I added online ordering a few months ago and it has been great. A small problem though is customers not pressing buttons for things like extra cheese or sides of dressings etc and just writing them in the notes. It happens on actually most orders. Ive seen someplaces write ‘items added in the notes section will NOT be prepared’ I apprehensive about doing that because the customer could write a bad online review saying Something like ‘We need to pay more attention I clearly ordered this but didnt get it…’
Is this something I should get over? