Marketing Restaurant Online

One of the key ingredients to your restaurant success in today’s fast paced world is speed and convenience. Without them, selling food or drinks alone might not work as it used to in the past especially with iPhone and iPod generation.

Americans don’t have much time especially during the week days while the work load is greater than the time. So that means they also have less and less time for lunch. The average lunch break time is about 30-45 minutes depending upon the company that they are working. By the time they leave their office and drive to the local restaurant their half of the lunch break is over. Once they reach the restaurant there is a big line as every one seems to be  hungry exactly at the same time. It could take several minutes before they could get their food in their hands. This is a time consuming process and this doesn’t help the hungry customers who are in a hurry. This some time could lead to an unpleasant experience.

So the question is how can a technology and multifunctional device like iPhone help the hungry office workers order food seamlessly at a click of iPhone and receive it without even waiting in the line and without fumbling to dig into wallet or purse at the cash register counter. iPhone has been a great platform for any mobile application to provide mobile services like mobile order and mobile payment that it will make small restaurants to be able to provide the mobile services to their customers too.

Watch the video and see how a person can easily order  frappuccino from Starbucks with few clicks on iPhone and also make their payments by their  itunes account. Once the frappuccino is ready the customer gets the text message saying that it is ready, the customers comes straight to fast lane where they don’t have to wait in line. All they do is show the text order confirmation to the cashier and gets the frappuccino. It cannot be simpler, easier and faster than that. All in all it would take,may be 10-15 seconds before the customer gets the frappachino in his hand.

The good turn around time of a lunch customer from the time he orders and gets his  food on his  hand after finishing the payment transaction is around 2 minutes and 40 seconds in quick service restaurant industry. Imagine that time is reduced to only 15 seconds how many customers would you have served in 2 minutes and 40 seconds. Essentially you would have served about 10 times more of the customer. Now that is speed and convenience. Your food is prepared and sold in faster speed. This would be ideal to drive thru like Starbucks or Mcdonalds or any restaurant that has a drive thru. Another good thing about this is that there would be less chance of mistakes as all the orders are predetermined by the customer while ordering by mobile iPhone and is being sent  digitally. That means there is no manual entry by your staff in the order taking process and decreases the chances of error which is a great benefit considering that a single mistake could back log your line for several minutes. As the prime  lunch time window is only 2 hours between between 11am. to 2pm. loosing even 5 minutes is like loosing 20 customers. The another best part of this technology is that it has  bar code system known as Semacode which will allow to use itunes account for the payment transaction which will bypass the credit card transaction and speed up the pick up process.

Apple Inc. has already patented iPhone mobile ordering and paying technology. The iPhone application for this mobile ordering and paying is called “Quick Order”. What this tells us is that revolutionary technology is coming to restaurant industry whether it is just selling coffee or food.