I think there are a few things here that cause this:
a) You're going against the worst kind of incumbent- the 15 year old nephew or kid next door. He's cheaper, good enough, and "trusted". He is competition that exists a million times over.
b) Even if your system is better, they just can't be bothered to even get a good demo. You definitely need to build something so usable and good it's frightening, but good luck getting the full demo.
c) The guys that do have the ability to get in with a demo (GoDaddy, yellow pages,etc.) have no clue how to sell something good. What they usually sell is usually crappy, so now you have a fearful restaurant owner.
d) To crack this market it's a "heavy startup". It requires lots of capital, it requires sales, and it requires marketing. That's something guys like us don't like to often venture into. It's the same reason GroupOn requires lots of capital and other business like ReachLocal have feet on the street.
e) Churn is miserable. If you're on a monthly fee or provide additional services, good luck keeping the customer. ReachLocal has something like 80% churn,not retention, fucking churn.
Here's how I'd go about this for months 1-9. Crack the nut of an easy to use system (point b) and find distribution channels that already exist (point c) such as local newspapers, print shops, and others with a foot into the local market. You'd also need to have a system of people to crank out onboarding in a very cost efficient and systematic manner.
The other problem is going beyond, "hours of operation/location" + "menu" + "phone number" takes integration with on site software. So now your competing with all those Point Of Sale systems.
IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge investment.
So true. The restaurant market is a tough nut to crack but if you manage to do it you will be very glad you stuck it out. I only disagree with e. Our churn (tripleseat.com) is less then 1%. If you provide value and have a good relationship restaurant people are very loyal and will stick with you in good times and bad. If your churn is bad try annual pricing at a discount. Restaurateurs love to negotiate and annual pricing at a discount is a win/win
From experience, this is a very high touch business with intense sales efforts to scale. One company that's in our backyard here in NYC has had success with a sales and channel model is SinglePlatform.
They are a bit under the radar but are solving these problems in realtime within a huge market.
After delivering pizza for a restaurant for two years, I finally convinced the owner that his free, Frontpage-generated site wasn't good enough, and got him to pay me to do a redesign. I learned a few things along the way.
1. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out $1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for a brick and mortar store.
2. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training sessions on these basic tools.
3. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little as possible) for it and it does it's job.
4. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the "outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.
In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner. Slap something together and collect your $500.
Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.
How often do you go to restaurant websites vs. actual restaurants (not including Yelp or Google maps)? Truth is, they just don't matter. The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost. Also, a small business restaurant owner won't know how to operate a CMS. They just figured out email, remember? Worse, is that websites turn from beautiful assets to liabilities.
The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website. The kid builds it for $100, everything is great. Until the business owner needs to change store hours.
"What's that password that kid gave me again? What do I do with that password? He mentioned logging in somewhere... Now that kid has a job at Google or is doing a startup and doesn't have the time to mess with $10/hr type of work anymore. Crap, now all my patrons are expecting me to be closing later and I am turning them down. What a huge pain, I have to go find a new web designer."
The solution needs to be the anti-CMS. Something that's not as simple as email, but as FAMILIAR ... Email is simple, but it was a huge learning curve for that small business owner. And learning something else just as simple will be a huge pain.
"The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost."
The question I guess is why restaurant owners spend money having flash monstrosities built when most users -- especially those on mobile devices, which is a big use-case for restaurant websites -- would rather see plain-jane HTML with an address, phone number, and menu.
"The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website."
I suspect this is closer to the truth. The restaurant owner demographic probably runs in the same circles as the dilettante designer demographic, so the site is built by a wait(er|ress) with a copy of Flash CS.
> Because restaurant owners are barely figuring out what email is.
That seems a bit condescending to restaurant owners? Rather, perhaps, they are so much in the real world, dealing with suppliers, cooks, kitchen equipment, waiters, decor, etc., that navigating the virtual (websites) is antithetical?
Interestingly, here in Israel, there's a standard layout for restaurant websites that is almost always used, and it's pretty good.
I'm not 100% clear on the history, but afaik, a website called Rest.co.il (a restaurant directory), offers restaurants a service for creating a website for them. I'm guessing that initially, most restaurants that didn't have a website just created one through Rest. Nowadays, 80% of restaurant websites I visit are Rest-operated sites, with a very decent standard layout, including quick-info for getting their number, quick info on average prices of meals, maps, and detailed menus.
