Setting up online ordering for your restaurant or cafe website
GippsTech are now offering quick and cost effective online sales solutions for restaurants, cafes, pubs, and bars.
Get online and start selling for takeaway and delivery - websites built in 48 hours.
For $2,999.00, spread across six months, we’ll build you your own website with online ordering functionality. No apps, no third-party platforms, no commissions — take control of your own online ordering and delivery. The site is yours to keep.
As food & beverage businesses all over Australia find themselves in need of quick, reliable, and cost effective solutions to sell directly to their customers, GippsTech is creating WordPress-powered websites with WooCommerce integration for small businesses that need to start selling online as soon as possible. And with payment processing through Stripe, your costs for most sales will only be 1.75%+$0.30 per transaction.
Already have a website? Contact us and we can get you a quote to add online sales to your existing site.
What you get:
Your own WordPress website, with a landing page and online menu & ordering page, customised with your own logo, colours, photos, and fonts.
Two weeks of WordPress and WooCommerce support while you familiarise yourself with your new site.
Six months of hosting, as well as six months of website security maintenance including all security updates, backups, monitoring etc.
A social media marketing consultation and plan to help you let your customers know that they can order from you online.
No ongoing commissions, platform subscription fees, or recurring costs beyond normal website hosting and maintenance costs ($100/mo) going forward.
Domain registration available for an additional $100.00+GST.
Websites will be developed on a first-come-first-served basis, so if you want your website up and running as quickly as possible, place your order today!
If you’d like to speak to our team first before placing your order, book a free consultation.
Restaurants and COVID-19 restrictions on trading
With the shutdown of non-essential businesses across Australia, restaurants and cafes urgently need to implement takeaway and food delivery services in order to remain in operation.
For restaurants and cafes who have never done food delivery before, this can mean multiple frustrations and administration problems as they navigate their new normal. Some of these administration problems may include:
Staff taking orders and credit card payments by phone, resulting in pages of hand-written orders.
Mixing up customer orders.
Credit card numbers being written down wrong, or card information ending up in the wrong hands.
Losing track of which customers have paid, and which have not.
For customers who want to continue to support their local businesses, it’s difficult to find out which cafes and restaurants in the area are utilising a delivery service, let alone finding menus online. Many restaurants and cafes in Gippsland aren’t even on Google Maps, let alone have a website with the capabilities of online ordering and delivery.
If you are a cafe or restaurant owner, setting up online ordering and deliveries will be the only way to continue to operate.
We have put together this restaurant website requirements guide outlining how to get your business online quickly in the current climate.
Some tools we discuss in this guide are free online tools you can use on your own. However, if you are time-poor and need assistance in rolling out a new website quickly, we can help you. The team at GippsTech have put together a very simple $2,999 + GST Restaurant Website Package, paid over 6 months, with a turn around time of 2 days to get your website online, so that you can remain operational and in-demand through this time. (Note: it will take longer to start receiving payments, since Stripe may take 7-14 days to verify your bank account, but you can start making sales straight away once the website is launched.)
How to set up online ordering yourself
There is an array of online ordering systems and restaurant payment technology such as Menulog and UberEats, that you can set up yourself to enable you to make the switch to online ordering and deliveries. Listing your business on Menulog restaurant grants you instant visibility and ability to take online orders, however they charge a 14% commission on each order, which cuts the already low margins in the hospitality industry further. However, this may be worth setting up so that your customers are able to find you if they search for restaurants that do takeaway and delivery in your area.
Building your own website with an online ordering system lets you bypass the high commissions charged by Menulog and similar platforms, however, it takes significantly more work. You can build your own website using a website builder such as Squarespace or Wix, but if you’ve never built a website before, it will likely take you several days to a week of solid work and a significant learning curve. Unfortunately, there is a lot more to a website than just hitting publish, as you will need to invest time into choosing your preferred website builder tool, buying your domain name (eg. yourcafename.com.au), connecting the domain to the website, setting up the online store itself, adding your logos and menus, and getting your new website listed on Google.
How to get a website built for you in 2 days
If you are one of the many restaurant or cafe owners who need to get online urgently, and you don’t have the time to learn how to build your own website, we’ve created a very simple Restaurant Website Package for $2999 + GST. This package will include a one page website for your business; with an online ordering system and payments processor built in, as well as assistance in collecting the content needed for the site, such as a menu and some information and text about your cafe or restaurant. Domain registration can be included as an optional add-on for $100+GST.
