What if you could walk into a restaurant and have your drinks ordered straight away? In an astounding show of speed, mobile drinks ordering is now available — and helps your restaurant grow with the times.
Find out below how a free online ordering restaurant app can help you promote restaurant efficiency in 2021.
Don’t forget to discover how a free app helps your walk-in restaurant in other ways. Learn about standby seating, a special technique to welcome more customers with pre-ordered drinks.
Figure 1. Negroni by Mario Bonifacio via Flickr
Using Mobile Drinks Ordering Today
It’s inevitable. Step into any popular walk-in restaurant and you’ll likely have to hang around for a table.
Depending on the restaurant’s table turnover rate, dwell time will usually vary between 20—40 minutes. An integral part of the walk-in experience, this wait challenges our patience.
In addition, we have to select food and drink from a menu, wait for a member of staff to take our order, and then hang tight for the kitchen to dish up our selection.
Granted: the use of QR code menus has reshaped this process — no longer are we exchanging long rectangular menus between hands, a scenario we were all accustomed to before COVID-19.
These little black-and-white squares may make table ordering more efficient, but they don’t speed up processes in the kitchen: you’ll still wait a good while for the main course meal with drinks — especially if you’ve walked in on a busy night.
Today’s guests can save time and make pre-orders at your restaurant, a digital arrangement that enables customers to land straight into the dining out experience whenever they enter your restaurant.
The time-conscious, wristwatch-tapping customer wants to pre-order from your restaurant’s menu because it quickens things up.
Guests are keen to know what is already in store for them: a table with their orders already present measures up to their expectations. In fact, an industry-wide survey on apps showed that the majority of its respondents would choose to pre-order due to “ease of use” — a quicker way to experience eating out. What’s more, a 2017 survey showed that over 65 percent of customers thought restaurant pre-ordering a good idea.
So convenience plays a key role in choosing to offer your guests mobile drinks ordering. Think about what customers want now; in doing so, it’s a good idea to bear the above points in mind.
Sell in Advance with a Mobile Ordering System for Restaurants
There’s a bonus: Your restaurant receives payments before guests have even arrived. The next ten parties coming in the following hour have already paid £100+ on various beverages, pints of lager, glasses of wine, etc.
It’s easy to underestimate the role excitement plays in making restaurant pre-orders work. See it from the customer’s perspective — they approach your restaurant expecting results, anticipating top-quality food and fine service to boot.
Now an effective ordering system is there to amplify their experience. This is often overlooked in the restaurant industry, meaning lost guest opportunities and lost revenue. Online ordering has taken the catering world by storm — why shouldn’t restaurants join in on the benefits too?
Figure 2. Wine Glass by Alex Ranaldi via Flickr
Why Mobile Drinks Ordering Works?
With such a system in place, restaurants may earn money before taking customers; but customers share the benefits too. It’s all about making things simpler for customers, offering a more interactive service beyond the dining table.
This works via a simple-to-use order form. Stylish and nifty, the whole process fits into the customer’s pocket.
Essentially when someone enters your virtual queue they receive an SMS confirmation with details on their wait, including a link to a mobile drink offer. Selecting this link reveals an option screen, where customers can select from your restaurant’s drink catalogue, displaying special offers.
When customers make a payment it’s not a problem for them to fill out payment details: waiting elsewhere they have plenty of time to fill in card details or use services such as Apple and Google pay.
Otherwise, it’s a tedious experience. Restaurants deal with no-shows for various reasons, from a sudden change in plans to plain forgetfulness on the customer’s part. However, the one-two combination of confirmation messages and drinks pre-ordering links secure a customer’s return — especially if they’ve already paid for beverages. After all, who would let a perfectly good drink spoil?
Figure 3. Drink by Kjersti Magnussen via Flickr
Introducing Mobile Drinks Ordering — Free Online Ordering Restaurant App
Often, a mobile ordering system for restaurants will charge restaurateurs money to process customer payments.
It’s common practice to follow traditional payment aggregator formulae, involving payment providers, gateways, and banks.
Things can get more complicated when, for instance, processing credit cards or having to apply for merchant accounts that come with more costs. As with all point-of-sale systems, processing fees with major banks are inevitable, but with Carbonara App, things are a little different.
Featuring a free drinks pre-ordering system, Carbonara App creates a worry-free experience for restaurateurs to deliver customer pre-orders. Developed with the finance-conscious in mind, our App has no commission or mark-up fees — in a sentence, we take no cut of the restaurant revenue.
When a customer completes a purchase, the full amount immediately transfers to your restaurant’s account (minus external processing fees, depending on things like the value of a payment or the customer’s card issuer). As such, there are no deduction fees from Carbonara App.
In the meantime, drinks pre-ordering remains in its testing stage, and as such, Carbonara App temporarily covers processing fees. We work closely with Stripe, a payment-processing platform, to make this happen.
The added bonus is this: our pre-ordering system supports multiple currencies and adapts them as appropriate. So your restaurant receives purchase funds in its own currency, even when international customers buy drinks.
Now, with Carbonara App, you can let customers buy beverages and make bonus revenue with no extra expenses on the app store. Finally, customers can now enjoy the extra speed of having a drink at the ready, mobilizing fast orders according to today’s needs.
Try out our completely free app. Contact us with any questions you may have — let’s allow customers to pre-order alcohol online today!
