How To Make Restaurant Online Ordering Mobile-Friendly


Increase your sales with mobile-friendly online ordering.

Increase your sales with mobile-friendly online ordering.

There’s no denying that you want your restaurant to be as successful as possible, and a lot of your success is measured by the amount of sales that you do.

If you are looking for a way to increase your sales, there is a surefire way to do so:

Online Ordering

Online ordering has been proven to exponentially increase the number of both pickup and delivery orders that restaurants receive, as well as increase the average order size and customer loyalty.

While offering online ordering will drive up your sales, making online ordering mobile-friendly will drive them up even further.

Mobile-Friendly Online Ordering

What is a mobile-friendly online ordering system? Basically, it allows your customers to view your menu from their mobile device with ease. Once they have chosen the items that they wish to order, they can place their order directly from their mobile device. And, not only can your customers place orders from their mobile devices, but they can pay for them, as well. Once they order is placed, all they need to do is head to your restaurant and pick it up.

When you consider the fact that nearly half of all of the visits to your restaurant’s website come from mobile devices, making online ordering mobile-friendly just makes sense. (tweet this)

Here are the steps to implementing Mobile-Friendly Online Ordering:

Step 1: Setup A Mobile-Friendly Online Ordering System

The first step is to get your mobile-friendly online ordering system setup.

You could go with a completely custom setup for your website, but that can take a lot of time and a lot of money. It might be worth it, but the other alternative is to go with a system like the one we offer at Restaurant Engine (see: Restaurant Engine Online Ordering). You make a few decisions on design and the rest is setup for you.

The online ordering can integrate with your restaurant’s ordering system so you can easily take orders from your website and put them in with in-store orders.

With Restaurant Engine, your online ordering system is also mobile-friendly. This means that your website, menu and online ordering system can all be easily understood and accessed on tablets and smartphones.

Step 2: Optimize Your Online Menu

Next, you’ll want to optimize your menu for your customers, which will also optimize your menu for search.

How do you do this?

There are a couple things to keep in mind.

First, you probably have great titles and names for your menu items. It’s part of what makes you unique. These unique titles are fine, but if you have a unique title you’ll struggle to get people to be able to search for your menu items. People search for things like “Pepperoni Pizza” and they’ll struggle to find yours if you call “Tony’s Hot Pep Pizza”.

You can still optimize your menu with great descriptions. Add a great description and use the language that your customer would use. Describe each menu item in great details and really sell your website visitors on the item. The description will also make it easy for customers to know what they’re buying and easier for them to find through search and social media.

Pizza Menu Example

See the descriptions for the unique titles on the Red Tractor menu.

Menu Item Mantra: Titles Tell, Descriptions Sell (tweet this)

Step 3: Keep Your Menu Updated

Finally, keep your online menu updated. Make sure old items are removed and that every new item is added. It will make your online ordering system more efficient and effective. It will also make sure that your website visitors are enticed to buy.

When you add new items to the menu or if you’re doing a promotion you could add a special graphic or image to the other pages on your site to promote. You could put something on the homepage that says, “Brand New Pizza! Order Online Now!”

Train your staff or get in a habit for removing old items and getting new items up as soon as possible. And remember to add great descriptions where you tell the story of the menu item while using the language your customer would use.

Conclusion

We’ve been seeing great success with our clients with mobile-friendly online ordering. More than other industries, the restaurant industry has customers that are on their phones. Your customers are likely using their phone to find information about eating out. They might be at the office, hanging out with friends or even on their sofa at home.

Getting your menu online and making it easy to find and read online can get customers to your interest, get them interested in your offerings and get them to order right from your website.

Do you want to upgrade your mobile ordering so that it is mobile-friendly? If so, contact us today and we will be more than happy to get you setup with the Restaurant Engine online ordering system!

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