More and more restaurants are creating "unique" websites nowadays, but I think because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it. Pretty funny considering for other things in Israel, there is much less web-awareness than in the States.
If you want examples (sorry, they're in Hebrew, but you can see they look the same). Bottom-left is the quick-info, including information on accessibility for people with disabilities, whether the food is Kosher, hours that they're open, etc.:
That looks like a perfectly good standard template, both visually and in hitting the points of what customers want to know - menus (with prices!), hours, links to directions, some sense of what the place looks like, etc.
"because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it"
Very cool. There's something to be said for a genuinely good basic approach.
Oh my god, dentist's websites. I've one full year of dental school left, and as I'm looking around for a job, I sometimes wonder if I should just be a dental website designer instead of a dentist.
No matter how unique a restaurant's website is, it cannot satisfy a customer to that restaurant: only the food can. Thus there is little impetus for the restaurant to try to create a good experience online.
One reason for menus in PDF is because the menus may change frequently, and a PDF is easy to create from their actual print menus. It doesn't seem like a big deal to update both an InDesign layout and a website, but if different people do those two things, then it's quite likely a mistake will be made, so it's smart just to use the already proofed version.
I would be happy if most of the restaurant sites I visit used PDF for menus. They either have nothing, or a badly formatted Word doc that needs custom fonts (no, my install of OSX 10.6 does not have Papyrus, let's keep it that way).
I also deal with this while keeping my resume updated and tweaked. I have an HTML, PDF, and MS Word format. I use a print CSS sytle sheet on my homepage (http://ronnie.me) so that I can print it to PDF for the PDF version and manually create the Word version. Very tedious.
We've been quite successful at cracking the UK market and we run the sites for a few of the UK's biggest chains down to some smaller brasserie style companies.
I'd like to present some work which I think is good for a change (there are a lot of bad examples on here)
Also we've recently launched a product that allows anyone with a website the ability to have a content managed mobile site set up and working in no time.
Well, I think we're all thinking it- how'd you go about acquiring your customers (as that's a notoriously hard market to crack)?
Also, your pricing for "Chain" @PocketDiner seems wayyy too low. Even £49/mo for "Multi" is probably priced too low. The overhead per store per hour is probably more than that.
At the gourmet high end, my favourite is http://www.squarerestaurant.com/ -- I love the big, big pictures of food, and of course all the other information being available. They use the same format at Pied a Terre.
The annoying ones are e.g. http://www.wildhoneyrestaurant.co.uk/ -- useless use of Flash, this could be done in pure HTML and not force me to scroll a tiny frame with a menu. It could be much worse though, el bulli's website has a "virtual city" you have to wander through in order to select a wine from their menu -- "easy and fun" they say: http://vins.elbulli.com/elbullivi.php?lang=en
Having worked with restaurants before (and having a dad who owns a restaurant), I have come to the conclusion that it's just because most restaurant owners a) just want something that works and is cheap, and b) do not fully understand how web design can help or hurt their businesses.
Bad web designers tend to target restaurants (and medical practitioners) because they have a much easier time selling bad design to them.
Perhaps there is no business case for having a good, CSS/HTML based website when your business is turning over tables?
That's a serious question. Has anyone here been involved with a restaurant or food-service related start-up that isn't an aggregator or social networking play? Maybe someone can shed some light on the roadblock?
1. Grow their email database and they have contacts they can market to.
2. Engage the customers with the site. Keep them coming back. 2 for 1 vouchers anyone?
3. Provide the basic information like where, when and how much. Make this accessible across devices.
It doesnt matter how good your site is, if your food sucks you loose.
Restaurant owners don't know who to trust, and have no judge of the skill of website builders and/or price. They are often pitched by various company's and the one that eventually gets through will by no means be the best.
Because a lot of web site design services sold to restaurants are sold by hucksters.
p.s.: not all hucksters know that that's what they are. Heck, you or I might be one, without meaning to be so. Of course, plenty enough do mean to be so and do awright for themselves that way.
I'm working on this site right now, and I understand your concerns because I feel them myself. I'm hoping I can bridge the gap between dining and diner. :)
(Please excuse the design, since I'm the only developer :P)
I'd advise that you nuke the frontpage. Instead, make it location aware and show categories (ex: recommended, asian, mexican, american, italian, greek, other) with five restaurants each.
