Everything Your Need to Know About Food Ordering System – The Benefits, Features, & Technologies to Use

The terms “quick commerce” and “on-demand delivery” are buzzwords everywhere. We are also witnessing significant development in the direction of this on-demand economy in the food and restaurant sectors. Today, the online food delivery market is worth billions of dollars. New food delivery services and cloud kitchen startups continue to flourish in this expanding market as each day goes by.

Creating platforms for on-demand food delivery benefits business owners and their clients. These online food delivery services have proven to be a lifesaver for most restaurant owners. These offer the most creative and straightforward method for lazy people who want to order food online.

You can take advantage of this booming market by using an online food ordering system as a restaurant or food business owner. This guide was put together to assist you in comprehending the fundamentals of food delivery platforms and the elements to consider when choosing the best one for your restaurant’s requirements.

But first, let’s go over some fundamentals before diving into the details.

Let’s first understand the following:

What is an Online Food Ordering System?

The term “online ordering system” refers to a streamlined, automated system that enables your restaurant to handle internet-based food orders from online customers via a branded website or mobile application. You can process online orders for your restaurant or food business, manage sales, and deliver food to customers quickly.

Even though online food ordering systems have been around for a while, the pandemic saw a drastic increase in demand for this technology. Hospitality businesses quickly changed their operations to offer online ordering services in response to prolonged lockdowns and restrictions so that their customers could continue to enjoy restaurant-quality food at home.

The demand for takeout and delivery food is still high despite the relaxation of restrictions, with the number of people ordering food online for delivery rising by 27% between 2020 and 2022.

Also Read: A Complete Web Development Guide For Small Businesses In 2023

Orders can be done within 10-15 minutes, including the time it takes to place the order, complete the transaction, and get the food. In contrast to a dine-in point of sale, where your regular customers might have to wait well over 60 minutes for their orders during peak hours, an online ordering system enables much faster service.

Keeping this in mind, it is no surprise that hospitality companies collaborate with an online food ordering platform to help increase sales and draw in new customers.

Let’s move on to the criteria that will help you decide which food delivery system is best for your restaurant.

Key Features of Online Food Ordering Software:

1. Ease of Menu Customization:

You’ve introduced five distinctive dishes you think your customers will like. It used to take a lot of time to edit the menu card to add new words and notify customers about them. However, a food ordering and delivery system will enable you to alter your menus, goods, prices, and other relevant items in less than ten minutes. This will undoubtedly have an impact on the services provided by your company and its efficiency.

2. Showcase Tasty Food to Attract Customers:

There is no denying that hunger begins in the eyes. So that your customers can’t stop ordering their favourite meals from your app, always use the best and highest-quality images of your delicious food. Remember that no one would ever order food online if they had to zoom in to clearly see the dish they wanted to eat.

3. Real-Time Synced platform:

Your apps, dashboards, websites, and admin panels should be perfectly synchronised to give your customers, administrators, and drivers the best possible user experience. A customer orders a dish, the admin will receive a notification. After accepting the order, a driver must be assigned for the delivery via the app. Until the delivery is finished, your customer will receive push notifications for status updates.

4. Various Filters to Enhance User Experience:

The search function in your food delivery app needs many valuable filters so that users can choose their cuisine based on their budget. The user experience will be enhanced, and they’ll become loyal customers if they can use various filters to find a delicious meal within their price range.

5. Save Valuable Time:

Sometimes, people need more time to wait for their food to arrive. By making a request via the Pre-Order feature, they can focus on their work while saving time.

6. Manage Multiple Stores With A Single Dashboard:

By creating a food aggregator portal, you can manage the operations, menus, orders, deliveries, and payments of multiple food stores from a single outlet. It will also assist you in growing your customer base, streamlining your food business, and expanding it from a local scale to a global arena.

Key Decisive Factors for Selecting the Best Online Food Ordering System

1. Keep Your Budget in Mind:

Consider your options carefully when choosing a company to develop an online food ordering app or website for your restaurant or food business. The budget must always be considered when creating an online ordering system for restaurants or any other food business. Money will be needed for daily operations, employee salaries, marketing, and promotions. Always stay within your means.

2. Seamless Integration:

The primary goal of an online ordering system is to boost sales while enhancing customer convenience. Compare the apps you’re testing with well-known food delivery apps. Another factor to consider is how the software works with other hardware and software already used at your business. It’s a warning sign if you experience difficulties or technical issues while using the new software.

