Despite thousands of U.S. restaurants closing permanently within the last two years, the number of food delivery sales has continued to soar to all-time highs. So if you don’t have your own online ordering site by now, you’re missing out on a huge portion of the market. But as a restaurant chain, you need an ordering site designed to support multiple locations. To make your search for the perfect food ordering website platform easier, we’re sharing the must-have features for any multi-location restaurant chain.
Ability to Manage Primary Menus
Managing menus for a single location is hard enough, but doing it for 10+ restaurant locations is downright impossible if you don’t have the right tools. In this case, the right tool is a POS system that allows you to effortlessly manage a primary corporate menu file. While all locations share a base menu, primary menus are flexible enough to allow regions to have their own signature items and coupons. And after you make changes to the primary menu, it can be automatically sent out to every location, helping you to avoid outdated in-store and online ordering information.
With SpeedLine, it’s easy to customize a single corporate menu to allow for different prices, coupons, and offerings at individual locations. With the "Store Groups" feature, you can make virtually any element in the menu location-specific by simply selecting a check box.
Access to Detailed Sales Analytics
As a restaurant operator, one of the most valuable commodities is data. So any ordering site that you use should give you the ability to track online sales data, which you can later analyze and compare against your in-store sales. This will allow you to decide what order types need to be promoted more and what dishes should be modified or removed from your menu.
As a multi-location chain, you need the ability to access statistics for not just one restaurant, but all of them. And preferably, you should be able to do it remotely from anywhere, not just at head office.
SpeedLine Store Manager allows you to view net online sales and the average online order size from all your remote ordering sources.
Automatic Coupon Management
Coupons have the power to sway the dining choices of 30% of all customers, which is why so many restaurants use them. But the problem occurs when customers attempt to use a coupon online and it’s not found in-store. This can result in disappointment and frustration for your online customers and in-store staff. That’s why you need an online ordering site that automatically synchronizes online and in-store menu prices and coupons for each order.
SpeedLine provides the ability for you to make regional or store-level differences in coupons, even going so far as to allow individual locations to create their own coupons. Or you can choose to restrict coupon changes to head office.
Once you have an online ordering site with automatic coupons, order tracking, and a primary corporate menu, you’ll be much better equipped as a modern restaurant chain. And if you want to further improve your multi-location chain, then check out these loss prevention tips for restaurant chains.
