Our online food ordering system can stand alone as a website, or can be fully integrated into a restaurant or catering service’s existing website by simply adding an Order Online button. It can also be made available to customers as a branded mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows devices, or even as an app on Facebook. We can help you get to where your customers are.

The power of our service does not end there. Any orders that are approved and paid for by customers using a variety of means can be made to funnel into the computerized system already in place in your kitchen.

Customers do not have to do anything special, and neither do you—we do it all for you. From building the code, and designing the best look using your colors, logo, and photographs of your menu items, to setting up secure payment portals.

In addition to making it easy for customers to choose and buy the food they want to order, we also accommodate restaurant loyalty programs, and can generate maps to allow customers to locate branches quickly. Using our food ordering system, customers can monitor the status of their delivery through SMS notifications, email, or through app notifications.

“The best thing I love about Food Online Ordering Systems is their pricing. We were paying GrubHub and Eat24 almost $500 per month! We saved almost $400 a month and are building our brand – not theirs!”

The competition is charging on average 15% of the sale!  This is outrageous considering most restaurant are making 20-30 cents on the dollar. They are taking more than half your profit!  Our system comes at a fixed rate which falls at about one-third of the cost of the competition. We also do not have a service charge per sale, like other online ordering systems do. While they generally charge 15% of the cost of a sale, we merely charge a fixed flat rate. We also provide premium support for free.

Using our system, online ordering for restaurants has never been easier or more cost-efficient. Our customers have seen close to $1,500-$5,000 in monthly sales by day 90!

We would be happy to give you a free demonstration on how our system works, and talk further on how we can assist you in giving your customers what they want—wonderful food, at a reasonable price, quickly and with as little hassle as possible.

Hospitality Leader – 3/16/2016

http://www.hospitalityleaderonline.com/doc/is-your-restaurant-online-ordering-model-destroying-your-profit-margins-0001

Restaurant And Hospitality IT News For VARs

Online ordering is changing the way restaurants do business. While the restaurant industry has always been competitive and risky, changes over the past five years in tech have added a new variable for restaurant owners to consider: online ordering is now a vital part of how restaurants handle pick-ups, deliveries, and reservations. Millennial customers also have higher loyalty rates depending on how accessible their favorite restaurants are online. In the end, online ordering is a must-have for any restaurant today.

Because of shift in customer thinking when it comes to online ordering, restaurateurs working to build their market share find it essential to have online ordering options available to their customers. But the most common online ordering options have high fees which can make the difference between success or failure for restaurant owners. By contrast, the right online model can help your business grow and thrive instead of potentially dooming it to failure.

Are Percentage-Based Ordering Models Eating Into Profit Margins?

To restate what most owners already know: depending on a restaurant’s overhead, the profit margin can often be rather small (often from 3% to 10%, according to recent industry estimates). For successful restaurants, the profit margin can be anywhere from 20-30%, but the built-in costs of restaurant maintenance mean it won’t get much higher– and that profit margin is almost always the difference between success and failure. In fact, most new owners don’t realize at the outset just how razor-thin restaurant profit margins can be, which is why the restaurant industry claims a staggering 60-70% failure rate on average over a ten-year period (some analyses actually put the number slightly higher). However, assuming that a restaurant was profitable before the age of online ordering, adapting to new marketplace realities can seriously change the game for the worse. Here’s why.

A recent article in Quartz magazine, taking into account data from multiple restaurant online ordering companies’ IPO’s, discovered that the average commission made by these companies was a staggering 13.5%. Whatever benefit these companies provide in terms of helping restaurants build their business online is almost completely erased by the fact that the percentages they take out can often be considerably higher than a restaurant’s profit margin, meaning that the business will actually be unprofitable over the long term. Even worse, most business owners are rarely aware of what is happening, as their statements seem to indicate hidden fees and penalties that weren’t necessarily explained, leading to individual charges looking much smaller than the actual totals being charged to the business.

