Forget online ordering, just sell lead generation. I could sell your service to my local clients but not easily for 15/month. If you tracked leads you could easily sell your service on commissions alone.

Do you mean lead generation to potential restaurants, like an affiliate setup?

Or lead generation for restaurant customers?

In this context it almost certainly means "We filled 68 tables for you this month. That has obvious monetary value to you. Pay us and we will continue delighting you."

Hmm, I'm not sure how we could directly correlate mobile website hits with actual customer visits. Although being able to record those metrics would be a great selling point.

OpenTable/Groupon has an advantage there since they have a very direct method of measurement.

Eh. This is the sort of thing I would (and might) recommend to my restaurant-owning clients free-of-charge, which is why they call me when they have other trouble, and why they recommend me to other people, which is where I make money.

That's not to say that it's a bad idea, just that it wouldn't change my recommendations, personally.

Sounds interesting. Can you give an example of how this might work? It hadn't occurred to me that you could do such a thing without physically exchanging money. Everything I can think of off the top of my head would involve tracking code that presumably the customer wouldn't be able to validate is legitimately tracking leads.

We have been contemplating adding ordering for a while now. To do it well, it's a non trivial problem with a lot of different challenges.

Restaurant online ordering providers usually fall into two camps:

1) Simple ordering that goes to email, fax, or phone. There is no integration with the kitchen and restaurants have to reconcile their reporting at the end of the day.

2) Online ordering website integration directly with the restaurant's point of sale system. This works better for the restaurant cause the orders can go straight to the kitchen printers, the sales reports are all in the same place, and the orders pop up in the point of sale system that the restaurant is already using. This is a lot more work (and a lot more expensive), and first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.

Additionally, not all restaurants are interested in doing online ordering (it affects the workflow of the kitchen to have orders coming in 'out of band').

I wouldn't want to limit our service to only folks interested doing online ordering, but it might be an interesting add-on for us down the road.

> ...first you have to convince the POS manufacturers to give you access to their APIs.

Or roll your own POS and blow the competition completely out of the water. :-) There is a huge opportunity here for the sorts of people that hang out on HN.

We'd like to do one in Python/HTML5, open-source, cloud-based server. Not sure about device interaction though, and can you imagine the sales cycle? Yikes. Are people on HN interested in being part of a project like that? We weren't sure (at ChompStack) that we could get enough developer interest, and it's a big project. We've written touchscreen software for restaurants before, for about 5 yrs.

The sales cycle may not be as bad as you think. The standard model in restaurant (and market) POS systems seems to be a large up-front cost of many thousands of dollars, followed by a yearly "support contract", which entitles the client to a "free" phone call to technical support as necessary. (Without an active "support contract", I've seen some pretty outrageous hourly rates for calls to tech support, and they will resolutely refuse to answer anything unless it's paid for.)

On top of this, the hardware used by these POS systems is absolutely terrible. The "new" hardware used by wait staff is basically a Blackberry with a tiny screen and a stylus which is easy to lose, sold by Symbol. The menu functions on them are complicated, and last I checked, the replacement costs rival a new iPhone.

...and there's a device out from Apple which attaches to the back of an iPhone and allows users to swipe credit cards through the iPhone. (Sorry Square, I really wish you had responded to even one of my emails, but it looks like that bus has left the station now.)

With competitors like these, you should be able to pretty successfully market a replacement using commodity hardware, open systems, and a yearly "support contract" that would entitle the customers to upgrades, etc.

One of the vendors, "Digital Dining", has only just recently started offering integration of menus into their customer's websites, and it's clunky as hell.

Your bigger challenge would be getting existing restaurants to convert. Once they pay out for one of these piles of crap -- and get it working after weeks of aggravation -- they're reluctant to do anything that might upset it.

But businesses like mine would be very happy to guide them through the transition. :-)

edit: You already know all this. But maybe someone else doesn't.

I've heard the general POS term of existence is 2-5 years, so a lot of restaurants might be inclined to upgrade I would think. However, restaurant owners can be a suspicious lot, and they require more than proof-of-concept by early adopters (not even sure who those would be) to convince them.

We think it's worth the time and the money, and we agree that the current clunky, antiquated hardware and counterintuitive software is a disgrace. It's one of those ideas (upgrading restaurants) whose time is fast approaching.

In regards to #1: sure there is. Assuming they are a sit down restaurant and have hosts/hostesses, put that fax machine at their stand where they wait for customers, if an order comes in via that, have them walk back and give the order to the expo guy or the guy in the "main window", they ring up the order as they do to-go stuff(at least where I worked at Mitchell's Fish Market) so receiving an order over the phone or via fax isn't too much of a difference. Perhaps some re-training.

I think maybe you are overthinking that aspect of it. I totally understand and likewise agree with doing POS integration with the kitchen(you can't automate it), but there are methods already present in every restaurant to getting an order to the kitchen, some are paper, some are DASH(Darden's system, microsoft stack) aloha system etc seems to be a pretty big one.