The individual restaurant pages are very clean and informative compared to what you might see on a restaurant website. The only things missing are restaurant hours and pictures of food items.
That's really cool, I like where you're going with One Big Menu. When I visit a restaurant, I want to know how good what I'm ordering is--I don't care if the restaurant is 5 stars, if what I ordered is the crappiest thing on the menu.
I'm working on something at the moment. Just hours + menu + some optional social integration.
Based the research/feedback I've done, decision makers have near-zero time to learn or use a cms (hence why menus are always in PDF) and near-zero budget.
So what I'm going for is a super-simple system much like about.me/flavors.me ... something around $5 to $9/month or possibly even free and use it as a gateway to other services (also working on a diy groupon clone and staff scheduler for restaurants).
I once built an online dish ordering website with interface similar to digg and reddit. It showed dishes in your area sorted by the number of times they have been ordered online. I still host a short video demo of the site: http://video.eatlista.pl/ (it's in Polish language, but still, could be inspiring for someone).
Anyway I ditched the idea after talking to restaurant owners, they were mostly older people, having hard time grasping the concept of the site (and even the Internet itself) and I didn't enjoy the idea of educating them.
I've been thinking about developing a custom cms/site builder of sorts, pitch it to one restaurant and make both the customer and owner experience really smooth. On one side, I would have a restaurant directory with all the info, recommendations and what not, but the owner would get a site with no 3rd party branding and their own domain, charge a monthly fee and get free dinners on a bunch of places.
But then I imagine explaining my idea to other people and having them ask "so, uhhm, like geocities?"
I did local SEO work for a while - I assure you, assuming small business owners have knowledge of even geocities is greatly overestimating their technical knowledge.
Obviously, because the sites are based on decisions made by one person who is not a web design expert. But that's okay, there are ways around that problem for the restaurant-goer: yelp.com provides a useable interface, socially vetted, and normalized so that places can be compared. I hardly bother with the restaurant's site anymore, they're all on yelp.
I know first-hand what kind of budgets most small/medium-sized restaurants have for websites and online marketing.
Its much better to put resources and money into a profile/photos/menu on a site like http://www.grabmytable.com/ than doing a half-arsed 'proper' website.
[+] [-] jasonlbaptiste|15 years ago|reply
a) You're going against the worst kind of incumbent- the 15 year old nephew or kid next door. He's cheaper, good enough, and "trusted". He is competition that exists a million times over.
b) Even if your system is better, they just can't be bothered to even get a good demo. You definitely need to build something so usable and good it's frightening, but good luck getting the full demo.
c) The guys that do have the ability to get in with a demo (GoDaddy, yellow pages,etc.) have no clue how to sell something good. What they usually sell is usually crappy, so now you have a fearful restaurant owner.
d) To crack this market it's a "heavy startup". It requires lots of capital, it requires sales, and it requires marketing. That's something guys like us don't like to often venture into. It's the same reason GroupOn requires lots of capital and other business like ReachLocal have feet on the street.
e) Churn is miserable. If you're on a monthly fee or provide additional services, good luck keeping the customer. ReachLocal has something like 80% churn,not retention, fucking churn.
Here's how I'd go about this for months 1-9. Crack the nut of an easy to use system (point b) and find distribution channels that already exist (point c) such as local newspapers, print shops, and others with a foot into the local market. You'd also need to have a system of people to crank out onboarding in a very cost efficient and systematic manner.
[+] [-] Retric|15 years ago|reply
IMO, there is a huge opportunity for a unified website + POS + Back end software company. But, to step beyond what's out there would take a huge investment.
[+] [-] tucker1213|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Volscio|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daveambrose|15 years ago|reply
They are a bit under the radar but are solving these problems in realtime within a huge market.
[+] [-] zacstewart|15 years ago|reply
1. Restaurants have tiny margins. 7% profit is doing well, and dishing out $1k or more for what they perceive to be a Yellow Pages ad is unthinkable for a brick and mortar store.
2. Restaurant people are techno-iliterates (in general). I set up a Google Apps account so the managers could communicate with branded email, share documents, schedules, etc, and had to give more than a couple training sessions on these basic tools.
