Why not email, fax or PC? 

There are systems out there that implemented ways to just send the orders by email, fax, text, PC and even direct to printer. All these alternative ways do not assure a real-time communication.

An email may arrive in 5-10 minutes, up to 4 hours in some cases to the restaurant’s device. In average the restaurant staff will notice the email in another 5 minutes or so.

An SMS notification is also prone to being missed. Moreover, the order details come in limited format, difficult to read and confirm fast. Then comes the problem of replying to client with an accept SMS, this is slow and prone to typos etc.  

The sending of order directly to fax means to “auto-assume” that the order was accepted just because the fax printed it. Which is not necessarily true. Same for sending to a printer.

The PC apps are also hard to follow, expensive to maintain and fragile, the PC speakers are not loud enough, the PC itself is many times a static workstation or notebook connected to printer and other equipment’s that remains for long periods unattended. A PC is a complex system on which many other apps are running and conflicts between various apps are very often occurring (viruses, firewall problems, system update issues, etc.). Providing tech support to a PC takes hours is sometimes more expensive than buying and using a mobile device.

And at the end of the day this is all about getting more sales, right? The fact is that online clients are even more demanding than phone clients – if they don’t like something they simply go someplace else and never give the restaurant the chance to make up to them.

The irony is that the busiest restaurants that have most sales with our system (over 50 orders a day) have an average response time of 65 seconds and they simply became addictive of our system. The faster they accept the more clients they have and so on. Those with less than 1 online orders a day are also often missing 50% of those few orders they have.

According to our initial research 3 minutes is “the magical” timespan that a client who orders online is willing to wait before getting a confirmation. When placing an order most clients are already a bit hungry (therefore anxious) and they want / demand to know as soon as possible if the restaurant will take their order, otherwise they try calling or ordering online somewhere else.

This is pure suicide of online business. If we implement these “alternative” ways of taking orders what happens is that the restaurant will make little business online, have many angry people bouncing about their order over the phone and lose customers. And then they blame the system and stop using it.

Receive confirmed orders via fax

The restaurant manager can sign-up with an email-to-fax service provider and obtain an address that looks like [restaurantfaxnumber]@[emailtofaxproviderdomain].com

In each country there may be great rates for domestic email to fax services, some even for free. (e.g. https://www.hellofax.com/info/pricing).

Then, the notifications options from the “Advanced settings” tab of the restaurant’s account admin area to set the fax to receive the confirmed orders via that fax email address obtained from the email-to-fax provider.

Please note, this happens AFTER the order was confirmed in the order taking app. 

Accept orders through emulator

There are some big volume sales restaurants that have a fixed desk position for a full time dispatcher managing the orders, the kitchen and the fleet on several screens, etc. And some of them find it much faster to use the same mouse and keyboard over all systems as input method. In such cases, they told us they use Android emulators like Bluestacks to operate from a PC. However for these are rare cases but we also don’t provide tech support in such usage scenario.