How to take an online food order in Nigeria, step by step

People typing this phrase are usually one of two people. Either they are hungry and want food brought to them, or they run a kitchen and want to know how orders get taken without a phone call. This article is written for the second person. It sets out what an online food order in Nigeria actually needs, which parts you can arrange for nothing, and the point at which free tools stop being enough.

Five things every order needs

Strip away the software talk and any order, anywhere, needs five things to happen.

A customer has to see what you sell, at today's prices. They have to be able to choose without asking questions. They have to tell you who they are and where they are. Your kitchen has to find out. And you have to get paid.

Most Nigerian restaurants have already solved the first and last of those and are losing time on the middle three. So take them in order.

1. A menu people can read on a phone

Not a photograph of a printed card, and not a PDF. Both of them force the customer to pinch and drag with one hand while holding a bus rail with the other, and both go stale the moment a price moves.

What you want is a normal web page listing categories, dishes, prices and any options. It should load on a slow connection, which in practice means light pages and compressed photographs rather than clever design.

2. A way for people to arrive at that page

Two of these are free and both are underused.

Your Google Business Profile. Google's own guidance for restaurants tells owners to use the menu editor, manage the menu URL, upload photos of the menu and accept online food orders through the profile. There is a separate help page on managing online ordering options, where you can add your own link and mark one as preferred for pickup or delivery. That means the ordering page you control can sit on your Google listing beside the delivery apps, and a customer searching your name in Ikeja or Wuse sees it.

WhatsApp. Meta describes the WhatsApp Business app as "built with the small business owner in mind", with a business profile, greeting messages and replies that go out while you are away. Putting your ordering link in that profile, and in your greeting message, turns every conversation into an order without anybody typing a list.

A printed code on the door, on the packaging and on the receipt does the same job for people already standing in front of you.

3. Who they are and where they are

This is where most Nigerian orders lose time, and it has nothing to do with software being clever.

Addresses here are often descriptions rather than lines on a form. Behind the filling station, third gate, ask for the blue building. Read down a phone line, that costs two minutes and one wrong delivery a week.

An order form fixes this if it asks properly. A phone number. A building or estate picked from a list you set up, rather than typed freehand. A pin dropped on a map at the moment of ordering, while the customer is standing in the place the food is going.

4. The kitchen has to hear about it

An order sitting in an inbox nobody is watching is not an order.

The reliable answer in Nigeria is the place your team is already looking, which is a group chat on their phones. If the order arrives there, formatted, with the items and the address, then nothing has to be copied and nobody has to remember to check a dashboard during a rush.

"We did not choose group chat because it is fashionable. We chose it because every kitchen we sat in already had one, running all day, with everybody in it. Software that asks a busy team to watch a second screen is asking for a habit they will not keep."

— Tanzeel ur Rehman, co-founder of Get Menu

5. Getting paid

Cash on delivery, or your own card machine at the door, is still how a great deal of Nigerian food delivery settles. It needs no integration and no bank approval, and customers are comfortable with it.

Taking card details on a website is a much bigger commitment: a payment provider, a settlement account, chargebacks and the duty to protect card data. Plenty of restaurants are better off leaving that until volume justifies it.

Where the free version runs out

You can do all five of the above with a Business Profile, a WhatsApp account and a shared spreadsheet, and a lot of kitchens start exactly there. Three things eventually make it painful.

Every order is typed twice, once by the customer in a chat and once by your staff. That is unpaid work during your busiest hour.

Nothing is counted. You cannot say which dish sold most last month, or which customer has ordered nine times, because the record is a chat history.

And you sell things you have run out of, because the menu has no idea what the kitchen has left.

Those three are the reason ordering software exists at all. We look at the same crossing point from a different angle in the guide to a takeaway ordering system, and the question of whether to build an app instead is answered in the piece on the restaurant app.

What Get Menu adds

Get Menu covers the five steps in one place, and everything below is real rather than planned.

The menu lives on a page at your own address on getmenu.ae, given to you on the day you sign up. You pick among 12 page layouts and set the colours and the font, so a buka and a lounge do not look identical. It opens like any link, so nobody installs anything.

Dishes carry options and add-ons with their own prices, and choices you mark as required have to be answered before the item goes in the basket. At checkout, every line is priced again from the live menu, so a price you changed at four is the price taken at eight. Two taps will not create two orders.

Portion counts drop as orders come in, options keep their own counts, and a dish greys itself out at zero without anybody watching. A warning reaches you once when your low level is crossed, and cancelling an order returns the stock.

For the address, the customer picks a building or estate from your list and drops a map pin. You can charge a different delivery fee per building and set a total above which delivery is free.

Then the messages. About 2 seconds after a customer confirms, 3 messages leave: a receipt to the customer, a ticket into the managers' group and a dispatch note into the riders' group carrying the pin. Every one is logged, arrived or not.

For tables, a code is drawn for each one and dressed in your brand by a designer, with a print pack sent to your email. The code carries the table number, so the guest types nothing, and one table can build a single bill from several phones.

Afterwards, stamps can be earned per order or per amount spent, regulars climb tiers that can carry an automatic discount, and the loyalty card sits in Google Wallet and keeps itself current. The Apple version is finished and waiting on a certificate. Coupons take caps, exclusions and end dates, and only the better of two discounts ever applies.

Invoices show your registration number and download as a PDF with no login. Your customer list and sales come out as a spreadsheet whenever you ask.

The trial is 15 days with no card details, and after it the bill is one monthly figure with 0% of your sales taken. There is no online payment, so the customer pays cash or by card machine at the door and no card details exist in the system at all.

Frequently asked questions

Do I need a website before I can take orders online?

No. An ordering page is enough, and it is the part a customer actually uses. You can add your ordering link to your Google Business Profile and your WhatsApp profile the same day.

Should I build a mobile app instead?

Almost certainly not, at least not first. Asking somebody to install software for a restaurant they visit twice a month is a big request, and a web page reaches everybody with no download.

How do customers pay?

Cash or your own card machine when the food arrives. There is no online payment step, which also means no card details are stored anywhere.

Can I keep using WhatsApp for orders?

Yes, and you should. The change is that the customer fills in a form instead of typing a list, and the finished order lands in your group chat already written out. WhatsApp stays where your team works.

How quickly can a small kitchen be running?

Usually the same day. A menu that already exists as a spreadsheet can be uploaded in one go rather than typed dish by dish, which is the step that stops most people.