Resources are stretched for a lot of restaurants right now, so it makes sense that operators are looking for ways to cut technology costs. Online ordering can seem like an easy place to start. So what should you consider before you sign with a low-cost provider?
A platform that only does the basics of online ordering can cost you more than you think, in ways that don’t show up on an invoice. The right digital ordering technology helps restaurants increase AOV, drive higher conversion, bring guests back more often, and hold up when a promotion takes off.
The costs tend to show up in the same few places: reliability at peak hours, the manual work teams pick up, how well the kitchen keeps pace, and whether guests come back. Each one is also a place where the right ordering platform can help a restaurant grow.
Reliability that holds up at peak hours
Peak hours are when online ordering should make a restaurant the most money, and they’re also when many platforms buckle. One hour of downtime costs the average restaurant brand about $10,000 in lost revenue. For a 250-location restaurant brand, just 5.8 additional hours of peak-time digital ordering downtime per location each year could mean $218K in lost sales—the equivalent of 6,663 missed orders. (Assuming each location generates $150 in hourly digital sales during peak periods, downtime stops all digital orders, and those sales aren’t recovered later.) And we hear of providers having up to 30 hours of outages per year!
Hungry guests aren’t going to wait for systems to come up—they’ll likely order from somewhere else, and they might not come back at all.
The damage doesn’t end when the site comes back online. Orders placed before the crash may be stuck or delayed, so the kitchen remakes food that sat too long while managers spend the rest of the shift issuing refunds and apologizing to guests who waited. The staff who should be cooking and serving end up cleaning up after the outage instead, during the busiest stretch of the day.
Promotions can be a common breaking point because they're designed to bring in a flood of orders at once—as one major pizza restaurant found out this year. To make it up to guests who couldn't order during a 50% off promo, the pizza chain brought the deal back for four more days. So, on top of the orders it lost the first time, it ended up running the same discount twice.
One operator told us their team kept a sign on the wall counting the days since the last ordering platform crash, like a warehouse tracking days since the last injury. Nobody wants that number resetting during the dinner rush.
For comparison, Olo runs at 99.99% uptime across more than 3.5 million orders a day. That kind of reliability means brands can run their biggest promotions with confidence.
Revenue promises don’t mean much if guests can’t place an order.
Lower-cost alternatives often come with big promises: lower fees, higher sales, more growth. But in my experience, brands that trade Olo for a flashier pitch often come back after their first big outage. Revenue promises don’t mean much if guests can’t place an order.
Workflows that run without workarounds
An unreliable platform can create extra work even when it's up and running. Teams end up double-checking orders or building workarounds for something as simple as a lunch-only promotion, and that manual work piles up fast. These workarounds shift time away from taking care of guests, or eat into employees’ personal time.
Yoshinoya felt this right away after it switched away from Olo in search of a lower price. Adding customizable menu items took up to five days, and even changing store hours meant clicking through three different tabs. The team also had no way to see its order failure rate until angry guests complained. After the brand returned to Olo, the same menu update takes less than 20 minutes.
Paris Baguette used Olo for online ordering but ran catering through another provider, and its team was doing nightly audits just to make sure catering orders hadn't disappeared. After the brand moved catering to Olo Catering+, average catering sales grew 48% year over year, and the team got back up to 10 hours a week.
Kitchens that keep pace with demand
Imagine a slammed Friday night: your online ordering site tells a guest the order will be ready in 25 minutes. In reality, it’s ready in 45. The guest waits at the counter while a buried kitchen staff rushes food they'd normally handle with care.
Less sophisticated platforms often lack the ability to protect kitchens in this scenario. They give restaurants little control over how fast orders hit, which becomes a problem the moment volume spikes.
Without throttling, a manager has two bad options. The first option is to turn online ordering off, which stops revenue across the board until someone remembers to switch it back on. Hopefully before Saturday. The second option is to let every order in and watch wait times climb for everyone, dine-in guests included—which could mean remade or refunded orders.
Olo's OrderReady AI predicts ready times from each location's own kitchen history, and its order throttling feature paces to what the kitchen can handle. At P.F. Chang's, that meant a 20% lift in quote accuracy, a 1.3% increase in conversion, and a 50% reduction in manual lead-time extensions.
Guest relationships that stay with the brand
Attracting and retaining guests is hard. Olo data shows about 65% of guests who visit a restaurant one year don’t come back the next. A brand that owns its guest data can see who ordered once and disappeared, then send the right offer to bring them back.
That matters most when something goes wrong. Guests don’t know which software failed, and they don’t care. They know they waited 20 minutes past their quoted time or that ordering online was more of a pain than it was worth. Even when the ordering platform caused the problem, the guest blames the restaurant.
Most restaurants want to fix it right away with a quick refund, bonus loyalty points, or an offer to come back. Some lower-cost platforms make that hard. They may not support refunds or loyalty on direct orders, or the platform may control guest data instead of the brand, so the restaurant can’t easily reach the guests it needs to win back. On Olo, each brand owns its guest and transaction data, so it knows who had a bad experience and can follow up.
Follow-through that outlasts the free perks
Sales pitches for ordering platforms often come loaded with freebies, like a few months at no cost or bundled extras thrown in to close the deal. Those perks can sound great at signing, but they rarely make up for a platform that can’t handle the basics. What matters more is what’s running on launch day, and whether the platform keeps delivering long after the free stuff runs out.
Those perks can sound great at signing, but they rarely make up for a platform that can’t handle the basics.
Moving to a new ordering platform doesn't have to be a long, painful project. When Yoshinoya announced the move back to Olo, its franchisees burst into applause. Implementation went smoothly, and Olo specialists acted as proactive guides throughout the process, even when unique challenges came up.
Scooter’s Coffee was racing toward a marketplace delivery launch date it had set with its previous provider, and it needed help fast. Olo stepped in and had all 900+ locations live within a week, menus and POS routing included. The results convinced the brand to bring its app ordering to Olo as well. Olo rebuilt it in under 90 days, and every existing app user was converted within a week of launch.
What great online ordering looks like
When online ordering works, nobody notices it. Guests get their food when they're told they will, and managers spend the busiest shifts running the restaurant instead of babysitting the ordering platform. With the basics handled, the platform can do what it’s there for: grow digital sales by creating a great guest experience and converting more orders. That’s what Olo is built to do.
The food is the reason someone goes to a restaurant. The technology can be the reason someone never returns.
See what you're missing. Talk to an Olo expert to find out how much more your online ordering could be doing for your brand.
