Should your restaurant have its own online booking takeaway?

We might all fancy a takeaway from time to time, and with all of the immediacy and convenience that smartphones and tablet devices now offer for those seeking all manner of products and services, it’s hardly surprising that this revolution has also helped to bring about a new way of ordering fast food.

We are, of course, referring to the services that have popped up acting as web-based intermediaries between customers and independent restaurants. Examples include Just-Eat and hungry house, and the way these services work is pretty simple, certainly for the customer.

All that the hungry consumer needs to do is log onto the website of the service in question, use the online search function to find a restaurant near them that offers the food that they desire and pay for their order by cash or card.

What’s in it for your restaurant?

There are undoubted benefits to restaurants signing up for a service like this. It could certainly boost your establishment’s initial visibility, with Just-Eat’s more than 13,000 participating restaurants in the UK alone helping to make it a big draw for food fans. Hungry house isn’t too shabby in that regard either, with its over 9,000 restaurant partners.

However, if there’s one major drawback to participating in a service like this one, it’s cost. Just-Eat charges about 10% of the total bill of every order put through, which could add up to a lot of lost money, particularly as your establishment becomes better known and there doesn’t seem such an urgent need to be involved in a scheme like this.

The time may be right for your restaurant’s own online booking takeaway

This is where you may begin to consider the advantages of your restaurant introducing its own online booking takeaway. Why allow a company like Just-Eat to not only eat (if you’ll excuse the pun) into your profits, but also be the company that your customer next turns to when they desire a takeaway, by virtue of the app featuring the intermediary service’s branding and marketing messages, rather than your own?

With your restaurant’s own online booking takeaway, complete with the restaurant’s own branding and colours, you can better spread awareness of your own business rather than an intermediary, while also bringing your customers all of the convenience that a service like Just-Eat or hungry house presently gives them.

Speak to SEO Local‘s developers today about how an online booking takeaway exclusive to your restaurant – created in accordance with its own requirements – can help to power your business forward. Our developers can have online booking takeaways built responsively and integrate any payment gateway into them to give people using these online takeaways a good choice of ways to pay.