Food delivery software: one order, step by step

Ask five suppliers about food delivery software and you get five different products. Some of them will call it software for food delivery instead, and mean something else again. One means a marketplace app. One means rider tracking. One means the page a customer orders from. One means a kitchen screen. All of them use the same phrase.

The fastest way to see through it is to follow a single order from the customer's thumb to cash in your hand, and mark at each step what does the work and what tends to go wrong. This guide does that for an independent restaurant, with Oman in mind.

Step one: the customer finds you

Nothing you buy does this by itself. People find a restaurant through an app they already have, a friend, a passing sign, or something they follow online.

Marketplace apps are genuinely good at this step and charge you for it on every order, forever, including the orders from customers who would have come back anyway. That trade is worth thinking about carefully, and we go through it in our guide to online food delivery platforms.

Nothing at this step is really software you own. It is either paid for per order, or it is the slow work of being known.

Step two: choosing and specifying the food

This is where mistakes are born. The customer wants it without onions, with the large portion, and with two extra sauces.

Over a phone call that becomes a conversation, and somebody writes it on a pad. In a chat message it becomes a paragraph a member of staff has to read twice during a rush. On a proper ordering page it becomes choices the customer makes themselves, priced as they go.

The test for any product sold to you here is simple. Can the customer specify the awkward version of your most popular dish without talking to a human, and does the price change correctly while they do it.

Step three: the address

In much of the world this step is a postcode and a house number. Oman works differently, and any software you buy has to cope with that.

Oman Post describes a PO box as "a permanent and important address for every individual or corporate", used in dealings with government bodies, banks and online shops. That is fine for post. It is useless to a rider holding a bag of food, who needs a building, a flat and a way to find the entrance in the dark.

So what actually works here is a map pin plus a building name and unit number, chosen from a list rather than typed. Anything less turns into a phone call, and the phone call happens while the food goes cold.

Step four: the order reaching the kitchen

The order now has to appear in front of the people cooking, quickly and in a form nobody has to interpret.

This is where a printed ticket, a screen or a message all work, and where the common failure is not technology at all. It is an order that reaches one person's phone and nobody else's, so when that person is busy the order simply waits.

Ask any supplier what happens if the first device does not see the order. If there is no second place it lands, you have bought a single point of failure.

Step five: dispatching the rider

The rider needs three things: where to go, what to carry, and how much to collect. Most lost time here is a rider standing in a lobby calling the restaurant, and the restaurant calling the customer.

A link that opens on the rider's own phone, with the pin and the amount already on it, removes both calls. Notice what that does not need: an app installed on a rider's phone, or an account created for someone who may work two shifts and leave.

"The number that surprised restaurants most was not the cost of the apps. It was how many minutes a night their staff spent on the phone telling riders which tower to go to. That is the part we set out to delete." — Tanzeel ur Rehman, co-founder of Get Menu

Step six: the handover and the money

Cash on delivery is still normal here, and there is a hidden advantage in that. Money that never travels through software cannot be lost by software, and card details that are never collected cannot be stolen.

What the software should do at this step is give a clean record: what was owed, what was collected, and a proper document if the customer asks for one.

Step seven: what you still have tomorrow

The order is finished. The question that decides whether your business grows is what remains.

If the order came through a marketplace, what remains is a payout and very little else. If it came through your own page, what remains is a customer, a number, an address and a history you can act on. That difference compounds quietly over a year.

What Get Menu covers, and what it does not

Get Menu is the ordering half of this list: steps two to seven. It is not a marketplace, so it does not do step one, and it does not employ riders.

Your menu opens at your own address on getmenu.ae, included in every plan, with 12 page layouts so the page reads the way your menu should. Customers open a link or a printed code. Nothing is installed.

Dishes carry options and add-ons with their own prices, and a choice can be marked required, so the awkward version of a dish is specified correctly by the customer instead of being written on a pad. Menus upload from a spreadsheet if you already keep one.

For the address, the customer drops a map pin at checkout and picks their building and unit number from a list you control. The delivery fee can be different for every building, and free delivery can start above a total you choose.

Every line is priced again from your live menu at checkout, so the amount the rider collects is the amount the customer agreed. A double tap cannot create two orders, and you can set a minimum order value.

About 2 seconds after the customer confirms, 3 messages leave the system. The customer gets a confirmation. Your managers' group gets a ticket. Your riders' group gets a dispatch note carrying the pin. WhatsApp is a sensible place for all of this, given that more than 3 billion people in over 180 countries use it, your team included. Every message is logged with whether it arrived, and an SMS can go from your own SIM when WhatsApp cannot deliver.

The rider link works without an account, so a new rider needs nothing installed and nothing signed up for.

Stock counts fall as orders come in, options keep their own counts, and an item greys itself out at zero, so a rider is never sent for something the kitchen cannot make. Cancel an order and the stock comes back.

Afterwards, invoices carry your tax registration number as a PDF the customer downloads without logging in, and sales export to a spreadsheet. Stamps, tiers and expiring rewards bring people back, with the card in Google Wallet and the Apple version waiting on a certificate. Coupons carry caps, exclusions and expiry dates. Old order details are cleared automatically after 120 days, and your customer list exports on any day, including your last with us.

Payment is cash or your own card machine at the door. There are no online payments in the product at all. Fifteen days on trial, and no card is asked for.

Choosing between the pieces

If you have no customers yet, step one is your problem and an app is the fastest answer, expensive as it is.

If you have customers but your evenings are spent typing their messages into a notebook, steps two to five are your problem, and that is what our guide to a takeaway ordering system covers.

If somebody is selling you a phone app for your customers to install, read our piece on the restaurant app question first. For most independent kitchens it is the most expensive way to solve a problem a web page already solves.

Frequently asked questions

What is food delivery software?

It is a phrase covering at least four products: marketplace apps that bring customers, ordering pages that take the order, dispatch tools that move riders, and kitchen displays. Ask which of the four a supplier means before you compare prices.

Do I need my own ordering page if I am already on a delivery app?

They do different jobs. The app finds people who do not know you. Your own page serves the ones who already do, without a share of each order going elsewhere, and it keeps the customer record.

How do riders get the address in Oman?

Through a map pin dropped by the customer at checkout, plus the building and unit they picked from your list. The rider opens a link that carries both and needs no account.

Can customers pay by card online?

Not in Get Menu. Payment is cash or your own card machine at the door, which also means no card details are stored anywhere in the system.