How OrderUp Can Help Increase Restaurant Profits
How OrderUp can support restaurants with minimum wage increases and the tip credit in the United States.
Restaurant owners across the country felt the pressure of the newly proposed “Raise the Wage” bill. With operating costs at an all time high, combined with the Covid related recovery, put restaurants under immense financial pressure.
The tipped minimum is rising from $2.13 to $4.95 in 2021, and will increase by $2 in subsequent years – eventually reaching $14.95 in 2026, and eliminating the tip credit entirely.
This puts immense financial pressure on restaurants in states like Texas, Georgia and Alabama who have been operating, and creating numerous jobs using the tip credit.
So what’s the solution?
Lay off your loyal and much-needed employees?
Hike up food prices and risk losing customers?
Sacrifice quality ingredients to lower costs?
Well, what if you didn’t have to do any of the above to remain profitable despite rising wages?
Would you consider it?
At OrderUp, we believe that we have a solution to keep your restaurant running strong, and position yourself for immediate and future success. And the best part – you don’t have to lay anyone off, serve cheaper food, increase prices, or provide a lower level of service.
It all starts with a free QR code menu
There’s a million “free qr code menu” generators out there. We know.
What makes ours unique is that they are designed specifically for smartphones and mobile devices. Instead of a hard-to-read PDF, our mobile-friendly digital menus are actually their own dynamically generated website.
Here are some of the benefits:
Unlimited Menus: Easily switch between, breakfast, lunch, dinner, brunch, happy hour, college game-day… and so on. We support as many menus as your restaurant needs.
Easy to update: Menus can be easily updated or changed directly from your phone, laptop or tablet in real time. This includes sold-out items, new specials etc..
User Experience: Guests love our menus because they’re super easy to use and navigate. Using categories, customers can easily search your menu without having to pinch their phone and scroll around.
Here’s an example of one of our Partners’ menus before and after:
As you can see, the existing menu (left) looks great, but when accessed via mobile device, it becomes very hard to read and navigate – forcing guests to pinch and drag to view items.
Their OrderUp menu (right) is designed for mobile devices and has categories to easily navigate.
4 Benefits of QR Code Ordering System
Allow guests to order directly from their phone.
Empowering guests to order straight from their phone isn’t a new idea. Think of Uber, DoorDash and Even Amazon – all of your customers are used to ordering just about everything from their mobile device. Studies have shown that contactless order and pay can increase average check size by 12%.
A study by Tacit found that 67% will actually visit restaurants that offer digital ordering more often.
Here’s where you’ll begin to see the opportunities to increase average check size with a very high level of certainty.
Recommended In-Menu Add-Ons
Did you know that about 31% of revenue in eCommerce comes from recommended items? That’s considering that these online shoppers have carts (which they often abandon). In a restaurant setting, no one is going to “abandon” their cart while out for dinner with their friends or family.
Suggested wine or beer pairings:
“Know what pairs perfectly with spicy wings? An ice-cold pint of Lonestar – Make it Texas-Sized for an extra $1”
“Other guests enjoyed this $50 bottle of wine to compliment their salmon dish”
“Make that glass of pinot a 9oz for just $2”
Food Add-Ons:
“Add extra bacon to that burger for $__”
“Add extra cheese for..”
You get the gist. This alone has the capability to increase average check size, almost without question. You can learn more about Recommended add ons in our latest post about optimizing and engineering a digital menu.
Dietary Preferences & Food Waste:
There’s no question that dietary preferences are on the rise across the world. Plant-based meat alternative sales soared by 138% at the beginning of the pandemic.
Whether it’s vegan, vegetarian, flexitarian, pescatarian, or something else; allowing guests to order from their phone gives them the confidence that they’re going to get exactly what they ordered. Plus, the digital menu makes it easy to filter and find dishes that meet their dietary needs, preferences, or restrictions.
How this can help you save money is by limiting wasted dishes or plates due to a small error. It’s bound to happen, but by using a digital ordering system, you eliminate some of the risks that comes along with specific mods, allergies, and food preferences.
