How to compare restaurant online ordering platforms

Comparing online ordering platforms without being sold to

Most comparison pages are written by one of the vendors. So is this one, and the way we have tried to deal with that is to use the same questions and the same sources for everyone, including ourselves, and to leave cells empty rather than fill them with guesses.

The categories matter more than the brands

The practical difference between products is mostly which category they belong to. A POS-bundled product is tidy and tied; an independent platform is flexible and needs a POS connection; middleware is for operations juggling many channels; a website-builder plugin is for a simple pickup menu. Decide the category first. Within a category the products are closer than their marketing suggests, and the seven questions above separate them quickly.

Commission-free is not cost-free

Several products in the table describe themselves as commission-free. That is a true statement about one line and says nothing about the others. ChowNow publishes a monthly plan plus a per-transaction fee. Owner.com publishes a monthly plan plus either a 5 per cent restaurant fee or a higher flat rate, and a 5 per cent fee paid by guests. Square Online’s free plan is paid for through card processing at 3.3 per cent plus 30 cents in the US. Tuckly charges no platform commission, a subscription, and your gateway charges its own fee. Each of those is a legitimate model; the mistake is comparing a headline against a total. The online ordering cost calculator exists to put totals next to totals.

Load your own menu before you judge anything

A demo with the vendor’s sample menu shows you the product at its best. Ask to load twenty of your own items, with your variants and add-ons, and then place an order from a phone as a customer would. Time it. Then open the order screen and move that order through to ready. Ten minutes of this tells you more than an hour of slides, and it is the only way to find out whether the menu editor copes with a half-and-half pizza or a thali with three choices.

Delivery is the hardest question and the least answered

Vendor sites talk about delivery loosely. The useful questions are: which courier services are integrated, in which cities, what the restaurant pays per trip, what happens when no courier accepts, and whether your own drivers can be assigned from the same screen. Tuckly’s answers are on the delivery management page: Porter in the Indian cities it covers, with automation listed as pending validation; your own drivers anywhere; pickup anywhere. We would rather you read that and decide than find out at launch.

POS integration: ask for the status in writing

Every platform has an integrations page. Few of them say what each integration does. Toast grants API access through a partner programme with certification; Square’s APIs are open; Clover approves developer accounts per market; Lightspeed reserves K-Series access for partners; Petpooja issues credentials to approved partners. A vendor can only be as integrated as those programmes allow, and the honest ones say where they are in the process. Tuckly’s integrations directory lists a status per system: available, in development, pending validation, or contact us.

Country availability is a hard filter

Payment processing is the usual limit. Square processes payments in eight countries. Stripe and Razorpay serve different markets at different published rates. A platform that cannot take payment in your country is not an option, however good its reviews. Tuckly’s market pages for India and the other countries it serves set out the local considerations.

Read the leaving clause

The most revealing paragraph in any contract is the one about leaving: notice period, what happens to the domain, whether you can export menu and customer data. A platform confident in its product does not need to lock the door. Ask us the same question; the answer should be as plain as the pricing.