Restaurant relying only on delivery apps? Add your own online menu and ordering

Regular customers message your Facebook page asking for the menu, and someone sends a blurry photo of the printed card. Phone orders are written on a notepad during the dinner rush and sometimes get mixed up. Most online orders come through delivery apps, which bring useful new customers but charge commission, set their own rules and keep the customer relationship with them.

You do not have to choose between the apps and your own channel. Many restaurants use both: the apps for being discovered, and their own simple menu and ordering page for regulars, nearby offices and people who already follow them on Facebook.

What your own ordering page should do

Keep the first version small and reliable:

1. A mobile menu with categories, clear photos, prices and short descriptions in Bangla and English. Staff can mark an item "sold out" with one tap.
2. A simple cart and order form asking for name, phone number, area, address, delivery or pickup, and a preferred time.
3. Order alerts to the kitchen or counter, such as a WhatsApp message, an alert on a counter tablet, or a printed ticket, so nobody has to keep refreshing a screen.
4. Payment options that suit your customers: cash on delivery or at pickup, and bKash or Nagad, either through a licensed payment gateway or by checking the transaction ID before confirming.
5. A confirmation message to the customer with the order details and expected time.
6. A QR code on tables, parcels and flyers that opens the menu, so dine-in and takeaway customers can find it again.

Questions to settle before building

• Delivery area and riders. Will you deliver with your own staff, use a delivery service, or offer pickup only at first? Mark the area on a map and be honest about times.
• Hours and cut-off. When do online orders stop? What happens to an order placed five minutes before closing?
• Prices. Keeping the same prices everywhere is simplest. If you want different prices or offers on your own channel, read your agreement with each delivery app first.
• Who watches orders. Name one person per shift who confirms every online order. An ordering page nobody watches does more harm than having none.
• Prank and fake orders. For first-time customers paying cash on delivery, a quick confirmation call before cooking is a sensible habit.

Mistakes that make customers give up

• A menu uploaded as one large image that cannot be read or searched on a phone.
• Items that are finished in the kitchen but can still be ordered online.
• Asking for an email address, a password and an account before the first order.
• Promising delivery times the kitchen cannot meet at peak hours.
• Adding loyalty points, coupons and other extras before the basic flow runs smoothly.

Your team's part and the developer's part

You and your team prepare the menu text, take decent photos in good light, set prices, decide the delivery area and agree who confirms orders. A developer builds the menu and ordering pages, an admin screen to edit items and mark them sold out, order alerts and payment connections, and makes sure the pages load quickly on mobile data. This is part of the software and website development work I do. If you want to take payments online, the page on adding an online payment gateway covers that part.

Once orders flow, you can add useful extras: a repeat-order button for regulars, a simple record of who orders what, and messages about new dishes, sent only to customers who agreed to receive them.

The smallest useful first step

Put your current menu on one clean, mobile-friendly page with prices and a WhatsApp order button that opens a message with the item names already filled in. Share the link on your Facebook page and print the QR code for your tables. Watch how people use it for a few weeks, then add the cart and payments. If you want help planning it, contact me.