The only requirements from you in order to build your website using this package is your business details, your menu, your preferred website URL, your bank details to connect the payment system to, and a couple of paragraphs of information about your cafe or restaurant.
It should take you no more than half an hour to an hour to gather the required information, letting you focus on the operational side of managing your staff and your business processes to switch to online orders.
A high-quality WordPress website built for the long term
The websites we will build for you in this Restaurant Website Package will be on WordPress using WooCommerce for the online ordering component. WordPress is the top platform globally for small business websites, and it is extremely flexible, allowing you to extend in future with the design and functionality that best suits your needs.
WooCommerce is an online store system which is also the industry leading solution in the field. It complies with all payment processing security requirements and is used for hundreds of thousands of online stores, including some handling millions of dollars worth of orders per month. Payment processing will be handled with Stripe, which can be integrated in future with Xero or MYOB to automatically import payments made via your website into your accounting system.
This dramatically reduces transaction fees for your online orders, since Stripe charges a transaction fee of only 1.75% plus 30 cents per order, which is vastly cheaper than the 14% charged by Menulog.
In our Restaurant Website Package, we will provide you with a simple template site which will include information about your business and either your own photos, or stock photos (if you don’t have any high quality photos of your business or dishes). All online ordering functionality will be fully built out in the template website, it will even calculate delivery fees for you and will allow you to automatically charge customers based on delivery vs pickup at the time of order. We are keeping the design of the site simple in order to keep costs low, so initially you will only be able to customise your colours, logo, fonts, text content and menu. However, as a WordPress website, your site will be fully extensible, so in the future or as an add-on service, it can be extended to a customised premium design to make your business stand out from the competition.
Using these industry-leading solutions means that the website you’ll get out of this package will be high quality, even if it is very simple to start with. This would not be a throwaway website the way a website you build yourself on Wix would be likely to be; but instead the foundation for a high-quality professional website for your business, able to continue to be developed into the future.
With the online ordering solution already in-built into the site, you can continue to operate your business throughout this crisis, whilst still giving you the option to enhance and update your website at a later date.
Ongoing costs and comparison vs Menulog
To make the cost of website development more accessible to small businesses, particularly at this difficult time, we’re offering the $2,999 cost of this package to be spread out over 6 months. You’ll pay $500/month payment for the first 6 months, plus the 1.75% + 30 cents Stripe fee per transaction.
By comparison, if you use Menulog, you’ll be billed 14% for each transaction. If your restaurant or cafe makes more than $4,333 in sales per month or more than $52,000 in annual sales, in comparison, you will pay less per month to have your own website developed than by using Menulog.
Setting up your own website ends up being much cheaper than using Menulog.
See below for a cost comparison.
Ongoing costs after 6 months
Every website needs hosting on a physical computer to keep the website available to your customers. In addition, WordPress websites also need ongoing maintenance to apply security updates, similar to your Windows or Mac computer. Websites that process payments also need a firewall in order to protect your customers and keep transactions secure. Our $100/month website hosting and maintenance package covers includes all of these. After your 6-month contract is concluded, we can continue hosting and maintaining your site for $100/month+GST, in order to keep your website available, safe, secure and error-free. As before, this is vastly cheaper than using Menulog - if you do at least $1000/month of takeaway sales, you will be saving money compared to using Menulog.
Government funding available for your industry
In some areas, grants may be available to assist businesses to adapt and continue operations during the COVID-19 shutdown. For example, Latrobe Valley Authority currently has grants open that cover up to $5k in professional services, which can be used for website development. City of Melbourne also has grants specifically for businesses to adapt to COVID-19, including up to $5k for digitisation. Other regions may also have grants available.
We have worked with over 30 businesses in the past to help them apply for grants to fund websites, digital marketing and other projects. While we cannot make any guarantees about whether any grants may be suitable to your business, we are happy to discuss ways we can help you apply for a grant in a free half-hour consultation.
Book your Restaurant Website Package today
In light of the current situation regarding COVID-19, it is time to innovate and pivot your business to online orders, so that you can remain operational.
Our package will allow your website to go live in just two days, to minimise the disruption to your business, and will very quickly pay for itself by allowing you to sell online at better margins compared to using a system like Menulog.
We hope that this guide has proved helpful for you at this time. If you would like to book a Restaurant Website Package for your business, please complete the online order form here, or if you have further questions please feel free to set up a free half-hour consultation call with a member of our team below.
Websites will take 48h to set up, and will be developed on a first-come-first-served basis. If you want your website up and running as quickly as possible, place your order today!