Delivery software for restaurants: what you actually need

At a two-location pizzeria I work with, the first days of online ordering brought in around 25 orders a day. Nobody had to pick up the phone for any of them. Customers chose their own pizza, typed in the address and paid, and each order showed up on a screen in the restaurant with the full address and the right total.

That's what delivery software does. It moves the order off the phone and off the scrap of paper at the counter, onto a screen where nothing gets lost along the way, not the apartment number and not the “no mushrooms”.

Below you'll find what this kind of software should do and what to ask before you pay for one. I've also added what we found at that pizzeria after the first week, because some problems only show up once real orders start coming in.

How an online order travels

Most orders come from a phone. The customer opens the site, scrolls through the menu, puts a margherita and a salad in the cart, then picks delivery or pickup. For delivery they type in the address, and the software checks whether the street is inside your area and adds the right fee.

Then comes payment. Some pay by card on the spot, others would rather hand cash to the courier. With a card, the bank almost always asks for a confirmation in its app, and that's the first place an order can get lost (more on that below).

In the restaurant, the order appears on screen and rings. The sound matters more than you'd think, because on a Friday night nobody is staring at the tablet. Someone accepts it, the kitchen gets the ticket, and the order either leaves with a courier or waits at the counter.

On paper it's simple. The hard part is the edge cases, like an address 50 meters outside your delivery area or an order placed ten minutes before closing.

What delivery software needs to do

The first thing sounds obvious, and yet plenty of tools don't have it. The menu should live on your own domain, with your photos and your prices, not in a list where the customer also sees a hundred other restaurants. When you run out of mozzarella at 7 pm, you should be able to hide that item from your phone in a few seconds without calling anyone.

Zones, fees and hours

You don't deliver everywhere for the same price. Delivery downtown might be free over 80 lei, the neighborhood on the edge of town might cost 10 lei, and the next village over might not be covered at all. The software has to work this out on its own, from the address. Otherwise you end up calling customers to explain why their order costs more.

Hours work the same way. If the kitchen closes at 10 pm, you don't want an online order at 9:58, so you need ordering hours that are separate from your opening hours, with breaks and days off.

Payment

Some customers want to pay by card, others in cash on delivery. You want both. For card payments, ask who holds the money and how many days it takes to reach your business account.

New-order alarm

An order nobody sees is worse than one that never arrives. The customer waits 40 minutes, calls, nobody answers, and next time they order somewhere else. The software should make noise, on the tablet or on the owner's phone, until someone accepts the order.

That leaves couriers. If you have your own drivers, they need somewhere to see the address and how much to collect. If you don't, an on-demand courier service can pick up the pizza from you and take it to the customer. Ideally you can switch between the two without changing software.

What to ask before you choose

In a demo, every delivery tool looks good. The differences come out in simple questions that few owners ask before signing.

The first is what an order costs you. Some tools take a percentage of every order, others charge a flat monthly subscription. Run the numbers on an ordinary month. At 20 orders a day with an average of 80 lei each, about 48,000 lei a month goes through the site. A 15% commission on that comes to 7,200 lei. A flat subscription stays the same whether you get 200 orders a month or 600.

Then there's the question of whose customers they are. Someone who orders from your website comes back to your website. Someone who orders through an app with dozens of restaurants can pick someone else from the same list next time.

Also ask what happens if the payment goes through but the order never reaches the restaurant. It sounds paranoid until it happens to you. Below I'll tell you how it happened to us.

It matters, too, who answers on a Friday at 9 pm when something breaks. A contact form with a reply in three business days doesn't help anyone that evening. And ask for a concrete start date, because some tools need weeks of setup while others are running in a few days.

What we learned from the first real orders

On 28 October we switched on online ordering for a pizzeria with two locations. In the first week, one location averaged 16 orders a day and the other 9. The site had been tested before launch. Real orders still turned up three problems no test had caught.

The most serious one had to do with card payments. After confirming the payment in their banking app, some customers never came back to the site. They closed the app and locked their phone, like anyone does after paying. The money was held on their card, and nothing showed up in the restaurant. We changed the order of the steps, so now the order is saved before payment and reaches the restaurant the moment the bank confirms it, whatever the customer does with their phone. The fix took 5 days.

The other two were simpler, and we fixed both the same day. The order tracking page had an “Order again” button, and a few customers pressed it two minutes after ordering. The pizzeria got the same order twice. We removed the button.

The last one came from the pizzeria having two locations. A few people sent a pickup order to the wrong location because the selected one wasn't clear enough. Now it always shows at the top of the page and on every order button.

None of this shows up in a sales presentation. When you talk to a vendor, ask what they fixed last month and how long it took.

Frequently asked questions

Can I take orders on my website and stay on delivery apps?

Yes, they run side by side. Customers who found you through an app can order straight from your site next time, if they know it exists. A QR code on the pizza box tells them exactly that.

Do I need my own couriers?

Not necessarily. You can start with pickup only and add delivery later, with your own people or an on-demand courier service.

If your restaurant is in Brașov or the county, I'll come over and we'll look at how your orders come in today. Details are on the restaurant websites in Brașov page.

Is delivery software the same thing as a POS?

No. Delivery software brings in orders from customers, and the POS is where you see all of them in the restaurant, counter orders included. I wrote about the difference in Restaurant software: POS, online ordering or inventory?

How SiteCare does it

With SiteCare, the website with your menu, delivery and pickup orders, zones, hours, payments and the POS all come in one subscription. Start costs 199 lei a month. Pro costs 349 lei and adds the new-order alarm on your phone, the kitchen view, the courier app and courier booking through Wolt Drive and Tookan. SiteCare takes no commission on orders, so the only thing taken out of a card order is the Stripe fee. The plans are broken down in what a restaurant website costs.

At Dr. Sandwich, orders used to come in only by phone. Between 20 August and 30 September 2026, the site brought in 145 orders and 14,858 lei. Since there was no online ordering before, these are new orders, not orders moved over from another platform. The sources and how we counted them are in Dr. Sandwich: how we measured 145 orders in 6 weeks.

If a month's orders through your site come to less than 1,000 lei, you don't pay that month's subscription. The guarantee covers Start and Pro.

Your website brings orders. Or you don't pay.

Message me on WhatsApp with a few words about your restaurant, and I'll reply myself within 24 hours.