Should You Rely on Ordering via an Online Food Portal?
Online food portals have been so popular in the past couple of years. They allow restaurants to enjoy all benefits food ordering offers, but without any hassle. There is no need to create a custom ordering app. Simply integrate POS and educate staff because an online food portal is doing it for you.
But is it really like that? Can online food portals offer just benefits without any disadvantages?
What about the price?
Online food portals usually advertise as something that can bring a lot of profit and with minimum costs. However, the truth is quite different. First of all, fees that have to be paid upfront aren’t modest at all. Second, these portals can take up to a staggering 30% of the total food price. This essentially means that you are losing money. Obviously, you cannot increase the prices of your food because you will lose customers. This means that you are facing money losses over these fees. Third, these portals are almost marketing portals and each restaurant has to pay to be promoted. If you don’t pay extra for your restaurant to be one of the top results, customers won’t be able to find you without scrolling too long.
When you think about it, you will have to start paying quite a lot from the start. In addition, you will also lose a lot of money just because these food portals take their share. The commission is charged whenever someone orders food from your restaurant. That’s why it is a lot better to invest in creating a custom ordering app that will allow your customers to order directly from you.
What about the competition?
There is quite a lot of restaurants that use online food portals. This means that the competition is quite fierce and that customers have a wide range of restaurants to choose from. They are able to compare prices, decide on the type of cuisine they want and they can even completely change their mind and forget about your restaurant once they see a huge amount of other restaurants that offer interesting food.
In addition to this, if you don’t have an ordering app and you use online food portals, you risk losing even those customers that are determined to order food from your restaurant. How is that possible you may wonder? Well, when your customers browse through your website and decide on what they would like to eat, once they click on Order, the system automatically transfers them to the online food portal you use. And once they are there, you can easily lose them because they will be able to compare prices with other restaurants that serve similar food and check out other promoted restaurants. All of this happens because your restaurant stops having control over what your customers see and what they browse on other sites.
What about the customers?
Although online food portals do their best to convince customers and restaurant owners that people love when they see all the restaurants in one place or that they love when they can use only one app/website to do all their food ordering, the truth is quite different. Over the last couple of years, many pieces of research proved that 70% of customers would rather order directly from a restaurant so that the money goes straight to the restaurant instead of a third-party app. In addition to this, over 50% of customers prefer using a restaurant’s own app or a website – clear evidence that it is worth investing in a custom online ordering app that will wow your customers.
Besides these financial gains, there is another aspect to consider when thinking about customers. When you use an online food portal, you cannot build any sort of relationship with your customers. You are not the one taking orders and you don’t communicate with them at all. This means that you are not able to create special discounts for your loyal customers or offer them special deals. Customer relationships and how you communicate with them is very important. When you use online food portals there is no way for you to create meaningful relationships with customers. This on its own is awful.
What about these portals, then?
An Online food portal offers a variety of services that are tailored to help your restaurant. However, these portals have several important flaws that can be rather costly for your business. They range from steep price to losing customers and fierce competition.
That’s why it is a lot better to invest in a custom ordering app that your customers will love using and which will not make you lose your hard-earned money. If you are ready to have such an app, get in touch with Orders2Me today.