Your ordering platform is charging your customers about $2.50 every time they order. LocalOrder charges 50 cents. Same order, same customer, two dollars back in their pocket.
Built and run by Joe Glines. Two restaurants live right now.
A local restaurant's platform adds about $2.50 to every online order. Not to the restaurant, to the person buying lunch. LocalOrder charges 50 cents instead. That is two dollars saved on every single order, and it is the same food either way.
Tacked onto your customer's total, every order. Plus whatever percentage the platform quietly takes from you.
A fifth of it. That is the fee your customer pays, and it is the whole fee they pay.
That is what your customers keep in a year that they would otherwise have handed to a software company.
Why not zero? Because the thing has to pay for itself to stay running, and I would rather charge a real number I can keep charging than a free tier that quietly turns into a percentage of your sales later. 50 cents covers it.
Not a stripped-down web page. A real ordering app that installs on their phone like any other app, and works even when the signal in your dining room is terrible.
They tap "Add to Home Screen" and your restaurant sits on their phone next to everything else. No app store, no download, nothing to approve.
Special instructions on every single item, not one box at the bottom of the order that the kitchen has to untangle.
ASAP or a scheduled pickup time, with your real hours built in so nobody schedules a pickup after you have gone home.
Customers type "what's gluten free?" or "what comes with fries?" and get an answer, instead of calling you during the lunch rush.
When somebody asks ChatGPT what a burger costs at your place, the answer comes from your real menu instead of a guess or a three-year-old scrape.
Tip options built in, calculated on the food total and not on the tax. Small thing, but it is the right thing.
Once your customers have your app on their phone, you can do things a paper menu and a third-party marketplace simply cannot do. This is the part I am most interested in building with you.
Ask happy customers for a Google review at the moment they are happiest, right after a good order, instead of hoping they remember three days later. The Hen House already has this running.
A digital punch card, and here is the part that matters: you can message exactly the people who are one visit away from a free item, on a slow Tuesday afternoon. A paper card has no idea who is holding it.
Slow night, a special, a new item, closing early for a holiday. It goes to the people who already chose to put you on their phone. No ad spend, no algorithm deciding who sees it.
Drop a free stamp on somebody who came in twice this week. Unexpected little gifts buy more goodwill than the discount costs you, and they are impossible on paper without reprinting cards.
Which items actually sell online, what your busiest ordering hour really is, and how long it takes somebody to come back after they redeem a reward. That last one tells you if any of this is working.
I am building for a handful of restaurants, not ten thousand. When you tell me something would help you, it can actually get built. Both current restaurants asked for rewards in the same week, so rewards are being built.
Both of these are live. Open them on your phone and order something, that is the fastest way to see what your own would feel like.
You are busy running a restaurant. The whole point is that this takes very little of your time.
Your customer pays 50 cents per order at checkout, the same way the $2.50 fee works today except it is a fifth the size. Getting your restaurant set up and running is on me. If you later want something genuinely custom, something specific to how you run your place that takes real work to build, we will talk about what that costs before I start it. No surprises on an invoice.
No. If you have a phone or a tablet in the kitchen, you have what you need. There is no proprietary box to rent and nothing to install.
Card payment runs through your own Stripe account, in your name, paid into your bank. I do not sit in the middle of your money and I cannot touch your payouts. Restaurants that would rather start with pay-at-pickup can do that too.
You do, 100 percent. Not "you have access to it," not "you can request an export." They are your customers. That is most of the reason to do this instead of renting space on somebody else's marketplace, where your regulars quietly become their users.
You take your menu and your customer list and go. There is no contract holding you hostage and I will actively help you move, not slow-walk it.
One thing to know up front, because I would rather say it now than at an awkward moment later: the web address itself stays with me. Your ordering page lives at something like yourplace.localorder.app, and that domain is shared by every restaurant on it, so I cannot hand a piece of it over. Everything that is actually yours, your menu, your customers, your reward balances, your data, leaves with you. If having your own domain name matters to you, tell me at the start and we will set it up that way from day one.
Being built right now, because both restaurants asked for it in the same week. Digital punch card, and the ability to nudge the people who are one visit away from a free item on a slow afternoon. See the section above for the rest of what is coming.
Send me your menu and I will show you. No pitch deck, no contract, no salesperson calling you every Tuesday.
Email me your menuOr just reply to whatever text or email got you here.