Faced with the possibility of moving into negative cashflow territory, restaurants often find that making use of online ordering can hurt their business, so they are faced with two uncomfortable choices: taking losses with large online ordering companies (directly affecting their cashflow) or skipping out on online ordering altogether (meaning a serious loss of revenue in today’s business marketplace.) The inevitable result for restaurants choosing the former option is to raise prices to offset the loss from online ordering, which usually results in tacking on a fee to offset the cost of the online ordering system or raise prices on their dishes overall. The result in either case is customer inconvenience and, in many cases, attrition.

Finally, to make matters worse for the industry overall, predatory online ordering companies almost always target new restaurant owners to “lock them in,” with those owners not realizing just how much of their profits are being eaten into by their online ordering system.

Even worse for restaurant owners, often these companies use SEO techniques which create total dependence on the online ordering company. A good example of this is the use of “microsites” that exist on the online ordering company’s end. They create mini websites that steal traffic from a restaurant’s own website. This technique is the opposite of traditional advertising, such as PPC (which is designed to reach new users) and user base advertising (reaching out to existing customers a restaurant acquires).

Often when restaurants sign up with online ordering companies, microsites for the restaurant will be created on the online ordering company’s website. (This is important to remember, because this is not going to the restaurant’s website, but the online ordering company’s site.) Because of the relative weight of the online ordering company’s size, chances are that potential customers looking for a restaurant will see the microsite before the restaurant’s own website, meaning that native web traffic that would have gone to a restaurant website (people looking for a restaurant’s menu or directions, for example) will be redirected to the online ordering company’s website, which will then downgrade the restaurant website’s own ranking. What this means for the restaurant in this example is that the exorbitant fees involved are compounded by a new problem: online web traffic is being shifted from the restaurant site to the online company’s site– meaning online ordering companies actually damage a restaurant’s web presence to build their own customer bases.

Solutions Where Online Ordering Can Mean the Difference Between Success and Failure

Recognizing the potential for disaster these margins mean for the online ordering industry and the restaurant industry in general, one online company has decided to do something about it. Food Online Ordering Systems, a successful national online ordering solutions provider, has developed a food online ordering system which allows business owners to take control of their web traffic and get online sales without paying a commission. This flat rate service saves restaurants $1,000 each month in commissions they are currently paying making the cost of running an online ordering system more manageable overall. With online ordering tied directly to the portal, everything from order tracking to payment organically becomes part of a restaurant’s existing order process.

Further, by focusing on a restaurant’s organic SEO visibility, restaurants using Food Online Ordering Systems’ portal are no longer trapped by online ordering companies’ predatory SEO techniques. A restaurant with well-maintained SEO is not dependent on the online ordering company, but gets to keep their customers for themselves, without worrying that their online ordering company is trying to undermine their own client acquisition efforts.

Flat rate ordering means that the total cost of online ordering leaves the realm of percentages of overall sales volume and moves towards a single, easy-to-understand pricing model. Online ordering moves over to the general cost of maintenance, and worries over how much is going to be taken out in a given month is over. This also means that the problem of worrying about increased costs overall is related directly to profits and volume, not how much the online ordering system will take out in a given month.

Online Ordering that Helps Manage Costs

Restaurant owners are discovering two facts about online ordering that direct them in opposite ways. The first is that online ordering is a virtual necessity in the modern business marketplace. The second is that many online ordering companies are extracting commissions from them that can crush their business model without making potential catastrophic changes to their pricing structure.

In this market environment, Food Online Ordering Systems offers restaurant owners a cost-effective alternative which is set to disrupt the online ordering industry. By helping restaurant owners by giving them the ability to finally get their online costs under control, the company’s flat-rate model is bound to change the way restaurants treat their online ordering systems. And in an industry where 7 out of 10 restaurants can’t make enough of a profit to survive, Food Online Ordering Systems’ flat-rate model is making enough of a difference to help establish this competitive industry’s future success stories.

If you’re a restaurant owner and have become concerned with the total cost of your online ordering system, it might be time to look at an alternative pricing structure that fits your business from Food Online Ordering Systems. With some online ordering companies charging well over 15% commission rates to get a business online, using an affordable, stable flat-rate online system that integrates with your existing POS may be the missing piece that makes the difference between long-term success and failure later.

