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

Don't Put Your Online Ordering Menu in a Pop-up Window

We often look at online ordering stats for restaurants to see how things are going. It's been bugging us that one client's online ordering sales aren't climbing as fast as would be expected for a store that size.

So we poked around and discovered that their corporate site was opening the link to their online ordering page inside a pop-up window. Pop up windows are a bad idea, because they turn customers away from using your online ordering. Here's how that happens.

Pop-Ups Get Blocked
Popup blockers aren't just something that users install themselves anymore. They come standard in many browsers. Why force a user to click "allow" for the popup? It's unnecessary. Blocked window? Must be more trouble than it's worth, right? Poof, lost order.

Pop-Ups Size/Position is Unreliable
Sometimes the pop-up puts the menu in a floating window that is the wrong size for the content and sometimes it's pushed off the screen. Not good. Customer closes window, poof, lost order.

Pop-Ups Feel Fragile
Because pop-ups are mostly associated with ads or dialog boxes, users interpret the information contained in them as temporary or fragile. (You don't often navigate multiple pages inside a popup, it's not natural). Users generally feel uncomfortable interacting with a window that has no tabs or address bar and is floating outside their main browser window. Yuck. This doesn't feel right. Close window. Lost order.

It's an Easy Fix
We still think your restaurant online ordering page should open in a new window (in fact, it's what we recommend). But just don't open it in a new pop-up window. Please let your new windows open in the traditional way (with target="_blank"). That way, your online menu opens in a new tab like you want and it'll still be grounded inside the main browser like your customers want. Oh, and your Restaurant's main corporate page stays intact, just like before.

 

The Long Distance Journey of a Fast Food Order

(Photo credit http://www.flickr.com/photos/ol1/4555812390/)

This isn't exactly online ordering, but it does show the lengths good restaurant operators will go to to make ordering faster, friendlier and more efficient.

A few years ago, McDonald's began trials of outsourced drive-through order-taking systems at 40 stores. Here's how it works.

When a customer drives up to the speaker, their voice is actually routed across the Internet to a teleworker in a call center in California. This employee is trained to be fast, efficient and -- most importantly -- to make sales suggestions to the customer. The employee enters the order in her computer and that order gets routed back to Mcdonald's where the line cooks prepare the order.

Why even consider such a huge communication loop? For the same reasons smart restaurant operators do online ordering: speed, accuracy and better up-selling than any teenager on a headset could ever give consistently. In the end, it was probably too expensive a system, but still, that's how critical the ordering process is.

Check out the New York Times article here.

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?