It’s one of the biggest questions any resto-preneur has: why do I need custom software when services such as GrubHub, Deliveroo, GrabFood, and others exist? Custom software is quite an investment while using third-party online ordering software is free.
Here’s the thing: you’re paying forever for the third-party software. While it introduces great profits during the first few years, you fail to gain a key factor that helps successful restaurants grow and prosper. Data and customer insight goes a long way with restaurants, and third-party apps won’t give you any ideas about the average distance of ordering customers, their demographics, and others.
An online ordering software is more than just a website and an app. They’re your biggest secondary revenue stream — the first being your restaurant and dishes you serve to customers. How will they bring money? Here are nine ways it can double or even triple your profits in just 10 days or less.
Raises Brand Awareness
In one of our previous articles, we’ve talked about how restaurants have their own personalities, which become a huge part of their brand. Your online ordering software is a reflection of your brand. For example, customers feel the way your waiters pamper them before the orders arrive and suggest dishes to go along with their primary choices by making an intuitive menu with auto-suggested additional dishes or add-on food based on popular choices.
Additionally, a website and app’s aesthetics will use the same mood and emotion customers will find at your actual venue, the restaurant menu, and every element your brand possesses. Because it’s accessible 24/7, your website and app become your virtual restaurant — the only exception that customers can log into them at any time because websites have no closing hours.
A Convenient Way to Order Food
Your online ordering software is accessible 24/7, and you can always choose to shut down delivery operations when your restaurant is closed or no deliverymen are available. However, having your own dedicated ordering system is enticing to customers because they won’t need to pay additional delivery fees to third-party ordering platforms.
UberEats, GrabFood, Deliveroo, and others charge customers delivery fees by the distance. Therefore, if your shop is kilometres away, customers will think twice before using a third-party online delivery app. However, if you have fixed rates or even order free for huge bulk delivery orders, then it’s a more attractive deal.
Third-party online ordering software has made it convenient to order food. However, restaurants with their own platform do not only make it convenient for customers but it reduces their expenses too.
An Excellent Way To Promote Dishes and Introduce New Ones
You’ve seen applications do it: they suddenly pop an attractive offer a few seconds after you log in to your account. Online ordering software requires your customers to make their accounts. Then, you can automate promotions of your best-sellers as the majority of your audiences prefer.
In addition, this makes it easy to suggest new dishes you’ve just come up. For example, you can have a select number of high-volume ordering customers to receive a free trial of your new dishes. Then, you can ask them for feedback about the free food you’ve delivered. In turn, you can quickly promote new dishes and continue making your best-selling dishes famous and profitable.
A Channel For General Audience Communication
Online ordering software uses a website customers can log into and create their orders. In addition to this dedicated page, you can introduce a blog and news section where you can talk about your brand’s latest achievements, direction, plans, and others.
Truth be told, customers are curious about the direction your brand is headed especially if they find your food awesome. You can add publications about how your dishes were featured in a particular news article, TV segment, or anything else under the sun. The more customers recognise you for your achievements and efforts, the more likely they perceive your brand as trustworthy of delivering an exciting gastronomic adventure.
Gather Data On All Brand Activities Online
If you can ask any restaurant who has extensively used third-party online ordering software, you might be surprised to find out that they have zero ideas about customer insight. While they may know the local palate based on the orders they receive for each dish, they have zero ideas about the distances of people who most frequently order from their respective establishments.
For example, a burger restaurant receives a visit from a third-party online ordering software driver. Only the driver knows the delivery’s destination. They cannot divulge this information to establishments.
With your own custom-made online ordering software, you can gather customer behavioural information on the destinations, order preferences, average spending, viewed items prior to finalising their respective orders, and the items they’ve left in the cart before they changed their mind about ordering.
Each one of these is excellent information that helps you grow your business’ attractiveness, establish your best-selling dishes, tweak brand personality to the audience’s language and persona, and more. True enough, if you work with established and capable F&B marketers and online ordering software developers, you can have them provide reports — or even create automated reporting and interpretation features. In addition to website customer behaviour data, they can integrate data from the following too.
Social Media Integration
Almost every restaurant’s story starts like this: They’ve been running a restaurant or cooking delicious food for years. They create a social media account to represent their business. Soon, many people are reviewing their food and reacting to the photos of their dishes. They’ve gained great fame online.
However, viral food photos from your restaurant won’t always translate into profits. It will certainly gain fame and create a brand presence, but it does not establish brand authority and dependability. Having your own online ordering platform allows you to integrate social media. How does this work?
