mobile ordering with a Social element
February 20, 2018
PUBLISHED BY John Adams
SOURCE PaymentsSource
David Grossman has long wanted people to place orders at his store before they arrived, even before the technology existed to enable this to happen.
“I created a card that I would put on every order ticket that said ‘skip the line and order online,’ ” said Grossman, who has worked for Freshii, opening stores in the Chicago area and Twin Cities. He also owns a handful of his Freshii locations in Chicago as a franchisee.
The rudimentary email pre-orders at Grossman’s stores were helpful, but limiting in that it still focused on a one-on-one interaction with the customer. Grossman has since implemented technology that allows multiple customers to submit a single order, such as when buying a takeout lunch with coworkers.
Grossman is an early adopter of Ritual’s order-ahead app, and in two years adoption has grown to 10% of the business at his franchises. Ritual is deployed at Freshii on a store-by-store basis.
Each location handles about 700 orders per day, so Grossman said it has been helpful to have mobile ordering take care of a chunk of its volume.
Ritual supports about 1,600 eateries in Boston, New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Toronto and elsewhere. The app is a multiplier of sorts, since it targets group ordering from offices near the eateries. Merchants access Ritual’s social feature, Piggyback, which enables co-workers to “hop into” the order, which a single co-worker can pick up.
Read the full article on PaymentsSource here.