Online ordering apps in Nigeria, and the page beside them

Search for online ordering apps in Nigeria and you get two different things mixed together. Some results are apps a customer installs to buy dinner. Others are software a restaurant buys to take orders. This article is about how the first kind works for a restaurant, what it does well, what it cannot do at all, and why most kitchens end up wanting a page of their own as well.

What is on offer

The two names a Lagos or Abuja restaurant meets first are Chowdeck and Glovo.

Chowdeck describes itself as "Food, Groceries & Local Markets Delivery Near You", operating in Nigeria and Ghana, and it invites merchants directly: "Do you own a restaurant, store, or pharmacy? Join our network to reach new customers and grow your business with ease."

Glovo runs food delivery and more in Nigeria, naming Lagos and Abuja as its top cities, and asks businesses to "Register your business" through a partner portal with the promise that "our technology and user base can help you boost sales".

Both are real businesses with real riders and real customers. Nothing below is an argument against joining them.

Three things food delivery apps do genuinely well

They introduce you to strangers. Somebody who has never heard of your kitchen scrolls a list at nine at night and orders from you. No amount of your own marketing produces that on day one.

They carry the riders. Recruiting, paying and dispatching riders is a business of its own, and for a small kitchen it is often the hardest part of delivery. The apps have already built it.

They handle the money. Payment, refunds and disputes sit with the app. For an owner with enough to worry about, that is a genuine service.

Anybody who tells you these are worthless has not run a kitchen that needed a first hundred customers.

Three things they cannot do for you

They do not make the customer yours. The person who ordered is the app's customer who happened to eat your food. You usually cannot message them, cannot count how often they come back, and cannot tell them you are open late on Friday.

They set the terms. Ranking, promotions and the fee you pay are decisions made elsewhere. You can accept them or leave.

They are not permanent. This is the one owners underestimate, and there is a clear Nigerian example of it.

What Jumia Food's exit actually taught

In December 2023 Jumia announced it would cease food delivery across seven markets, Nigeria among them, by the end of that month. The company said the business had not achieved profitability since its inception, and that food delivery represented roughly 11% of its gross merchandise volume for the nine months to September 2023.

Read that from a restaurant's chair. Kitchens that had spent two years building a rating, a review count and a place near the top of a category lost all of it on a corporate decision they were not part of. The food was the same. The customers were still hungry. The shelf was simply gone.

The restaurants that felt it least were the ones who already had somewhere to send people.

"Every restaurant I meet can tell me their app rating from memory. Almost none of them can tell me how many phone numbers they own. The rating belongs to somebody else and the numbers belong to you, and only one of those survives a company changing its mind."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

Using both, on purpose

The sensible arrangement is not either or. It is a division of labour you decide in advance.

Let the delivery app do what it is good at, which is finding you people who do not know you yet. Treat the fee on those orders as the cost of an introduction, because that is what it is. We go through the trade in more detail in the guide to online food delivery platforms.

Then give every one of those customers a reason and a way to come back to you directly. A card in the bag with a printed code. Your own link on the receipt, on the packaging, in your Google listing and in your WhatsApp profile. A stamp scheme they can only join by ordering from your page. The practical side of printing that code is covered in the piece on the menu qr code.

The measure of whether it is working is simple. Count how many orders came direct this month against last month. If the number rises, the app has become what it should be: a way to meet people, not a landlord.

What your own ordering page has to be, to be worth having

A page that only shows a menu will not shift anybody's habit. Here is what Get Menu puts on the other side of that link.

The address is yours from the first day, on getmenu.ae, and you choose among 12 page layouts with your own colours and font, so your page does not look like a template. Customers open a link, with nothing to install.

Dishes carry options and add-ons priced individually, and a choice you mark as compulsory has to be answered before the item can be added. Every line is priced again from the live menu at the moment of checkout, so an afternoon price change is honoured in the evening. Pressing the button twice cannot create two orders.

Prepped portions count down as orders arrive, options keep separate counts, and a dish greys out by itself at zero. One alert reaches you when your warning level is crossed, and a cancellation puts the stock back.

The customer picks a building or estate from your own list and drops a map pin, which is the part that removes the phone calls. Fees can differ per building, and free delivery can begin above a total you set.

About 2 seconds after the customer confirms, 3 messages go out: a receipt to them, a ticket to the managers' group and a dispatch note with the pin to the riders' group. Each one is logged with whether it arrived.

Tables get their own codes, drawn for each table and dressed in your brand, with a print pack sent to your email. The code knows the table, so nobody types a number, and several phones can build one bill.

For the part that matters most here, keeping people, stamps can be tied to orders or to spend, regulars move into tiers that can carry an automatic discount, and rewards expire so they get used. The card lives in Google Wallet and refreshes itself. The Apple card is built and waiting on a certificate. There is more on designing a scheme people actually use in the guide to a restaurant loyalty program.

Coupons take caps, exclusions and end dates. Any three dishes can be bundled at one price. Two discounts never combine by accident, because only the better one lands. Invoices carry your registration number as a PDF with no login, and your customer list and sales export to a spreadsheet whenever you want them, including on your last day with us.

The trial lasts 15 days and needs no card details. After that it is one monthly figure with 0% of your sales taken, however busy the month.

What this is not

Get Menu does not bring you strangers. It has no marketplace, no listing, no audience of hungry people browsing. That is precisely what the delivery apps are for, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest.

It does not supply riders either. Your own riders, or a logistics company you hire, do the driving, and the system sends them the address and the pin.

And it takes no payment online. Customers pay cash or by your card machine at the door, so no card details are held anywhere in the system.

Frequently asked questions

Should I leave the delivery apps?

Usually not. They are the cheapest way to be found by somebody who has never heard of you. The change worth making is having somewhere for the second order to go.

Can I use a delivery app and my own page together?

Yes, and most restaurants that do this well run both. The app brings new people in, and your own page carries the regulars, the loyalty stamps and the customers whose numbers you keep.

What happens if an app leaves Nigeria?

You lose the listing and the rating built inside it. Jumia's 2023 exit is the recent example. A restaurant with its own ordering address and its own customer list keeps trading through that.

Do customers have to download anything to use my page?

No. It opens like any web page from a link or a printed code, and the loyalty card goes into the Google Wallet already on the phone.

How do customers pay on my own page?

Cash on delivery or your own card machine at the door. There is no online payment, so nothing sensitive is stored.