What Is FoodPress And How to Use It As An Ordering System

The digital age opens doors to restaurants and their customers. It makes dining out easier for diners while helping you increase your bottom line.

In this article, we look at one feature of the digital age that’s something for you to consider. We look at the WordPress widget and ordering system, FoodPress.

It’s an intuitive way to deliver your restaurant menu to your customers in a simple, functional and usable manner.

Let’s discuss just what is FoodPress and how to use it as an ordering system.

First, we answer the question, “Why do I need an online menu?”

Why You Need an Online Menu

Your potential customers are looking for you online. They want to see your website, your menu items, your location and your phone number.

If you don’t provide these items to them in a mobile-friendly way, you can bet they’ll go to another restaurant that does.

Diners want to see photos of your menu items, and they want to know the cost. Oftentimes, they’d like to order online, pick it up and take it home to eat in the comfort of their own homes.

Menus on your website in a pdf format are passé. Today’s modern restaurateur is dedicated to providing the best online user experience for customers. (tweet this)

Next, let’s look at why you should provide online ordering.

Why You Need Online Ordering

It used to be that restaurants took all of their to-go orders over the phone. Today, that’s no longer the case.

The number of orders placed by smartphone or tablet has now exceeded verbal orders.

Your customers simply want to order “what they want, when they want it.”

Electronic orders are beneficial to your restaurant because they say to your customers, “We’re happy to meet your needs whether it’s dining in or taking it to go.”

If you’re looking to provide the best possible service to your customers, you want to offer online ordering. If you want to increase your profits, you again want to offer online ordering.

Next, let’s look at online reservations.

Why You Need to Take Reservations Online

The reasons are very similar as those mentioned earlier – convenience and simplicity.

Your customers don’t want to deal with a real person. They’d much rather book their reservation in advance and online.

With so many people spending the majority of their time surfing the Internet on their smartphones, make reservations easy by using a reservation plugin.

Now that you know why you need a beautiful online menu, online ordering and online reservations, let’s look at the plugin that can take care of all three for your restaurant.

What is FoodPress?

FoodPress is a plugin that you use on your website that allows your customers to view your menu and order online as well as make a reservation to dine-in.

You’ll find a variety of menu designs and layouts that allow you to define your menu in various ways from a box layout design with images on hover to accordions and tabs.

With this plugin, you are able to make a number of customizations to your menu in the way of color schemes, font icons and short codes.

The FoodPress reservation form is not only functional, but it’s beautiful as well. You can also manage your reservations from the easy-to-use backend.

For just $34, FoodPress will not disappoint you. It is worth noting that the online ordering function is available for a small additional fee.

Not only is it fully-responsive, so it renders well on smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktops, it’s compatible with WooCommerce, and it integrates seamlessly in your WordPress back-end.

It’s so easy to use, you’ll wonder why you haven’t used it before. You can add menu items with just one click.

What’s more, you can add titles, descriptions, broad categories and narrow categories. In fact, the number of categories you can create is limitless.

FoodPress also allows you to enter the nutritional information, ingredients, spice level, price and much more.

We also love this plugins ability to highlight the beautiful photos of your menu items.

The Added Benefits

Besides increasing profits and engendering your customer’s loyalty, you’ll find a few more reasons to use FoodPress as an ordering system.

1. Order accuracy. Orders placed through your website leave little room for employee error. Online ordering systems let your customers place their order on their own and just exactly how they want it. This takes the possibility of employee error right out of the equation.
2. Employee productivity. When your employees aren’t stuck taking orders over the phone, they’re spending more time with your in-restaurant customers, providing superior customer service. (tweet this) They can also use their extra time to fill online orders at the right time.
3. Grow your restaurant. Convenience means a lot. You’ll take more take-out and delivery orders by offering an online ordering system that’s intuitive and easy to use.
4. Build a database. Let’s say a customer places an order over the phone. The odds that your employee takes the customer’s name and email over the phone and enters them into your email database are slim. Yet, when customers place orders online, you can build a database that captures your diners’ email addresses. You can then market to them in the future with promotions, loyalty programs, event info and more. Your path to re-engaging these diners is now very clear and accessible.

Final Thoughts

With more than one million restaurants in the United States, your customers have a lot of choices when it comes to deciding where and what to eat.

Give your customers more options by providing them with an online menu, online ordering system and reservation system such as FoodPress.

You can get ahead of the competition by making the choice of online ordering available to your customers.

Consider this statistic: 42% of consumers say the ability to order online would make them choose one restaurant over another.

This should make it very clear that online ordering is a benefit to your restaurant, and it shows your customers you want to make ordering from your menu as simple as possible.

Smartphone usage is up, and your diners want ease of ordering. Try FoodPress today because online ordering is a necessity in today’s competitive restaurant market.

At Restaurant Engine, not only do we create great, responsive websites, but you can integrate ordering on your website so you can increase your profits. Ready to take the plunge and create a website with an online menu, blog and beautiful photos? Get your free website consultation today!

Images: Blake Wisz and Shanice Garcia on Unsplash