Selling direct, and what each route to the sale actually costs. Restaurant online ordering on your own site →
The till says one figure, the card machine another and the drawer a third. Before you buy an EPOS, price the whole 12 months and test the joins that lose money.
Friday is our busiest night and a third of every marketplace ticket leaves as commission, while the guest belongs to someone else. How to take those orders on your own site, and what the whole set-up costs.
A dish built for the table can turn into a refund after twenty minutes in a delivery box. Sort the menu into dine-in, collection and delivery before launch.
Ready bakes that sell out by noon and celebration cakes that need a conversation fail in different ways online. Give each its own lane before the order page opens.
Two payment accounts mean two statements, two payouts and two places to look for a refund. The reader for the till can settle into the same balance as online orders.
On the order page, delivery is paid by card, while dine-in and collection can go either way. That choice decides which orders carry a card fee and which wait to be marked paid.
A guest asks for a paid order to be cancelled and the server presses Cancel. Whether the money went back is a separate question, and a wrong guess returns as a dispute.
Waive the charge and the margin goes; hold it and a guest disputes the bill in front of the room. Nobody wrote the boundary between included and extra where the till can read it.
The same code honoured twice three weeks apart, once at a table and once on the website, with the printed slip backing both — a cost the accounts find in January.
When a bot works a list of stolen cards, the payments are tiny, almost all declined, and none is an order. What can be left is an authorisation-fee bill and a queue of chargebacks.
A marketplace pays once a week, after commission, refunds and credits are netted off one invoice. The bills it has to cover are not on that cycle.
Switching on online ordering looks like a deploy. The guidance calls it a way of trading with a lead time attached, and assuming an existing registration covers it is the risk.
