Online ordering system for website - take away fast food

Vegeta · 15 Aug 2014 at 15:17

Hi guy's I am in the process of launching a website for my takeaway and I want to know how I would go about including a menu on the page that customers can order from and decide to pay by card or cash on delivery or collection? There are a lot of companies out there providing such facilities but the prices seem a bit steep for me the cheapest being

Shortcut - 5% commission then VAT on top and the customer is charged card handling fees

ordys - £35 a month and the debit card fees are deducted from the bill (therefore the business pays for them).

I would assume a good host + some sort of scripting and a merchant service would be a cheaper option than the cheapest currently available? Thank you.

markeh · 15 Aug 2014 at 15:23

Basically you just want to be able to take payments for your orders online?

Is there anything in place on your website for this already? I.e. is the menu there? If so, are the prices stored anywhere?

Vegeta · 15 Aug 2014 at 15:29

Currently I have zilch setup! Sorry I should have been more specific. I would like to know how to take payments but also have a menu setup so customers can add/remove items and I can set a delivery area. I will be creating a website also this will be easy enough but i'm not sure how to create the menu part/adding things to the carts/customer accounts and taking payments.

markeh · 15 Aug 2014 at 15:30

Do you have server side scripting knowledge at all (PHP, ASP.net, etc)?

Vegeta · 16 Aug 2014 at 00:23

No knowledge in the slightest.

touch · 16 Aug 2014 at 01:53

Your online order process is the same as any online shop.
There will undoubtedly be pre-built plugins that do exactly what you want.
What did you use to build the website?

bremen1874 · 16 Aug 2014 at 02:26

If someone is offering what you want for £35/month then why reinvent the wheel?

Even if you knew exactly what you were doing from the start it'd hardly be worth the hassle. If you halved the cost you'd only be saving a couple of hundred per year.

Rroff · 16 Aug 2014 at 02:38

I would certainly go for a pre-built merchant package with the financial backend already in place - my brother did/does webdev stuff as an aside and from his experiences I'd highly recommend not trying to reinvent the wheel with it. He licensed (fairly cheaply) a highly customisable and very useful retail system that I'll try to get the name of.

Vegeta · 16 Aug 2014 at 11:29

Just been sent this by a friend on these forums https://www.braintreepayments.com/ - They seem to be the best and cheap too! The website creation won't be anything fancy i'll probably use dreamweaver or use a website host who register the address for me and provide one of those easy to build online tools they have where you place your logos etc.

EDIT: I was just after a 'payment gateway' but I didn't know what they were called there seems to be quite a few of them.

Vegeta · 16 Aug 2014 at 13:00

I think I've bitten off more than I can chew. I have no website creation past I thought they are fairly easy to create however I have no idea how to create a order form or integrate these payment gateways it all seems to be code related.

Woden · 16 Aug 2014 at 13:04

If you have no experience, you could just use a service like just-eat?

Vegeta · 16 Aug 2014 at 13:11

Woden said:
If you have no experience, you could just use a service like just-eat?

Just eat charge 11% commission on every order and there's a initial setup fee of around £350-£1000 I think. I don't want to be associated with justeat simply because they have dozens of competitors on their own website to mine! I want to keep it my brand only.

I am slowing learning via google (as always) to achieve what i'm after.

Vegeta · 16 Aug 2014 at 13:14

Wordpress - I might try my hand at this

touch · 16 Aug 2014 at 13:24

Wordpress is a good idea.
I think wooCommerce is the most popular shop plugin for wordpress, but i havnt used it myself.

dneill2006 · 16 Aug 2014 at 15:24

OpenCart is quite easy to use. Plenty of themes to choose from too just like WP.

Vegeta · 16 Aug 2014 at 15:26

Thanks dneill2006 looks like a good solution plenty of options to mull over this weekend!

Pho · 16 Aug 2014 at 20:44

Vegeta said:
Just eat charge 11% commission on every order and there's a initial setup fee of around £350-£1000 I think. I don't want to be associated with justeat simply because they have dozens of competitors on their own website to mine! I want to keep it my brand only.

I am slowing learning via google (as always) to achieve what i'm after.

Unless your takeaway is very well known (e.g., Dominoes) then to be honest, I think not using something like justeat is a false economy. Consider that most people who are after a takeaway want one because they're feeling too lazy to cook. It's unlikely they'd search for local takeaways, find your website, sign up and place an order. They'd either give you a call or just go straight to justeat where they may already have an account and can order something in seconds. Not to mention they'd probably be using the justeat app, which is another aspect entirely

.

You should definitely have your own website advertising your takeaway with menus and prices though.

There's also the fact that being on justeat will give you a great customer base from the go, and will likely get you custom that you'd never get separately. Let's say your takeaway specialises in vegetarian pizza's. I'd never look for a vegetarian pizza place but if I happened to see it on justeat I might consider it

.

The initial set-up fee does seem a bit steep but I suppose when you take into account web hosting fees, your time to build it and maintain it, and anything you may need to purchase to build your own site, then perhaps it's not.

Number_25 · 17 Aug 2014 at 03:31

Vegeta said:
No knowledge in the slightest.

This worries me a lot, especially as you're working with peoples financial details here.

Use a 3rd party piece of software please.

darreny · 17 Aug 2014 at 11:35

maybe call into a few takaways not local to you who are on just eat and see if they found the outlay and cost ok compared to customer takeup. you can always setup your own in the meantime and get it on menus and packaging to promote your website for future orders with a 5% discount if justeat charge 11%

Vegeta · 17 Aug 2014 at 11:39

I've got quite a lot of experience in this sector and I know a lot of other business owners and justeat isn't something I want to go on. Yes I will being use a 3rd party piece of software Number_25 I didn't realize it was a complicating as it was! I'm fairly good at learning software so I may not have any experience I can learn anything given time - I did make some flash sites in my teens (over 10 years ago mind).