Takeaway ordering system: what a UK takeaway actually needs

Half past seven on a Friday. The landline is going, a driver is standing by the door waiting for the next run, and somebody is reading a postcode back for the second time with a pen behind their ear. The flat number gets missed, the bag goes to the wrong block, and the tablet on the shelf keeps chirping with orders that lost a fifth of their value before the lid was taped shut.

What is a takeaway ordering system?

A takeaway ordering system is software that puts your menu on a customer's phone, takes the order, prices every line from your live menu at checkout, and puts it in front of the kitchen without anyone writing on a pad. For a takeaway it also has to settle two things a sit-down restaurant never asks: how far away the drop is, and who gets the bag there.

A photograph of your paper menu behind a QR code does not qualify. It can be read, not ordered from. Neither does a form that emails you a wish list: nothing is priced, nothing is held against the freezer, and nothing stops a request landing at ten past midnight when the fryers are cold.

Why do phone orders still run a British takeaway on a Friday night?

Phone orders survive because they are the quickest thing a hungry regular can do, and because most takeaways never handed their customers anything better to use. The bill for that arrives between seven and nine, when one person is holding a handset, a card machine and a pen at the same time.

Three costs hide inside it. Orders taken while distracted come out wrong, and the shop eats the remake. Nobody records who rang, so a customer who has bought from you every Friday for two years is a voice rather than a name. And nothing extra is offered (no side, no drink) because the caller is in a rush and so are you.

An ordering page does not stop the phone ringing. It lifts the repeat trade off it. The menu sits at an address on getmenu.ae, included from the first day, in one of 12 page layouts built for one thumb on a phone at a bus stop. The cart asks for a name and a number before checkout, so every order arrives with a person attached to it.

What do online food delivery platforms cost a UK takeaway?

Online food delivery platforms in Britain (Just Eat, Deliveroo, Uber Eats) usually take somewhere between 14% and 30% of each order, depending on the deal signed and on whether their rider or your driver does the miles. A shop putting £20,000 a month through the apps at 25% hands back £5,000 before rent, wages or a sack of potatoes.

Per basket it is easier to feel. A £24 order charged at 26% leaves £17.76 behind the counter and sends £6.24 to the platform. Repeat that three hundred times and the app has earned £1,872 in a month from the business that bought the meat, cooked it and apologised when the ride ran late.

The cost with no line on the statement is the customer record. The name, the number and the order history stay with the marketplace, so when a new grill menu goes up there is no way to tell the people who already like your food, and the only road back to them runs through the same listing at the same rate.

"Paying a marketplace to introduce you to a stranger is fair enough. Paying that rate again on the fortieth time the same stranger orders your chicken shish is a subscription nobody remembers signing."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

What a takeaway ordering system must do that a restaurant one need not

Three jobs separate the two, and all three turn up on a Friday.

Taking the burst in writing is the first. Between seven and nine the orders arrive faster than anyone can transcribe them, and a system earns its keep by needing no transcription at all. Opening hours are enforced instead of apologised for, so nothing lands while the fryers are cold. An auto-confirm timer covers the twenty minutes when nobody can reach the tablet. Each order gets its own status page that needs no login to open, which is a phone line that stops ringing with "is it on its way".

The address, settled before the bag is taped is the second. A pin is dropped on the map at checkout, the building is picked from a list you wrote rather than dictated down a crackling line, and the flat number is typed once by the person who lives there. The order that used to go to the wrong block because a six sounded like an eight now carries its own directions.

A fee per area is the third. Instead of one flat charge across town, you write the list of places you actually deliver to (estates, roads, postcode districts) and each one carries its own fee. A minimum order value sits beneath it so the £9 single-portion run never leaves at a loss, and free delivery over a threshold you choose does the arguing for you when a basket is fifty pence short.

One thing is worth saying plainly: this is a delivery-first system. Orders are placed for delivery to an address, and the money is settled at the door. If most of your trade is a queue collecting at the counter, the counter keeps that job.

Where do your drivers fit?

