Reducing the cost of your online orders

Many businesses within the F&B and hospitality sector are actively looking to reduce or fix the costs of their online orders as part of an overall cost-cutting exercise.

Ingredients, labour, taxes, rent, energy, and finance are all on the increase but there are still areas that you can reduce or fix your costs and your online ordering systems and orders, could provide savings of £1000’S a month.

Consider the cost of any aggregators or ordering portals you are using. Commission rates can vary from 15-35% per order, and whilst they appear to get the orders for you, the reality is at least 60-70% of the orders they provide are from your own regular, loyal customers.

By having your own branded online ordering system, you can migrate the aggregator customers on to your own system, removing the commission completely!

As well as moving your orders to your own online ordering system, you should also consider how you pay for your own system.

Many ‘white-label’ online ordering providers offer a cost saving by charging a smaller % than the larger aggregators, which may offer a saving, paying 6-8% is after all less than 15-35%, but even the lower % can soon add up to £1000’s a year in extra costs you can avoid.

In a previous blog post, we showed how using Slerp’s, Flipdish’s and App4’s savings calculators, you could still save a further £9300 a year, just by choosing a provider like App4, that charges a monthly fee and a commercial card fee, rather than a % commission on every order.

The final thing to consider helping minimise costs is to ask your customers to contribute. Providing your own online ordering service with faster payments and more convenience for your customers does add some additional cost, so why not add a service charge of 50p on every order?

Your customers understand things don’t come for free, and when they order through other platforms or aggregators, they can pay up to £1.99 in service charges to the providers, just for the pleasure of ordering, so if you charge a small fee they won’t mind one bit.

If you would like to find out more about how we can help you reduce the cost of your online orders call us on 01332 418 573 or click here to arrange a call back from one our team.