3. They don't consider it something to be 'involved' with. I've tried to press the point of building a presence through social networks, etc, but they can't wrap their heads around it. To them, you should pay someone (as little as possible) for it and it does it's job.
4. They explicitly ask for the faux pas. Owner asked me to take down the "outdated announcement" that we'll be having an event, since it was from last month. This is on the blog portion of the site. Owner asked me to upload the rest of the photos from an event (at least a hundred), even though the entire album is on Facebook, even though I explained no one in the world is going to care enough to flip through hundreds of jell-o wrestling photos on the news page of some restaurant's website. Owner asked for a photo background versus the subtle textured one I had designed the site with.
In the end, trying to teach them what emails is, arguing over design elements and explaining how people will use the site isn't worth it because they are going to be more work and less money than just about any other business owner. Slap something together and collect your $500.
[+] [-] bdclimber14|15 years ago|reply
How often do you go to restaurant websites vs. actual restaurants (not including Yelp or Google maps)? Truth is, they just don't matter. The cost of creating a website, even a $500 design over a CMS doesn't justify the cost. Also, a small business restaurant owner won't know how to operate a CMS. They just figured out email, remember? Worse, is that websites turn from beautiful assets to liabilities.
The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website. The kid builds it for $100, everything is great. Until the business owner needs to change store hours.
"What's that password that kid gave me again? What do I do with that password? He mentioned logging in somewhere... Now that kid has a job at Google or is doing a startup and doesn't have the time to mess with $10/hr type of work anymore. Crap, now all my patrons are expecting me to be closing later and I am turning them down. What a huge pain, I have to go find a new web designer."
The solution needs to be the anti-CMS. Something that's not as simple as email, but as FAMILIAR ... Email is simple, but it was a huge learning curve for that small business owner. And learning something else just as simple will be a huge pain.
[+] [-] jdminhbg|15 years ago|reply
The question I guess is why restaurant owners spend money having flash monstrosities built when most users -- especially those on mobile devices, which is a big use-case for restaurant websites -- would rather see plain-jane HTML with an address, phone number, and menu.
"The nephew of some restaurant owner finally convinces him or her that the restaurant needs a website."
I suspect this is closer to the truth. The restaurant owner demographic probably runs in the same circles as the dilettante designer demographic, so the site is built by a wait(er|ress) with a copy of Flash CS.
[+] [-] trop|15 years ago|reply
That seems a bit condescending to restaurant owners? Rather, perhaps, they are so much in the real world, dealing with suppliers, cooks, kitchen equipment, waiters, decor, etc., that navigating the virtual (websites) is antithetical?
[+] [-] spitfire|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarin|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edanm|15 years ago|reply
I'm not 100% clear on the history, but afaik, a website called Rest.co.il (a restaurant directory), offers restaurants a service for creating a website for them. I'm guessing that initially, most restaurants that didn't have a website just created one through Rest. Nowadays, 80% of restaurant websites I visit are Rest-operated sites, with a very decent standard layout, including quick-info for getting their number, quick info on average prices of meals, maps, and detailed menus.
More and more restaurants are creating "unique" websites nowadays, but I think because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it. Pretty funny considering for other things in Israel, there is much less web-awareness than in the States.
If you want examples (sorry, they're in Hebrew, but you can see they look the same). Bottom-left is the quick-info, including information on accessibility for people with disabilities, whether the food is Kosher, hours that they're open, etc.:
http://www.rest.co.il/sites/Default.asp?txtRestID=1796
http://www.rest.co.il/sites/Default.asp?txtRestID=7775
[+] [-] Semiapies|15 years ago|reply
Eh, that's what Google Translate is for.
That looks like a perfectly good standard template, both visually and in hitting the points of what customers want to know - menus (with prices!), hours, links to directions, some sense of what the place looks like, etc.
"because the level was so high initially, they're doing a pretty good job of it"
Very cool. There's something to be said for a genuinely good basic approach.
[+] [-] patio11|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] verisimilitude|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dholowiski|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redwood|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joezydeco|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ronnier|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunkyslink|15 years ago|reply
I'd like to present some work which I think is good for a change (there are a lot of bad examples on here)
So here we go
http://giraffe.net
http://www.chezgerard.co.uk
http://www.brasseriegerard.co.uk
Some of our older ones
http://www.strada.co.uk
http://www.caferouge.co.uk
http://www.bellaitalia.co.uk
The most visited pages on our busiest sites are
1. Offers and vouchers
2. Locations
3. Menus
so it is really important to do those well.
