Online Ordering For Restaurants -- The MenuBaby Blog by Constantine Daicos from Menu Baby Inc.

Play with your food

I was surprised to see the way customers "play" with our restaurant's clickable online menu by creating crazy fantasy orders as they browse. Things like twenty-five orders of Spaghetti Meatballs with sausage, mushrooms, cheese, extra meatballs and extra sauce. 

It must stem from the fact that adding, deleting and modifying food items is simple, so there's a low click-penalty for playing. It's kind of fun to build an order with 300 sandwiches or 1,000 stromboli... and then trash it.

Of course the final orders sent to the restaurant are much tamer than the play orders, but that's not the point. 

The point is that the more our customers play, the more familiar they get with the items on our menu. And how could that ever be a bad thing? It's not. Familiarity is an important part of loyalty. I think it's great.

Online orders aren't merely faster phone orders

In a recent blog post, uber-marketer Seth Godin writes:

"A car is not merely a faster horse. And email is not a faster fax. And online project management is not a bigger whiteboard. And Facebook is not an electronic rolodex. Play a new game, not the older game but faster."

This is how we feel about online ordering for restaurants. It's not just traditional phone ordering made faster, it's a whole new game. Your customers interact with your product in a whole new way.

Customers can't price a dozen different combinations with a phone order (without feeling hurried), but they can online. Customers can't automatically see all the extras and upgrades available on an item, but they can online. 

(And if you think your teen-aged phone agents are up-selling as effectively as they could, you're dreaming.)

Online ordering for restaurants. It's not just about faster ordering. It's a new game entirely.

Online ordering's becoming a must-have.

With everything you know about the power of the internet, can you really convince yourself that a paper takeout menu stuffed in some drawer can compete with an always-on, always-up-to-date, click-to-order menu that automatically suggests add-ons and extras? Really?

We're restaurant operators just like you. And with a service so simple, we're having a hard time coming up with excuses about why we didn't have online ordering sooner. What's yours?