About Food Online Ordering Systems

A fixed cost provider of custom online ordering solutions for restaurants, Food Online Ordering Systems can stand alone next to any point of sale system or be fully integrated. It is completely white label so it is your branding that your customers see. It can also be made available to customers as a branded mobile app for Android, iOS, Windows devices, or as an app on Facebook. The company can help build the code and design the best look working with the restaurant’s colors, logo, and photographs of its menu items and help set up secure payment portals. They also accommodate restaurant loyalty programs and can generate maps to allow customers to locate branches quickly. Food Online Ordering Systems will build and design a custom solution tailored to your restaurant.

Food Online Ordering Systems for Restaurants (FOLOS)

You may also connect with Food Online Ordering Systems on Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/FoodOnlineOrderingSystems), Twitter (http://twitter.com/Folosinc), and YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/c/foodonlineorderingsystemsforrestaurants).

Using a Commission Based Online Ordering Company? Have you looked at your statements lately?

If you are a restaurant owner and use an online ordering service for your take-out and delivery orders, then chances are you are paying a percentage of every dollar spent through that ordering system to the service provider. Every. Single. Dollar. Since those dollars also cover food costs, labor, and other important overhead expenses, how much are you able to keep from those to-go order dollars? Pennies, if you are lucky, but for many restaurants the truth is often that they are sacrificing their profits from online ordering just to stay competitive.  Many restaurants do not even realize what they are paying until they look at their statements.  In most cases it is several hundred to several thousand dollars a month.

Let’s face it. In today’s modern, digital, socially-networked, smart phone kind of world, not having an online ordering system seems almost archaic. Worse, the potential of losing business to a competitor who uses one of these services, can make online ordering feel like a requirement, rather than an option. Your food is delicious, and you want it to reach as many mouths as possible, but you don’t want to go broke through paying a high percentage of every online order to a service provider. After all, your menu printers don’t charge a percentage of your orders, and neither does your point of sale company, so why should your online ordering service? Until recently, the only available option has been to pay a commission, averaging about 14% of each order (gasp!) to an online ordering company, but there is a different idea making waves in the industry; an idea that could change the game. Big time.

What game, you ask? How about the game of corporate greed destroying small businesses. Or, you could think of it as the Game of Forks, and the Lannisters are in charge. According to an article published by NPR on August 12, 2013, common commission based online order companies don’t just charge a percentage based fee, but also tack on additional charges and even increase percentage rates if the restaurant starts making more moolah! Now that’s just appalling. Most restaurants are owned by small business owners are working to make money for themselves, not for online ordering services providers. So, what’s the alternative? Food Online Ordering Systems only charges a low flat monthly rate instead of a percentage of each order. Now THAT’S an idea! Rather than paying a commissions, with rates that vary depending on how much business your restaurant pulls in, you could be paying as little as a just few bucks a day for the same service.

With a flat rate, the cost of your online ordering service doesn’t change, you pay roughly a $150 per month whether you sell $3,000 or $5,000 worth of delivery orders, while a 14% commission would mean paying $400-$600 on the same orders. One doesn’t have to be the Master of Coins to see the value in flat rates over commissioned rates!

The theft is about more than money. It’s about your customers and your dream. Your dream to have a successful restaurant, make money, and feed hungry customers in the process. When profits for orders that typically represent a large percentage of one’s business are being gobbled up by an online service provider, then it is hard to stay afloat, let alone get ahead. When you can’t get ahead, other restaurants are able to move in and take business away from you. When you lose business, your dream slips away. Greedy commission-based companies are taking away more than just your money – they are threatening your bottom line, taxing you for being successful, and making you dance to their tune. They are stealing your dream.

Maybe it’s time to take your dream back. After all, you deserve to be successful, and no vendor should have the power to take that away from you, especially when there are other alternatives devoted to helping you grow your dream, rather than steal it from you.