Make most of your online presence
In this article, we are not talking about why you need an online presence, that we have already covered here in detail here.
This article is covering how to make most of your online presence once you have it. Most restaurant owners tend to get a website for their business. Still, they don’t update it or improve their restaurant online presence, e.g. never having a table reservation system or the restaurant ordering system connected to it.
Restaurateur often asks these questions, why do we need our own food ordering system? When we have Ubereats, MenuLog, Doordash services, and does it make sense to have both private and 3rd party systems?
Well, the answer is simply “Yes”. It would help if you used Menulog and Ubereats because these 3rd party companies bring customers and sometimes new customers too.
The primary business model of corporate food ordering companies like Ubereats and Doordash is to use their big marketing budget to get your local customers and then resell it back to you and charge big fat commission. The sad part is the customer still belongs to them. View the pros and cons chart below to understand it better.
The next big question is how to convert these newly acquired customers to use your portal?
Well, there are many ways to achieve it. Still, one of the most effective ways is to have a polite but honest approach with the customer, don’t be shy of sharing with them that you have a website and food ordering system, also there is very little or no margin in using these 3rd party portal.
Invite them to use your ordering system for even better deals and experience. There are some more creative ways to improve your restaurant online presence which we will share in our future blogs.
Cautious of strategy backfire
The idea is to get new customers from Ubereats, Doordash type companies, not to lose existing ones. So if you have a good number of take-away and phone orders already coming in, just use a commission-free online food ordering system and enhance your customer’s experience .
So they spread the word, and you get new customers. Big companies often keep an eye on restaurants that have a good rating and online clientele and try to overpower them with excessive promotions. Once your customer sees that they get the same food for less price by ordering through these companies, they will move on from your portal and start using them.
