Online food ordering is enormously popular right now. Statistics show that in 2022 the food delivery business was worth as much as 207.5 billion dollars, or roughly 73 billion THB. Your restaurant may be missing significant opportunities if it has no way of serving customers online.
Why does a restaurant business need to move online, and how can a Qashier POS help?
1. More customers
Putting your restaurant on online platforms grows your share of the market and puts your outlet in front of customers browsing those platforms.
A Euromonitor survey of Southeast Asia found GrabFood to be the strongest online food ordering platform, with a 49% market share. The household brand found that during the pandemic a great many new customers turned to Grab for food delivery to avoid eating out, while plenty of others ordered for family and friends whenever delivery promotions were running.
Hot on its heels is foodpanda, with a 21% market share and users averaging 18 to 45 years old. This group is thoroughly at home with mobile apps; more to the point, they have strong spending power and enjoy ordering online. So when you take your business online, you are aiming at a large market that is happy to pay for what you sell.
The delivery trend, meanwhile, shows no sign of fading. Surveys show that 87% of Southeast Asian customers will keep ordering food online as much as before, or more, even now that Covid-19 controls have been relaxed — the reason they give is simply that ordering online is more convenient.
The same statistics also point to menu variety as another important reason customers order online, alongside strong demand for food delivery in general, which shows that online ordering remains as popular as ever.
Think about it: plenty of customers may never have heard of your outlet until they came across it on an online platform.
2. Happier customers
If yours is a dine-in outlet with every seat taken, a delivery service lets your customers order online instead of queueing at the door.
There is also order-online-collect-in-store, which saves the delivery fee as well. Paying digitally like this lets customers order ahead and pick the food up on their way home.
Then there is the wider choice you can offer — a menu for quiet periods with a special promotion, say, or an online-only deal — plus the extra time customers get to browse the menu online before they decide.
If you want customers to add a drink, a dessert or a snack alongside the main course, incentives such as a discount during quiet hours or free delivery above a minimum spend will keep them happy too.
On top of that, putting your restaurant on a delivery service gives you the chance to trial new dishes online only, at no risk to the business, or to run online-exclusive offers that lift sales. All of this adds to customer satisfaction, because it is more convenient and better value.
3. Higher profits
Now that pandemic controls have eased and people can eat out again, dining out remains the option most people prefer. There are plenty of occasions for it — special celebrations, dates, parties — so you still have to run both the dining room and the online side. Hiring extra staff purely to manage online orders would push your budget up for no good reason, whereas a Qashier POS makes the outlet easier to run, and cutting costs is simply another way of adding to your profit.
And if your outlet is already on foodpanda, you will know the online ordering routine well: the order terminal has to take orders, manage them and print tickets for the kitchen. Rather than juggling several devices on several platforms at once, you can handle everything through the store management system from Qashier — one system, straight away.
For larger outlets where the kitchen is a long way from the POS terminal, you may have to put the foodpanda order terminal in the kitchen for the kitchen team to manage. Your staff then end up doing several jobs at once, such as keying sales details into the POS by hand to produce sales reports. Juggling like that invites mistakes born of fatigue, and instead of adding to your revenue it starts costing you.
The fix is to make your delivery operation leaner by bringing the delivery channels into the POS itself. You then no longer need extra staff to look after these online orders, because the system handles them automatically, smoothly and without a hitch.
Every function in one place, with the POS terminal for restaurants from Qashier
If you would like Qashier to support your restaurant business, get in touch for more details. We are ready to help, with POS terminals for restaurants and retail outlets alike, a capable POS system, and support from our team 7 days a week.
For more details, reach us on Line Official: @qashier.th or call 02 544 0267