Online Ordering for a Takeout Restaurant

Six o'clock and the phone

At a takeout restaurant, the phone rings hardest at exactly the hour the kitchen is busiest. Whoever answers it is also packing bags, taking payment and calling out names.

Callers hear a busy signal, or ring through to nobody. Those who get through are put on hold, then asked to repeat the order over the noise of the fryer.

Mistakes follow. A dish number is misheard, a spice level is forgotten, a name is written down wrong, and food sits waiting for someone who expected it later.

Ordering on the restaurant's own website moves much of that work to the customer, at a time that suits them, with the menu in front of them.

What goes wrong on the phone

• Busy signals at the hour most people want to order.
• Misheard dishes, especially numbers that sound alike.
• Options forgotten, such as spice level, sauce or no peanuts.
• Read-backs that tie up the person and the line.
• Calls missed while the counter is busy.
• Pickup times guessed rather than checked with the kitchen.

The second causes the most waste. Fifteen and fifty sound alike on a bad line, and a wrong dish is cooked and packed before anyone notices.

The menu in front of them

On a website, the customer reads the whole menu at their own pace, with descriptions and prices. Nobody waits on hold while they decide.

Options become choices on the screen: mild, medium or hot, rice or noodles, no nuts. The order arrives in writing, exactly as the customer chose it.

And people can order early. A dinner order placed at three for pickup at six spreads the work across the afternoon instead of piling it into one hour.

One menu, kept in step

An online menu is only useful if it matches the kitchen. A price that differs from the printed menu, or a dish dropped months ago, becomes an argument at the counter.

Keep one master copy of the menu and prices, and change the website, the ordering system and the printed menus from it on the same day.

Sold-out items need a switch staff can flip from the counter in seconds during service. Otherwise customers keep ordering the special that ran out at half past five.

Pickup times the kitchen can meet

The ordering system should offer only times the kitchen can actually meet: a minimum preparation time, longer at the dinner rush, and a limit on how many orders can be due in each quarter hour.

Set those limits with the cook. Once a slot holds as many orders as the line can finish in fifteen minutes, the system should stop offering it.

Add a way to pause online orders when the kitchen falls behind, and stop taking them a set time before closing. Enter holiday closures and short days too, so nobody orders for an evening when the restaurant is shut.

A worked example

A family-run Szechuan takeout in a strip mall has more than eighty numbered dishes and four small tables, and does most of its business between five and seven in the evening.

One family member answered the phone and packed orders at the same time. Dish numbers were misheard, spice levels went unrecorded, and on Friday evenings the line was often busy for minutes at a stretch.

The restaurant added ordering to its own website: the full menu with descriptions, spice level as a choice on every dish, and pickup times limited to what its two cooks could handle in each quarter hour.

Each order sends the customer an email with the dishes, the total and the pickup time, and sounds an alert on a tablet at the counter, where sold-out dishes are switched off too.

The phone still rings, and regulars still call. But online orders arrive written down, in the customer's own choices, with no dish number misheard over the fan.

Confirm every order by email

The confirmation email is the customer's receipt and the restaurant's protection. It should list every item and option, the total, the pickup time, the address and the phone number.

Send it the moment the order is placed. A customer who sees nothing after pressing the button will often phone to check, or order a second time.

Check where the restaurant's copy goes. If orders arrive by email, make sure they are not landing in spam, and show them on a screen or printer as well, so nobody is refreshing an inbox during service.

If an order cannot be made, phone the customer at once rather than letting them arrive to find it missing.

Taking payment, or not

Payment online protects against orders that are never collected. Payment at pickup is simpler and suits regulars, and many restaurants offer both, asking for payment online on large orders.

Where cards are taken online, use the payment provider's own secure page, so card numbers never pass through the restaurant's website. That keeps the card industry's security standard, PCI DSS, far simpler to meet.

Built for phones

Many takeout orders are placed on phones, from a car or an office. A menu shown as a PDF, or a photograph of the board, cannot be ordered from and is hard to read.

The menu should be text, with large buttons, a running total and a basket that keeps its contents if a call interrupts the order. Ask only for a name, a phone number and an email address for the confirmation.

The counter-case

A takeout with a short menu and a steady trade of regulars who phone has fewer problems to solve. Its first step can be smaller: the menu as text on its website, then pickup ordering on its busiest evenings.

Restaurants already listed on outside ordering services sometimes wonder whether their own site is worth the effort. Orders through your own website keep the customer's details, and the relationship, with the restaurant.

Either way, the essentials hold: one accurate menu, pickup times the kitchen can meet, and a confirmation for every order.

Before switching it on

1. Make one master menu with current prices.
2. Set preparation times with the cook.
3. Limit orders in each quarter hour.
4. Add a sold-out switch at the counter.
5. Send a confirmation email for every order.
6. Test that orders arrive where staff will see them.
7. Place three test orders from a phone.

Step three protects the kitchen. Without a limit, a busy Friday fills every slot at six, and online orders become late orders at a counter already full of them.

Orders that keep coming when nobody can fill them are covered in orders that arrive while the owner is away.

Frequently asked questions

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