Your drivers need no app and no account. Once the food is bagged the order lands in the riders' group on WhatsApp as a dispatch with the map pin attached, and the driver opens a link that marks the drop as delivered in a single tap. The messages travel on WhatsApp because the whole shop is already in it; Meta's developer documentation lists order updates among the things the platform is for.

One order produces 3 messages in about 2 seconds with nobody typing: the customer's confirmation, the kitchen ticket, and the driver's dispatch. Every message is logged along with whether it arrived, so "we never got it" has an answer rather than a shrug. Anything promotional runs in a lane of its own that cannot hold up an order, there is a weekly cap per customer, and sending pauses itself if failures start to climb. That last behaviour is what keeps a working number from being reported. Where WhatsApp will not deliver, an SMS from your own SIM finishes the job.

How do customers pay, and who does this suit?

Cash or your card machine, at the door. There are no online payments in the system at all, which also means no card details are held anywhere for anyone to steal, and no chargeback ever reaches the bank account the shop runs on.

That fits operations where the terminal already travels: takeaways, chip shops and curry houses across London, Manchester, Birmingham and Leeds whose drivers carry a machine, and dark kitchens running their own drivers. It does not fit everybody. If you need the money taken before the food is cooked, this is the wrong tool, and better said before a trial than after.

What brings the second order without paying for it twice?

Winning back somebody who already likes the food is the cheapest order a takeaway will ever take, and no marketplace will do it for you. Stamps are counted automatically (per order, per pound spent, or only on the dish you want to shift) and nobody on the line has to mark anything for one to land. There are tiers for regulars to grow into, each carrying its own automatic discount, and rewards expire so they get used.

The card itself sits in Google Wallet with no app to install and a designer for its colours and logo; Apple Wallet is built and waiting on a certificate. On the offers side there are ten kinds of upsell (pairings, ladders and spend thresholds), coupons with caps, exclusions and expiry dates, bundles, buy one get one, and win-backs aimed at a regular who has gone quiet. Two offers never collide by accident, because the best single one wins.

What your accountant, and your EPOS, will want

This is the ordering side rather than an EPOS, and the counter keeps whatever it already runs. What comes out for the books: VAT invoices carrying your registration number, numbered in one unbroken sequence, downloadable as a PDF by the customer without an account, with a total that is the sum of its own lines. A sales dashboard splits the month by day, item and channel, and exports to a spreadsheet whenever the accountant asks.

Setting up is deliberately dull. Upload the whole menu from a spreadsheet instead of typing 140 dishes. Put counts against the things that run out, so a sold-out item takes itself off the page; cancel an order and the stock comes back. If the shop has a couple of tables, a code is generated for each and a print pack is emailed to you ready for the printer. Owner and manager logins see different things, old order details clear after 120 days, and the trial runs 15 days with no card asked for. What a plan costs sits on the pricing page rather than in an article that could go stale.

Frequently asked questions

How much commission do online food delivery platforms charge in the UK?

Roughly 14% to 30% of the order value, depending on the contract and on whether the platform supplies the rider. Deals where you drive the food yourself sit at the lower end, and a full delivery-plus-marketing package sits at the top. On £20,000 of monthly app sales, the gap between 14% and 30% is £3,200.

Can a customer order while we are closed?

No, and that is the point. Your opening hours are enforced by the page itself, so an order cannot land at ten past midnight for a kitchen that went home at eleven. Inside those hours, an auto-confirm timer answers the orders nobody has reached, and every customer can watch their own status page instead of ringing the shop.

Do my drivers need an account or another app?

No. The dispatch arrives in the riders' WhatsApp group with the pin attached, and the link that marks a drop as delivered opens without a login. Nothing is installed on a driver's phone, and a driver who moves on does not take an account with them.

Can I charge a different delivery fee for each area I cover?

Yes. You write the list of areas you deliver to and give each its own fee and minimum order, and you can set a spend threshold above which delivery is free. The customer sees the charge before checkout rather than at the door.

Will this replace my EPOS?

No. It is a takeaway ordering system rather than an EPOS: it takes the order, prices it and sends it to your team, while the cash register carries on running the counter. Plenty of shops run both, with the ordering page carrying the repeat trade the apps were charging a percentage on.