How Do Restaurants Get Direct Bookings Instead of App Orders?
The tablets are occupied, the covers are raised and the month is still not in operation. Marketplaces add real additional volume, but here’s how to get direct restaurant orders, too. Calculate the amount of money you are left with after one app order, and then remove the buttons from your own Google listing.
In this Guide
- What a marketplace order really leaves you
- The listing fields that decide the order
- What your own ordering page must do
- How to tell whether it worked
How do restaurants get direct bookings instead of app orders?
By owning the links on their own Google listing, providing the searcher with a place to order or book quicker, and making the direct route clearly superior, since most app orders start with a search they could have captured.
Picture the pass at 5:45 on a Friday: three tablets going off in different tones, a printer jam on the second, a driver in the doorway. Marketplaces will deliver true incremental volume – particularly for a new opening or slow daypart and a complete shutdown typically costs more margin than volume. The argument is on the mixture.
What does a marketplace order actually leave you?
Take the ticket away, take away the commission, take away the food and packaging and what’s left is the real contribution, typically a small percentage of what the same order leaves when it goes direct.
| Line | How to get it |
|---|---|
| A. Ticket average per marketplace order | Last month’s statement, gross order value divided by orders |
| B. Commission rate | Your own statement or the platform’s published terms |
| C. Commission per order | A × B |
| D. Food and packaging cost | Your cost of goods, including the container |
| E. Contribution per marketplace order | A − C − D |
| F. Contribution on the same order direct | A − D, minus your payment processing |
| G. Difference per order | F − E |
| H. Monthly difference | G × last month’s marketplace order count |
Commission is not a result of revenue; it’s a result of the contribution margin, so a ticket price that seems to be survivable against a contribution margin is not survivable against the margin on that ticket.
Complete each line with your own statement, as we do not use any figures and your statement is the worked example. Rates vary from platform to platform; check on your contract. This is the way to reduce delivery app commission without taking a chance.
How do hungry people actually search?
On a phone, inside a few blocks, in the next twenty minutes, choosing from three map results on rating, photos, and whether it says open now, so the listing decides more than the website.
They’re the top three results a Houston or Cypress diner will rarely overlook. Check out restaurants we work with in Texas to see how this translates in the fast-paced markets and neighbourhoods in Texas.
If you feel a restaurant is superior to you on the map, read the reason why a nearer competitor wins the map before you change anything on the profile or rewrite any of its fields.
Who owns the buttons on your listing?
The person who put them, which in most restaurants is a marketplace that was added when they were first set up years ago and has been gathering orders since.
| Profile field | What it does | Who usually owns it |
|---|---|---|
| Order link | Sends the order to whoever is listed | Often a marketplace |
| Reservation link | Books the table, or does not exist | Often empty |
| Menu link | Decides whether they keep looking | A PDF from 2023 |
| Hours, including today | Filters you out of open-now searches | Rarely updated for holidays |
| Attributes | Answers takeout, outdoor, reservations | Mostly unset |
| Rating and newest reviews | Decides the click most | Whatever happened last month |
Go to your profile and look at the order link, reservation link, and the menu link. Google’s guidelines for representing your business state what a business can set on its own profile, which includes those links.
Once you have checked all three in that order and found a marketplace in first position, take back the links on your listing so the restaurant google business profile ordering button points to you, not to a third party marketplace.
It is not always possible to delete a marketplace link when the platform has a legitimate connection. Get your own link to first place and make it even quicker, which works well for direct reservations instead of apps too.
What does your own ordering page have to do?
Load fast on a phone, show the menu without a download, take payment in one screen, and never ask a hungry person to create an account.
The three failures are a PDF menu, a long checkout and a forced account. For first-party ordering, an ordering page built for one thumb would fix all three, and a direct order is worth more than its margin as it has a repeat guest to follow up with.
The three places your menu is wrong
On your own site as a PDF nobody can read on a phone, on a marketplace page that still lists a dish you dropped, and on a directory with last winter’s prices.
The PDF menu is hard to read on a mobile device, and Google’s helpful content guidelines say readable pages are better than files, so place the menu on the page as text. Every restaurant online ordering link should open that same menu.
Each copy of your menu will change over time, and cleaning up menus and hours that disagree across directories is important because the searcher believes the one they saw first, and a table is lost due to a mis-priced menu.
Why does your rating decide the click?
If there are two restaurants that are the same distance, the one with the higher rating and more recent reviews wins the tap, and delivery reviews might refer to a driver that you never used.
A one-star review for a cold delivery from the kitchen is the most demoralizing of any industry and a good reason to own the order end to end.
The simplest way to protect your rating from drive-by one-stars over time is getting reviews while the table is still warm by asking at the table before the card is signed and the guest leaves.
For the unfair ones that describe a driver you never employed, it helps to learn replying to the one-star about a driver in a way that is calm and short and keeps the room on your side.
Why do reservations leak?
A booking without a confirmation and a reminder is a guess and the most expensive empty table of the week is an unconfirmed 7 pm Friday two-top.
The twelve covers that did not confirm are the real leak in most dining rooms, and the confirmation problem underneath it is solved with a short reminder sequence, not more staff on the phone.
Filling the slow shift
If it’s a Tuesday, the direct customer list and the feed are more important than search for slow dayparts.
A Tuesday is slow because the people who know you are not being reminded, so filling a Tuesday from the feed works because your followers already know the room. When you discount a gradual move to a marketplace audience, you’re paying the highest price you can; when you’re sending the same content to your own audience, you’re paying nothing.
How do I know if it is working?
Pay attention to website clicks, calls and direction requests on the profile as opposed to your total covers, as total will not indicate whether the mix moved.
Do not touch the profile in any way before taking the baseline measurement. Those clicks, calls and direction requests are measured in Google’s Business Profile performance help reports, and are what this whole guide is about.
How to get direct restaurant orders, in order
Taking back orders takes five steps:
- Run the worksheet with your own statement.
- Fix the three links.
- Fix the menu.
- Make the direct page faster than the app.
- Then work the rating.
There is no way a restaurant without a delivery service can be a marketplace through a link. The first step in that direction is to own dine-in and pickup demand and let delivery stay where it is.
If you would like to see what ongoing support looks like for an owner, read about how we work with restaurants, read about marketing built around covers, popular times and the pass on our restaurants page.
We are a digital marketing agency at 13121 Louetta Rd, Cypress, Texas. Pink Socials can run the worksheet with you and show how to get customers to order directly.
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