As a restaurant owner, or a web developer working with restaurant owners you might be asking yourself:

“Why Use a WordPress Food Ordering Plugin for Your Restaurant?”

I’m going to break that question down into three parts:

Why Online Ordering?
Why do you even need to add online ordering to your website?

Why use WordPress?
What’s so special about WordPress that sets it apart from other options?

Why WooCommerce?
What is WooCommerce and why should you care?

Why Online Ordering?

A recent study revealed that 43% of consumers order their food and/or groceries online for delivery more often now than they did before March 2020.¹

For customers ordering for in-store pickup, the number is 48%.

When half of your customer base changes the way they buy your product it’s important to adapt your business to accommodate the new buying habits.

We saw this with big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Best Buy.  They quickly realized that in order to compete with Amazon, they needed to significantly up their online-game.

The truth is customers value convenience and speed now more than ever. Why get in the car and brave the harsh weather when you can click a few buttons on your computer, and have whatever you need delivered right to your doorstep? 

It’s hard to compete with that. Best Buy, Wal-Mart and many other brick and mortar stores would be in serious trouble if they weren’t offering their products online.

The same principle applies to restaurants and local brick and mortar shops just as much as the big box stores. It’s much more convenient to order lunch online rather than driving to a restaurant and waiting in line.

The reality is if you’re not offering online ordering, your customers are eating somewhere else that does offer online ordering.

Consumers desire for speed and convenience has already been driving people to order more and more online for several years now. 

And of course, there’s the pandemic. 

For many local businesses there were several months where curbside pickup was their only option, and being able to offer this to customers kept many businesses alive, while others who were unable to adapt sadly ended up closing up shop.

Even now that most businesses are allowed to fully reopen, sales are still down and restaurants are struggling.

Owning a restaurant is already hard, even without a pandemic. Costs are high, and profit margins are low. Even a bad winter can be detrimental to a restaurant already floating on the edge. As a restaurant owner, it’s imperative that you find ways to increase revenue whenever and wherever possible. 

Surveys reveal that restaurant owners who add online ordering to their website increase their revenue on average about 30%².

There are two main reasons for this increase in revenue:

1. Online ordering brings you more orders, and
2. Online ordering increases the size of your orders. 

Studies show that online orders tend to be about 20% larger than in-store orders³.

The average monthly revenue for a restaurant less than 12 months old is $111,860⁴. This means a 30% increase in revenue from online ordering would bring in an extra $33,558 per month! That oughta help you get through the cold months.

The fact is people just aren’t eating out as much as they used to, and rent/mortgages aren’t getting any cheaper, and adding online ordering to your website could be the difference between shutting down and staying in operation.

While creating useful content on your blog (like a sample vegan grocery list for those healthy eaters out there) can help build long-lasting relationships & encourage your customers to make the most out of food in their own home, there’s simply no substitute for making it easier for them to place online orders directly on your website while they’re reading a blog post.

Why WordPress?

So why did we decide to build our amazing Online Ordering solution as a WordPress plugin? 

Well there are several reasons.

First, WordPress accounts for about 42% of all websites in the world. That number is even higher among small business websites like restaurants and brick and mortar stores. So there’s a good chance your website is already built in WordPress. 

Why does WordPress have such an incredible piece of the website market share? Because it’s free, it’s powerful, and it’s easy to use. For these reasons, developers love using it to build websites for small business owners. It’s powerful enough to do whatever the business owner needs, and it’s simple enough for a business owner to login and make minor changes.

It also has a very large, very active community of developers constantly putting out new themes and plugins that just make WordPress an even better website building solution.

Granted, we’ve already built a few other plugins and themes for WordPress, so we may be just a tad bit biased. 🙂 

WooCommerce Restaurant

WordPress also makes eCommerce super simple, which is another big reason why we chose to develop for the platform. With the help of a simple plugin called WooCommerce, your WordPress store can quickly and easily become a WooCommerce Restaurant, capable of accepting credit card and PayPal payments. By combining the power of WordPress and WooCommerce, setting up your online store is easier than ever.

Orderable took the amazing combination of WordPress and WooCommerce, and added a little bit of our own magic to bring you a simple, affordable WordPress food ordering plugin. Ready to take your restaurant/store to the next level?