This also creates a more comfortable dining experience for those who have specific restrictions.
Mobile Ordering Free’s Up Staff
Since orders forgo manual input and are directed straight to the bar or kitchen – it allows your staff more time to do what they do best – provide excellent customer service.
Ensuring all your guests are getting the attention they deserve while allowing more time to answer any menu questions and clear tables at a faster rate.
This leads to faster table turnover and lower wait times.
Accept mobile-payments
Tying in payment to the menu and ordering is the next piece that your restaurant can leverage to help offset rising wages.
OrderUp supports all major credit cards, apple pay and Google pay. These are commission free, and restaurants don’t pay anything extra. We use Stripe as our credit card payment processor, who’s rates are equal to any traditional payment terminal. Here are some of the benefits you can expect to see with OrderUp mobile in-house payments:
Increase Table Turnover:
Allowing your guests to pay the bill whenever they’d like is a game changer. We’ve all been in that situation where you’re trying to get the bill – but so is everyone else. There’s only a certain amount of terminals to go around, and only a certain amount of staff to split and process it all. These are considered low-value add steps, and decrease your restaurant’s operational efficiency.
Payment with OrderUp cleans up this process. A lot.
Guests can split the bill right at the table, and leave on their own time.
This is perfect for those busy lunch rushes when customers have to get back to work.
Or that busy Friday night when one of your staff calls in sick at 4pm.
Or when a terminal isn’t connecting and needs to be rebooted.
Or those large parties that are splitting 5 appetizers 9 ways but one person is taking care of the other’s bill.
Empowering your guests to pay for their meal right from their phone, it’s both improving their experience, and saving you time.
What about your staff?
A question we get a lot is: Will my staff still get tipped to the same extent? The answer is yes! A study by Square actually found that mobile and digital payments yield higher tips than traditional methods such as cash or magnet-strip cards.
OrderUp supports your staff by taking care of the most time-consuming part of their job so they can focus on their ACTUAL job – service!
Build an Email List for Marketing
Did you know that over 50% of consumers are comfortable sharing their data with a brand in exchange for a better service? And when it comes to receiving offers, email marketing outperforms every other channel by a whopping 92%? In some cases, a single email campaign can drive upwards of $3,400 in revenue!
This is what makes email marketing for restaurants such a big opportunity in 2021.
Sending promotional emails is the easy part, but collecting them in a natural, organic (and legal) way is the hard part.
That’s where OrderUp comes in:
We make it easy to collect diners email addresses through an optional email opt-in. It’s non intrusive, and a natural way to start building your email list.
How does it work?
We’re seeing opt-in rates of 7%-9% without any promotions! The bottom line, consider building out an email list! It’s easy, and is great way to drive repeat business and communicate with your customers. For more information on email marketing and sending emails, please refer to this blog post: Email Marketing For Restaurants: Why and How.
Back-end data and reporting
One issue with “old-school” POS systems is reporting.
Often, reports are not user friendly, and end up just giving an overview.
It’s great to know total sales, cost of goods sold, number of transactions, and so on. But what’s better is getting the true insights that exist within your data. This can be as simple, or as granular as you need.
For example, Restaurant Owner Sally knows how many chicken wings she sells in a day – but is not able to break it down any further at specific times.
OrderUp’s custom reporting can help Sally figure out the optimal time frame to offer her wings at a discount – and the optimal time to have them at full price.
We work with our partners to create custom reports and bring actionable insights to light – displayed in a way that’s digestible easy to understand.
The flip-side to real-time menu data is the ability to be more efficient in controlling costs, predicting demand, and purchasing inventory.
The great part about real-time data, you can make real-time decisions.
OrderUp wants to support businesses like yours, during times of uncertainty and rising costs. Through a completely digital order & payment system for your restaurant, you will be able to offset the cost of rising wages, become more efficient and actually impact your bottom line.
Get started today with a free QR code menu by clicking the button below.