Once your app or website emails the customer about their completed orders, you can encourage them to share a food review on their social networks. To entice them further, you can include discounts, promotions, or even free gifts in the process.
Your custom online ordering software can track the traffic whether it came from your email or app. Next, it can communicate with your social network to record the number of reactions and comments the review has. In turn, you can use this information to encourage other social networks to order your food and make their respective reviews about it too.
Email Marketing
This particular communication channel isn’t exactly known to restaurant owners who started on social media. Emails are still powerful today thanks to the prominence of smartphones and push notifications. You might wonder: what do I send on email?
Online ordering software allows you to create your own custom promotions. It can generate discount codes, which it applies automatically to food your customers order. This is enough content to encourage your online ordering software contact list to consider opening your email and using your promotions.
Additionally, you can send information about the latest achievements and recognitions your brand received. If you think it’s not interesting for customers, they’re actually curious about your brand’s work as we’ve mentioned earlier.
Improve Customer Insight
With third-party online ordering software, customers had to pay depending on their distance from the establishment and only take advantage of its promotions and discounts. However, custom online ordering software improves audience insight not just about the performance promotions, but about spending habits as a whole.
In fact, you can categorise your frequently-ordering customers by their spending habits, the food they prefer, dishes they positively or negatively reviewed, and deliver appropriate items and dishes that they’ll most likely want to eat. In addition, you can launch customer list-specific promotions and campaigns to encourage advocates and first-time customers to buy your dishes.
Indeed, collecting customer data is legal. Just make sure that during account registration, you present a terms and conditions agreement wherein the customer must acknowledge they’ve read their rights and the brand’s rights to collect information. While owners may not have to know about third-party online ordering software terms and conditions, they don’t get any customer insight from them too.
Easy A/B or Multi-Case Testing
Making your online ordering software much more profitable depends on three factors: design, ease of use, and contribution to overall customer success. Therefore, a reliable F&B marketing developer can create multiple website and application designs. In addition, designers and developers will detail the customer’s journey and possible insight into their state of mind or feelings throughout each stage.
However, actual user data will always outweigh any speculations regarding their state of mind and emotion. An online ordering platform website or app makes it easy to test multiple designs for either a controlled testing group or actual users for real-time data. In both situations, insightful data can improve the app and the website’s functionality to create convenient and helpful experiences for users.
Perhaps the only difficulty that A/B and multi-case testing presents is time to test your designs. While it is convenient to create a test website and app designs regularly, you will spend time collecting and analysing information to see if it meets your objectives. However, by working with reliable F&B developers with experience, you can outsource this process and gain insight through their fully-accurate reports and insights.
No Third-Party Profiteering
Online ordering software that F&B software developers and marketers make for you do not depend on technologies that third-party online software such as GrubHub, GrabFood, and others create. In this way, you won’t encounter any form of third-party profiteering. All the designs, principles, usability, dishes, and profits your online deliveries make go straight to you. You won’t need to suffer the average 30-40% profit cut that restaurants suffer having to work with third-party online ordering software providers and the possible poor delivery service of their remote employees.
With your own online ordering software, you have full access to your audience’s information. You know the locations of frequently-ordering customers, the dishes they prefer, and how much they spend ordering your dishes on a regular basis. Thanks to custom reporting software, you have great insight that can help you improve your business conveniently.
Scalable and Reliable
Most restaurants dependent on third-party online ordering software only see user experience upgrades once the ordering app developer updates their system. Therefore, if customers are displeased with the overall experience using the platform, restaurants can do nothing much to alleviate it. However, with your own online ordering software, you can immediately implement changes.
In addition to improving your systems, tailor-made online ordering software is easily scalable. When your business gains more customers thanks to your delicious dishes and marketing efforts, developers can quickly implement new payment methods and advanced delivery queueing to improve your website and app’s capability to accommodate a higher quantity of orders.
You Can Never Go Wrong With Software Tailor-Made to Give You An Edge
Online ordering software always generates profits because it is convenient, demonstrates your brand’s reliability exceptionally, is easily upgradeable, and gives you valuable information about your customers’ preferences, locations, and other data helpful in growing your audience and patrons.
If you’re interested in owning your own online ordering software, you can depend on NinjaOS to develop and maintain your own custom online platform. We can create all types of exceptional features you’ll never see in third-party platforms and ready-made software products. Learn more by dropping us a line at sales@ninjaos.com.