Also we've recently launched a product that allows anyone with a website the ability to have a content managed mobile site set up and working in no time.
The product is called http://www.pocketdiner.co.uk
Any feedback or comments are welcome
[+] [-] iheartmemcache|15 years ago|reply
Also, your pricing for "Chain" @PocketDiner seems wayyy too low. Even £49/mo for "Multi" is probably priced too low. The overhead per store per hour is probably more than that.
[+] [-] Erwin|15 years ago|reply
The annoying ones are e.g. http://www.wildhoneyrestaurant.co.uk/ -- useless use of Flash, this could be done in pure HTML and not force me to scroll a tiny frame with a menu. It could be much worse though, el bulli's website has a "virtual city" you have to wander through in order to select a wine from their menu -- "easy and fun" they say: http://vins.elbulli.com/elbullivi.php?lang=en
[+] [-] lowglow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jarin|15 years ago|reply
Bad web designers tend to target restaurants (and medical practitioners) because they have a much easier time selling bad design to them.
[+] [-] bradleyland|15 years ago|reply
That's a serious question. Has anyone here been involved with a restaurant or food-service related start-up that isn't an aggregator or social networking play? Maybe someone can shed some light on the roadblock?
[+] [-] chunkyslink|15 years ago|reply
Restaurants need to see results
1. Grow their email database and they have contacts they can market to. 2. Engage the customers with the site. Keep them coming back. 2 for 1 vouchers anyone? 3. Provide the basic information like where, when and how much. Make this accessible across devices.
It doesnt matter how good your site is, if your food sucks you loose.
[+] [-] klbarry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sdizdar|15 years ago|reply
The top four concerns for restaurants are: personnel, personnel, personnel, and personnel.
Cool looking web site is really peripheral for many restaurants. Mobile support .. What?
[+] [-] dasht|15 years ago|reply
p.s.: not all hucksters know that that's what they are. Heck, you or I might be one, without meaning to be so. Of course, plenty enough do mean to be so and do awright for themselves that way.
[+] [-] lowglow|15 years ago|reply
I'm working on this site right now, and I understand your concerns because I feel them myself. I'm hoping I can bridge the gap between dining and diner. :)
(Please excuse the design, since I'm the only developer :P)
[+] [-] aberkowitz|15 years ago|reply
The individual restaurant pages are very clean and informative compared to what you might see on a restaurant website. The only things missing are restaurant hours and pictures of food items.
[+] [-] redgirlsays|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lowglow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callmeed|15 years ago|reply
Based the research/feedback I've done, decision makers have near-zero time to learn or use a cms (hence why menus are always in PDF) and near-zero budget.
So what I'm going for is a super-simple system much like about.me/flavors.me ... something around $5 to $9/month or possibly even free and use it as a gateway to other services (also working on a diy groupon clone and staff scheduler for restaurants).
[+] [-] lowglow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trafficlight|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Volscio|15 years ago|reply
I rarely get any of that at a restaurant's web site.
No wonder that it's easier to google/yelp it and use their listings.
[+] [-] lowglow|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chunkyslink|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] augustiner|15 years ago|reply
Anyway I ditched the idea after talking to restaurant owners, they were mostly older people, having hard time grasping the concept of the site (and even the Internet itself) and I didn't enjoy the idea of educating them.
[+] [-] julian37|15 years ago|reply
http://www.portlandfoodanddrink.com/2010/03/what-is-it-about...
http://www.badlanguage.net/why-are-restaurant-websites-so-aw...
http://blogs.houstonpress.com/eating/2010/09/10_reasons_your...
[+] [-] albemuth|15 years ago|reply
But then I imagine explaining my idea to other people and having them ask "so, uhhm, like geocities?"
[+] [-] klbarry|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] angdis|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] davej|15 years ago|reply
Its much better to put resources and money into a profile/photos/menu on a site like http://www.grabmytable.com/ than doing a half-arsed 'proper' website.
[+] [-] T_S_|15 years ago|reply
Eventually things like Google Places, Yelp, etc. will handle 100% of their UX.