Online orders are taking a bigger share of the food delivery market, as consumer interest in food delivery is up year over year. Morgan Stanley predicts that by 2020, the food delivery industry could account for 11% of all restaurant sales—a $32 billion opportunity. Customer expectations and their love affair for online ordering and delivery are now shaping how restaurants are using their POS systems to cost-effectively run their operations.
It’s a daunting task, but restaurants and delivery service providers (DSPs) are working together to transform the industry employing integration partners. Integration is part of a larger effort to improve restaurant ease of operations when it comes to delivery. When your chain looks to partner with an enterprise-class POS integrated digital ordering solutions provider, it is important to ask questions about their offerings.
“There’s more to a robust DSP integration than successfully sending orders to POS,” explains George Istfan, founder of NovaDine. “You have to solve the problem of POS/DSP menu incompatibility. NovaDine’s integration handles this automatically and seamlessly by creating compatible menus for each location in seconds, allowing for a quick rollout across the chain. Menus are kept up-to-date in real-time any time the POS menu is updated.”
Normally, menus on DSPs have to be created and updated manually for each DSP, per store, including pricing, out of stocks, sales tax rates and business hours. Menu structure incompatibilities exist; for example, a POS menu item may have multiple levels of modifiers while the DSP menu structure may not support it. That menu item then has to be “flattened” to have only one level of modifiers before it’s uploaded. The same item will need to be “unflattened” before sending it to the POS as part of an order. NovaDine’s adaptive menu engine handles all this automatically with no manual intervention required. Menus can be quickly uploaded from a restaurant to most DSPs and new POS items will be automatically added to the DSPs without concern of modifier structure compatibility. It’s a win-win for restaurants.
In addition, Istfan states that NovaDine will proactively keep the menu for all subscribed DSPs up to date in near real-time. Out of stock items are automatically removed from DSP menus and automatically re-added when back in stock at the POS.
To complete the circle with DSP marketplace integration and ease POS reconciliation, NovaDine can be optionally configured to send a different payment type and/or destination per DSP when sending orders to POS. NovaDine’s POS integrated House Account function can also be used to track receivables and payments from DSPs.
NovaDine also offers Delivery as a Service (DAAS) integration with various providers. With DAAS, guests place delivery orders directly on the chain’s website, and the orders are transparently dispatched to a third-party delivery provider. The cost per DAAS order to the brand is nothing, as the delivery fee is normally passed directly to the end user. DAAS is provided to NovaDine clients at no additional cost and with no additional transaction fees.
With research indicating that more than 50% of business owners are testing and researching new POS solutions for 2019 and beyond, it’s clear that owners are adapting their capabilities to accommodate the influx of digital orders. Make sure your POS software and technology platforms are in line with today’s consumer for convenience—from start to finish.
This post is sponsored by NovaDine