another domain, the most important part of the visit happens over there. The page people come back to and link to is then not yours.

Plenty of percentages circulate on this subject. Almost all of them come from US research, often from companies that sell ordering systems themselves. Work from your own statement rather than somebody else’s chart.

If you want to know where you stand, order something from yourself on your phone and look at the address bar at the moment you pay. The answer is right there.

The five kinds of system, side by side

In the Netherlands there are roughly five ways to take orders online. They differ less in features than the sales pitches suggest. What they really differ in is who keeps the guest and where the costs land.

Read that table left to right rather than top to bottom. No row wins everywhere. There is a row that suits the number of online orders you already have, and that is the row you want.

The delivery platform, with or without its own ordering page

Thuisbezorgd, Uber Eats and Deliveroo are where a lot of places start, and not without reason. The apps are already on your guest’s phone, the marketplace shows you to people who have never heard your name, and you have nothing to build or maintain.

Against that sits a commission on every order, plus the promotions you help pay for when you want to sit higher up the list. What you actually hand over is in your contract and on your statement, not in what someone online calls the average.

The platform’s own ordering page

The platforms now also offer a version where the order comes in through your own address and they only do the ride. On paper that is commission free.

In practice the money simply moves. A flat monthly fee appears, or a charge per order, or service fees your guest pays that make the same order cost more than it would at your counter. And the marketing the app used to do for you, you now do yourself.

When this is the right call

• You are just starting and have no audience of your own.
• You want to deliver without rostering couriers yourself.
• You use it as a shop window and move regulars to your own site afterwards.

So do not switch the platform off because somebody told you it is expensive. Put your own channel next to it, and look three months later at which way the orders are moving.

The ordering module that comes with your till

Almost every POS supplier now sells online ordering alongside the till. For a place where the dining room does most of the work and takeaway comes on top, that is often the quietest choice available.

One menu, one supplier, and the order rolls off the printer without anyone retyping it. That last part is worth more than it sounds. Retyping is where the mistakes happen on a Friday night, and a wrong order costs you twice: the food and the guest.

The drawback is that online ordering is rarely a POS supplier’s main product. The ordering page looks like every other customer’s, marketing is thin or absent, and the module often sits on a plan one step up from the one you are on. On top of that, your whole ordering flow now hangs off the same contract as your till.

So ask whether the module keeps working if you ever change POS. The answer is usually no, and that is useful to know before you switch it on rather than after.

A website builder with an ordering plugin

You can put a restaurant site together in an afternoon and hang an ordering plugin on it. It is the cheapest way to start and you stay in control of how everything looks.

It pinches at the point where a restaurant menu is not a webshop. Variants, extras, allergens, delivery zones, time slots, a kitchen that takes its last order at half ten: those are not product fields, they are logic. In a general builder you wire that logic together yourself, usually on an evening when you had something else on.

And you stack subscriptions: the builder, the plugin, the payment provider, the domain and the hours of whoever maintains it. Add that up before you compare it with a package that already contains the lot, otherwise you are comparing a part with a whole.

There is one more reason that only counts when things go wrong. If the order button breaks on a Saturday night, nobody is responsible except you, and the plugin and the builder will point at each other.

The free or nearly free ordering page

Some providers offer online ordering for free. No subscription, no commission on your turnover, and you could start this afternoon.

Free here means somebody else pays. Usually that is your guest, through a service fee on every order, and on top of that you still pay the cost of the payment itself. A guest who spends more online than at your counter remembers it.

The design is almost always plain and the menu is a list. For a chip shop with a fixed menu that is no problem. For a place that trades on atmosphere or on photographs, it is.

As a stage it is fine. You get to see what online ordering does to your business without signing anything. The catch is that a place where it works grows out of it, and then you move your menu, your domain and your guests anyway.

A system built to grow direct orders

The last category does one thing only: get more people ordering from you directly. The site, the menu, the checkout, the repeat order and the messages to your guests sit in one system, because they act on each other.

What you get from it is concrete. The menu puts the best sellers at the top. The checkout asks whether a sauce or a drink should come along. Someone who ordered three times and then nothing for six weeks gets a message. These are not features to boast about, they are the places where orders otherwise get left behind.

On top of that, menu, variants and extras live in one place, so a price change is right everywhere at once, and the customer details are yours to export.

Be honest about the floor. This category is not meant to win you your very first online order. It is meant to turn ten orders a week into forty. If you have almost no online orders yet, you will not earn the subscription back, and starting small is the better move.

Portano sits in this category: your own ordering site on your own domain, with your guests’ details in your system and no commission on every order.

What an order actually costs you

Every supplier will walk you through an example in which they come out ahead. Do it once with your own numbers from last month and you never have to believe a chart again.

1. Count last month’s online orders and the turnover with them.
2. Divide it by the number of orders: that is your average order value.
3. Work out per system what that month would have cost: subscription, commission, transaction charges.
4. Ask whether commission is taken including or excluding VAT. At 9 per cent on food and 21 per cent on most drinks, that gap matters.
5. Add the service fees your guest pays: they hold your order count down.

Payment costs belong in there too. iDEAL costs a fixed amount per transaction, while cards and phone wallets usually charge a percentage. On a ten euro order a fixed amount bites hard, at sixty euros the percentage does.

Two rules of thumb help here. On low volume a percentage is nearly always cheaper, because you only pay when something comes in. On high volume a flat fee is nearly always cheaper, because a percentage grows with your turnover and a subscription does not.

So find the point where the two cross and see how far you sit from it. Well past it, you are paying every month towards recognition you already have.

Which system fits your place

There is no winner, there is an order of play. It depends on how many online orders you have today and on what your business mainly does.

• No online orders yet: start on a platform, keep fixed costs low.
• Dining room at the core, takeaway on top: the module from your POS.
• Low volume, your own look: a builder with a plugin, hours counted.
• Orders with commission on them: a direct system pays for itself fastest.
• Several sites or your own delivery: the integrations first, the price second.

Book two or three demos this week and ask all of them the same five questions. Anyone who cannot answer one of them straight is out. In practice exactly one usually survives, and the choice is made before the price ever comes up.