3. Adaptability and Simplicity:

What is the ideal platform for online ordering that should offer a fantastic user experience? Which visitors are they? End users include both clients and companies. The ordering software must be scalable and flexible to meet the business’s and its clients’ needs.

Your online ordering process should be intuitive and effortless. It is useless if your staff and clients cannot use the software’s interface and functions. Choose a system that satisfies your requirements after testing multiple options with various providers.

5. Detailed Insights and Analytics:

In this day and age, data is the most crucial asset. The more you know about the market and your target audience, the more money you can make. The online ordering system of a restaurant must provide you with access to customer information to improve your offerings and increase sales. Above all, the data must be accurate and usable because cluttered, unprocessed data is useless.

Also Read: Website Building Guide for SMBs to take the First Step into Digitization

Understanding consumer behaviour will allow you to create tailored advertising and promotional strategies and the best products and recipes. With the right data, you may do a SWOT analysis and reflect on your business operations. As a result, analytics can aid in making sound decisions.

6. Marketing Functionality:

Things that grab people’s attention today fly off the shelves. Your restaurant or food establishment must entice customers.

People must be drawn to your restaurant or eating establishment and be inspired to engage with your brand.

Your restaurant’s best online ordering platform can help with your marketing initiatives. You can create inventive loyalty and promotional programmes to draw clients and keep them coming back for more. A strong marketing strategy will help you stand out from the competition, so make sure you have one.

7. Crucial Features:

What features would you expect from an online ordering system if you were a customer? Online restaurant ordering systems need specific components to enhance the customer experience.

• The software’s location navigation feature must be enabled.
• With an online ordering system, uploading menus and making changes should be as simple as possible.
• Your ordering software should accept payment methods like credit/debit cards, internet banking, UPI, mobile payments, Apple Pay, intelligent speakers, and others.
• Finally, the ordering software must incorporate a time-tracking feature that notifies customers when their order is delivered.

8. Device Compatibility:

Consumers typically access the internet and place orders using various devices. Your software must work with mobile devices like tablets and smartphones and operating systems like iOS and Android. When looking for an online ordering system, keep this in mind.

The software must first be installed on the computers used by your company, trained on by your staff, and tested to see how it performs. Make sure the user experience is the same on all platforms. You should cancel your subscription if you frequently encounter bugs and problems.

9. Pickup Options:

As was already mentioned, convenience sets different businesses apart from one another. Many fast food outlets and dining establishments let customers pick up their orders from a location of their choice. Ask the provider if a pickup option is available on their online ordering platform. Take advantage of this feature in the belief that people will make an effort since your food is delicious.

10. Reporting Features:

Do you know how many orders your business fills every day, every week, every month, and every year? If you are still determining your company’s order volume, how can you make crucial decisions about purchasing raw materials, hiring personnel, marketing, and other matters?

A restaurant’s online order system will provide precise information about the number of orders placed on weekends, weekdays, public holidays, special occasions, etc. To assist you in making wiser decisions, the reporting feature will provide total orders, takeaways, pickups, and deliveries in numerical form.

These reports enable the restaurant owner to increase marketing and promotional efforts while measuring success and ROI and improving customer service.

11. After-Sales Support & Maintenance:

It takes effort to run a restaurant and accept online orders simultaneously. When operating a restaurant, you might run into integration problems, ordering tracking problems, server problems, etc. Ask about maintenance and support services after purchasing an online ordering system.

Restaurant owners must always consider post-sale customer service when choosing an online ordering system. You can work in the industry without stress if the software service provider resolves these problems quickly. You can conduct business without stress if a responsive service provider modifies your ordering process to increase customer satisfaction to reflect the changes.

Why Use PHP & MYSQL for Food Ordering Website Development?

PHP does not have data storage, making it perfect for creating dynamic web applications. To store the data, we need a database, and PHP developers favour MySQL as their database of choice.

Based on the requirements, MySQL automates the most frequent operations related to locating and storing specific user information. The server-side programming language is PHP, and the relational database management system is MYSQL.

Combining the two can result in highly unique solutions. The use of PHP and MySQL has the following significant benefits.

