Restaurant Sites With Their Own Ordering — Not a Marketplace's
For a small restaurant the difference between owning the ordering flow and renting it from a marketplace is the difference between a profitable order and a break-even one. On thin restaurant margins, a thirty per cent commission is frequently the entire profit.
The site does not need to compete with the marketplace on reach. It only needs to capture the customers who already know the restaurant — and those are the majority of repeat orders. What it does need is a booking or ordering route that is never more than one tap from any page, because restaurant sites fail on navigation far more often than on aesthetics.
Who this work suits
- A restaurant handing a third of every delivery order to a marketplace
- A venue whose regulars already know them and would order direct if it were easy
- A kitchen that needs incoming orders in a usable form, not a phone call mid-service
- A restaurant in a distinctive building whose character is not showing on the site
- Any food business whose customers are almost entirely on phones
People arrive here searching for
Questions people ask before hiring
Will my own site really replace the delivery apps?
It should not try to. The apps are a discovery channel and they are good at it. Your own ordering exists to serve the customers who already know you and would happily order direct — those are the majority of repeat orders, and they are the ones where the commission hurts most.
How do orders reach the kitchen?
Through an order management view built for the pace of service, not an email. Orders arrive with state — received, preparing, ready, out — so nobody has to remember what was said on a phone call three minutes ago.
How many taps should booking take?
One, from anywhere on the site. If a customer has to navigate to find the reservation or the menu, the design has already lost. This is the single most common failure in restaurant sites and it is entirely avoidable.
Rasa Lichfield — Halal Pan-Asian Restaurant
UK halal Pan-Asian restaurant inside the historic Corn Exchange, blending modern Asian cooking with reservations and online ordering.
Have a project or app in mind?
I take 2–3 new clients per quarter. If you have a serious project, let us talk.