Your restaurant website should take orders, not just show the menu
Delivery apps take 15–30% of every order. How Quincy restaurants can take orders on their own website, what it costs, and what to keep on the apps.
Walk down Hancock Street or through Wollaston and you’ll see the same thing in almost every window: three or four delivery-app stickers. The apps bring in new customers, which is useful. But they also take 15–30% of every order, including orders from regulars who would have ordered from you anyway.
The fix isn’t to quit the apps. It’s to give your regulars a better way to order: directly from your own website.
What “direct ordering” actually means
A customer opens your site on their phone, taps the dishes they want, pays by card or Apple Pay, and picks a pickup time. The order prints in your kitchen or shows up on your POS, just like an app order. The difference is the money: you pay a card fee of around 3%, not a 20% commission.
What a good setup includes
- A menu that’s easy to update. Sold out of the soup dumplings? You should be able to mark it unavailable from your phone in ten seconds.
- Bilingual menus if your customers read Chinese or Vietnamese. Dish names in both languages, with proper search engine pages for each.
- Orders that go where you already work. Square, Toast and Clover can all receive web orders, so staff don’t watch another tablet.
- A text when the order is ready. Fewer “is it ready yet?” calls during the rush.
- Hours that stay in sync on your site, Google and Yelp, so nobody drives over when you’re closed.
What it costs
A restaurant site with a bilingual menu and direct ordering starts at $4,800 with me, as a fixed price. After that you pay the card processing fee and, if you want me to handle hosting and edits, the $149/month care plan. See the full price menu.
Here’s a simple way to check if it’s worth it: if you do $4,000 a month on delivery apps and move even a quarter of that to direct orders, you keep roughly $200–300 more each month. Most restaurants earn the site back within a year, and often much sooner.
Getting regulars to switch
- Put a small card in every takeout bag: “Order direct next time, get a free spring roll.”
- Add an “Order online” button to your Google Business Profile that points to your site, not an app.
- Answer the phone with “You can also order on our website.” It adds up.