1. Greater Usability:

PHP is easier to use and comprehend than other programming languages. It is simple to define the PHP syntax. It can be easily modified to fit the client’s unique business needs. Because of its dependability, PHP can easily handle various problems.

2. HTML inserted codes:

PHP is, without a doubt, a reliable and cross-platform language. Furthermore, because PHP can decode HTML, there is no need for separate coding. This property has several advantages; for example,

• PHP can be easily incorporated into code generated by WYSIWYG editors.
• PHP can reduce costs while increasing the efficiency of websites or web applications.
• With PHP, each line of HTML in a programming language can be written without having to rewrite each line of HTML in a programming language.

3. Ability to Create Dynamic Pages with Unique Features:

Server-side scripting languages like PHP produce dynamic pages with unique features. PHP offers a user-friendly, interactive website or web application that encourages visitor interaction while creating flexible and dynamic content.

4. Ideal for Food Ordering Website Development:

PHP can handle all the requirements for developing a food ordering website and is simple to customize to the customer’s business-specific needs.

5. Cost-effective:

The Apache/PHP/MYSQL combination runs flawlessly on the most basic, inexpensive hardware available for ASP/SQL Server, which is worth mentioning. PHP is incredibly affordable and never requires additional fees. By obtaining a free permit, you can ensure that no one will demand additional payment once you’ve finished the site’s construction.

6. Interoperability with multiple operating systems:

One of the most crucial issues for businesses is convertibility. Instead of spending large sums of money on limiting products, organizations can save money by using their existing resources. PHP’s ability to run on various servers and operating systems is another critical benefit. PHP is aware of portability problems with at least one operating system.

You can seek professional assistance for distinctive and customized software solutions based on your business objectives since you are familiar with the features of an online food business app. Your business will expand if you hire expert developers to build an online food ordering system.

Also Read: What Do You Need To Start Your Own Online Marketplace?

Since the creation of food-ordering apps has become popular in the digital age, many new application developers have appeared, each claiming to be able to create a unique website or app that will help businesses expand. However, the best course of action is to work with an established app development company if you want to ensure that your software is bug-free.

Get in touch with some highly qualified developers immediately if you want to expand your restaurant business globally!

A Effective and Reliable Food Ordering System Must Have

The User-Side:

• New users can register using their email address or third-party applications like Facebook and Google using the signup functionality.
• Having access to a list of nearby restaurants and cafes from which to choose
• The capability of placing orders from a menu quickly
• A system that processes payments and checks for promotional codes. As many payment options as possible, such as credit cards, PayPal, COD, Apple/Google Pay, and similar services, should be added. Order payments should be processed as quickly and efficiently as possible for customers.
• Tracking order status, delivery time estimation, and courier location.
• The capability of bookmarking favourite eateries, cafes, and menu items
• For updates and questions regarding their order, customers should be able to chat with the restaurant and the courier.

The Restaurant Side:

• A restaurant registration page that would let food establishments sign up for the food delivery system. Such a page includes all relevant details about the restaurant, such as its name, address, opening times, phone number, etc.
• A comprehensive content management system that enables eateries to upload menus and photos to the food delivery platform
• The capacity to run promotions and provide customers with promo codes
• Restaurants can view incoming orders and inform customers of the status of their orders thanks to an order tracking feature. Every time an order changes, both parties should be able to see exactly where it stands—cancelled, completed, ready for delivery, etc.
• being capable of finding the nearby courier who can fulfil orders.  The location of the courier should be able to be followed by the app from the time the package is picked up until it is delivered without problems.
• A feature that enables seamless cross-interface communication between the restaurant, customer, and courier.

The Courier Side:

• A page where couriers can join up to use your food delivery service.
• A page for managing courier orders that enables real-time delivery booking. All order information, such as pickup and delivery locations, order amount, and the customer’s contact information, should be included in this feature.
• You can make a delivery time estimate before picking up the order.
• Cross-interface communication tools that would let couriers communicate delivery updates and chat with the restaurant as well as the courier
• An account history page where couriers may monitor their deliveries to particular clients.

Key Takeaways

Creating an online meal ordering system allows your restaurant to compete with other businesses that use cutting-edge technology. However, before you start developing online software, consult with a tech partner or specialist to better grasp the intricacies of an online food ordering system and how much it will cost. If you want to get an estimate, don’t hesitate to reach out to us.