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No, Your Restaurant Doesn’t Need An App

Debunking a common myth about online ordering.

Here’s a question we at BentoBox hear all the time: “Doesn’t my restaurant need a mobile app for ordering?”

The answer, in nearly every case, is no. In fact, having an app would actually hinder your operations and customer journey.

What is much more desirable, for both the restaurant and the customer, is to have a mobile-optimized website that can do everything an app would do.

It’s understandable that some restaurant owners might feel that they’re missing out without a dedicated app. After all, we live in a world of apps. The most popular food ordering platforms, like Grubhub and DoorDash, are apps. But as we’ll lay out in this article, just because someone else is making use of apps doesn’t mean it’s right for every restaurant.

Still curious if an app is right for your restaurant? Read on. As you’ll see, the decision comes down to a very simple question: What do you really want the app to do, and what’s the best way to do it?

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The misconception about mobile apps

“BentoBox has helped us almost completely cut out third-party delivery apps,” the customer said. He’s the proprietor of a single-location restaurant and, in this meeting, was excitedly sharing the results that Takeout & Delivery created for his business.

The customer beamed as he talked about how good it felt to be able to shift his online ordering away from Grubhub and DoorDash and onto BentoBox’s commission-free direct ordering channel. It was exactly what we wanted to hear.

Then he said something else BentoBox hears all the time. “And I’m sure you guys are working on an app, right?”

The answer was no. We had to burst his bubble.

This customer was far from the only one to ask questions about launching an app. Operators appreciate that BentoBox lets them own direct channels for takeout & delivery, catering, gift cards, events — pretty much any type of revenue a restaurant generates. Many operators then make what seems like a logical leap: Why not consolidate all those services into a mobile app?

The reason is that apps interfere with a natural customer order flow. For all but the largest restaurant groups, apps do not make sense in terms of driving revenue or operating efficiently. A mobile-optimized website is a better solution.

Why apps get in the way

The golden question when it comes to selecting your customer-facing technology is simple: what exactly do you want the customer to do?

If you want customers to be able to discover your restaurant online and easily place online orders, a mobile-optimized website is the best way to do that.

That easy connection between digital discoverability and ordering is interrupted by directing customers to a standalone app. It requires the customer to 1) be on their phone and 2) switch to a different app in order to make a transaction.

An app also lacks the ability to be discovered by search engines. Eighty-six percent of diners discover restaurants online, nearly 60% of them by using search engines. Restaurants attract this valuable web traffic by offering web crawlers text versions of their menus, locations, and descriptions. That’s how a restaurant gets discovered when someone Googles, for example, “Italian food delivery near me.”

Putting your ordering flow in an app would not only not show up on such a search, but even if the customer did somehow find your restaurant, would then force them to open up (or worse, download) a separate piece of technology in order to begin the transaction. That is not customer-friendly, and it does not make your restaurant more discoverable online.

Now perhaps you imagine having a mobile-optimized website for attracting those new customers, while also having an app for your dedicated regulars. In that case, an app is almost certainly redundant.

Mobile-optimized websites are able to recognize returning customers, meaning they can apply loyalty programs and remember credit card information. For most restaurants, this solves the use case for the vast majority of their customers — even frequent ones.

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When an app makes sense for a restaurant

The only scenarios in which a dedicated app makes sense for a restaurant is when there is either a very elaborate loyalty program in place — requiring frequent customers to be recognized and processed in ways that web cookies can’t do — or when very high volume is at play.

An app makes sense for a national QSR brand, for example, because they serve millions of customers at thousands of locations across a wide geographic area. Their name recognition is high; the idea of a customer having their dedicated app on their home screen is reasonable. It makes almost no sense to expect a customer to be excited about downloading the app of a local restaurant group, with a handful of locations, that they visit only occasionally.

Even if a restaurant wants to gather very detailed data on their customers, for example, an app would not be the best way to go about it. Asking a customer to download an app is an imposition likely to turn away many would-be customers. Ironically, it’s precisely because the third-party delivery platforms are app-based that, if a customer had to download an app to order, they’ll likely just turn to that more-expensive channel rather than adding yet another app to their phone.

A website is all you need

To restate the important point, the only question a restaurant needs to ask is, “What do we want the customer to do?” Unless the answer includes an enormous quantity of customers at a high number of locations, with brand cachet to match, the answer is almost always that a mobile-optimized website is vastly preferable — both for the restaurant and the customer.