Get Your Restaurant Online With Shopify
Monday, April 13, 2020Eric Zegarski
Why You Should Get Your Restaurant Online With Shopify
As a restaurant there are many ways you can yourself online. However, services like
Uber Eats, and
SkipTheDishes charge a fee for every sale you make. Going online with
Shopify allows you to own your customer, master your marketing, and keep more of your revenue. Below we’ll explore the benefits with taking your restaurant online with Shopify. We will also look at common roadblocks and how to get around them.
Own Your Customer
By having your ordering process on Shopify, you own your customer. You get handy analytics into their purchase frequency and what meals they order the most. Also, your customers deal directly with you vs a support line from a third party in regards to customer service inquiries. This gives you the opportunity to showcase your outstanding customer service. As a result, they won’t be in a long queue and get their issue immediately resolved.
Own Your Marketing
The number one benefit of owning your customer, is you get to own your marketing. As mentioned before, owning your customer gives you advantages that you wouldn’t have relying on third-party service providers. With your own Shopify store, you can launch ads that drive traffic to your shop via social and Google. You can capture browsers with tasty offers and your showcase restaurant’s unique flair.
Google is everyone’s best friend when it comes to search. That’s why it’s crucial to rank well on Google. You can always get a little help ranking well by launching
AdWords campaigns. Now we’re not telling you to start claiming that you have the best pizza in town but using Google AdWords you can! Running AdWords campaigns can direct traffic directly to your online store on Shopify. You can even boast your hard earned 4.4 star rating in the ads!
In addition, you can remarket to people who viewed your mouthwatering pizzas. You can connect your social channels like Facebook and Instagram to your Shopify store. Through the magic of Facebook Pixel, you can have your pizzas follow your web browsers across social media and make them drool on their phones!
Furthermore, you’ll be able to execute targeted email campaigns tailored for your customers. Come Tuesday when you’re running a promo on an extra-large pepperoni pizza you can target past purchasers with an email campaign. In addition, you can send delicious offers to customers who have not ordered online in a while.
Are you famous for your sauce, have wicked branding, or one of a kind t-shirts that your staff wear? By having your restaurant online with Shopify, you can offer these items as purchase add-ons. It’s a great way to capitalize on your unique brand which you spent so many years building.
Common Initial Roadblocks You Might Face with Shopify
Optimizing Your Delivery
One of the core benefits of services like Uber Eats and SkipTheDishes is they provide their own delivery drivers. Therefore, restaurants don’t need to worry about capacity issues if there is an influx of orders. However, here are a few ways a restaurant can circumnavigate this roadblock. One option is to have staff that have access to a vehicle and aren’t currently scheduled to be on call to do deliveries. You can partner with local delivery companies that can assist with home deliveries. Furthermore, you can entice people to come in and pick up their order by offering free pickup or a small monitory discount.
There are apps for Shopify that assist with delivery too! The
Store Pickup + Delivery app is a handy tool that can help you streamline your delivery process. During the checkout procedures, customer chooses whether they would like pickup or delivery. It also allows you to block out times that your restaurant is closed. To ensure that people outside of your delivery zone don’t order, the app also has a delivery address verification feature. In addition, you can set a maximum amount of orders that can be accepted in each time block. For example, you’re only accepting 10 delivery orders for a 5 to 6pm delivery window. This app homes in handy when you’re looking at optimizing your capacity planning too.
Lead Times for Preparing Orders
No one knows your business better than you! Depending on the food offered, each restaurant will have a different prep and production procedure. So, you must determine what acceptable amount of orders you can handle in an hour. Some popular tactic used by other restaurants include having a cutoff widow for dinner deliveries. For example, some restaurants require that all dinner orders must be in before 3pm. Another popular tactic adding an automatic lead time for your orders. When an order is placed, the customer receives an email that the order will be ready for pickup or delivery in a specific given amount of time. With this method you can add a little time padding to take into consideration an increased amount of orders.
Taking Orders Over the Phone
Shopify has a handy feature that allows the merchant to manually input the orders. If the customer is willing to present payment information over the phone, then you can process the payment then and there. If they choose not to, the POS app can process payment upon delivery. The app is free, and Shopify has nifty card readers that process card payments with a simple swipe. The app can process cards manually, if your delivery personnel misplace their card reader or if the card reader malfunctions.
Zero Experience Building an Online Store or eCommerce
You don’t have to be a tech wizard to build a Shopify store! Shopify has pre-build themes that require zero coding knowledge to set up. The most labor-intensive task on your end will be taking mouthwatering photos of your food and writing captivating product descriptions. There are numerous apps that allow for extra features for your store such as allowing customers to add order notes. The
Shopify App Marketplace even has apps that allow for dropdown menus, which based on choice can even add to their total dollar order amount. Therefore, you can have nifty features like extra sauce or extra meat and charge for it. Furthermore, these apps are plug and play meaning you won’t have to do any extra coding on your end to make them work!
Building the Right Online Strategy for Your Restaurant
As mentioned before, no one knows your restaurant better than you. Therefore, you must craft your own online strategy. After reading this you might realize that, instead of pulling the plug on your existing channels via SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats, launching a Shopify store will be a part of your multi-channel strategy. As a final slice of advice, reach out to your colleagues in the industry and chat with them. They'll have valuable insights about their online strategy and what is currently working for them.