Those days will soon be over. It is the break between Christmas and New Years and most Restaurants are super busy at the moment and so are we on our FROLO for Take Outs and Restaurants.

Here is the last fortnights work on FROLO.

Fish and Chip shops will be able to move into the 21st with an online ordering system designed with the needs of Fish and Chip shops in mind.

We have been working with our Beta Testers and are making the following improvements:
A simplification of the way you can enter and edit your menus;
Tweaking of the customer side of the ordering process;
An easier view to see your current orders; and
Various changes based on all of the great feedback from our Beta Testers.

One of the team has come up with an amazing idea to help you increase the average order value for your Restaurant – we are busy putting the finishing touches on the design of this and arguing with the dev team over how long it will take to put in . Hopefully it will be included in the Beta before we go live. We don’t want to say too much, but lets just say we are harnessing one of the most powerful statements in Restaurant sales ever for your Restaurant.

And the big surprise is the PAYMENT SYSTEM!

Hooray – we are looking at using Stripe to manage payments for you. This means a 4 day payment system for credit cards on a rolling basis, straight into your account. We won’t take the payment on your behalf. The money goes from your customer to the Credit Card payments company to you. One less middleman means less charges for you. We won’t be clipping the ticket on the way through, you will just have the normal credit card fees to pay and you will get payment on a rolling 4 day basis. This is much fairer and should free up some cash flow for you .

Sign up for the FROLO waiting list if you want to cut the cost of taking orders online.

If you want to have a say in the Next Generation of online ordering, join our Beta testers and get early access and help design the best online order system for Restaurants.

Happy New Year. 2015 is going to be Awesome!

The post Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System December Update! appeared first on Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering.

Menulog appears to be the dominant player, with most of our customers saying that they get the most orders from Menulog. Their website says they have 4,200 restaurants in their network. Starting in 2006, they have grown to become a very profitable business. Headed up by Dan Katz, Menulog has steadily grown over the last 8 years and according to our customers, sends through by far the most orders per week of the 3 players in the market.

Eatnow is the second biggest player and run by Gabby Leibovich, a really smart operator who is also behind Catch of the Day and Scoopon and the recently back from the dead Yumtable. Eatnow is very aggressive in the marketplace, trying to make up ground on Menulog. Eatnow does have a couple of interesting tactics. It evidently provides restaurants with “free” websites, but charges the restaurant commissions that can range as high as 12%. The standard Eatnow template website is missing one critical element, the phone number. This means that people wanting to phone in an order may order at another restaurant and also it makes the restaurant appear to be take out only, there is no option to dine in.

Delivery Hero is the huge Gorilla in the room from the global perspective, having raised $656,000,000 of 9 rounds of investment, with the last investment being $350,000,000 in September 2014. Headquartered in Berlin, they have over 73,000 restaurants that they work with, but have struggled for traction in Australia. They operate in 21 countries. Founded in 2011, they have grown spectacularly but were late entrants into the Australian market and have struggled to win market share away from Menulog and the aggressive Eat Now.

One of the ways that it has grown is through it’s affiliate program, which provides marketers with a 4% commission on every sale that they generate for customers over a 60 day period. These costs are obviously borne by the Restaurant themselves and go in some way towards the high costs that many Restaurant owners complain of, although the high commissions are an issue with Menulog and Eat Now as well.

All 3 companies are really business to consumer businesses, finding people wanting food and matching them with restaurants. They provide the restaurant with a customer and clip the ticket on the way through. They view the customer as theirs (in some cases quite rightly, but often, the customer is really looking to order online from a restaurant they already know) and take the customer details and send out coupon offers of other restaurants to that customer.

Since these companies started, the cost of software development has fallen dramatically and cloud based services make building an online business a lot cheaper. Marketing4Restaurants is leveraging this trend to be able to provide similar functionality to each and every restaurant that does take out ordering and want to move to taking those orders online.

The Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System aims to do things differently. This is going to be a big opportunity for struggling small restaurants looking to improve profitability and not wanting to share their customer database. It is also a huge opportunity for those restaurants who have recognised that the costs of taking online orders has been too high for them to afford. These restaurants will now be able to move to online ordering and get all of the benefits associated with it, which include less time spent on the phones, less customers lost who can’t get through to place an order, less errors in taking orders and a database of customer contact details which grows every day.

Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System is being offered free of charge to all restaurants and take outs wanting to take orders online. Set up is quick and simple and restaurants will be able to start taking orders in the same day that they sign up.
Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System is currently in Beta testing and is scheduled for release in early 2015.

The post Menulog vs Eatnow vs Delivery Hero vs FROLO – the Free Restaurant Online Ordering System. A comparison of online ordering apps for Restaurants and Take Outs appeared first on Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering.

There are 3 main differences between our Free Restaurant Online Ordering System and the others.

1. We think this is bad for your restaurant because it is hard for you to show how your food and experience is different to your competitors.  Restaurant owners with poor food are able to compete with coupons and discounts to keep customers ordering, making it more difficult for great restaurants to survive.
2. They are building a list of customers to help them to drive orders. Delivery Hero, Eat Now and Menulog don’t care where a customer orders from, just that they make an order.  We are customers uses their widget on your website, the details are shared with the online ordering company, which means they can email out offers from other restaurants.  We don’t think this is fair at all.
3. We don’t charge you. Not per order, not per month.    Nada.  Free.  Free for you, free for your customers.

This is the way that online ordering was always meant to be [icon name=”smile-o” class=””]

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2015 will be an exciting year for take-outs and restaurants with a delivery service, with everyone now having access to taking orders online without paying a percentage per order and without having to share their customer’s details with other companies.

The online ordering game is a game of scale and we believe that the size of the Australian market will make it difficult for 4 companies to exist profitably.  Therefore, it is quite probable that one of the companies will exit the Australian market.

We expect FROLO to do two things:

1. Take market share away from the other 3 as Restaurant and Take Away owners look to decrease costs by not paying per order or per month; and

2.Educate Restaurant owners that they shouldn’t share their customers contact details with other companies who will promote their competitors.

We believe that there is a fair chance that Delivery Hero will withdraw from the Australian market, given that they are the smallest of the old business model companies and probably a fair way from profitability. They have much bigger markets that they already dominate and they may think that the writing is on the wall in Australia and decide to pull out. As for Eat Now and Menulog, they will certainly be very aggressive to retain their market share, but it will become increasingly difficult for them when Restaurants can use any ordering system on their website as well as use each of the companies.

The Free Restaurant OnLine Ordering System will dramatically improve profitability and customer loyalty for Pizza shops, Indian, Chinese and Thai Restaurants, Fish and Chip shops and any type of Restaurant that does Take Out.

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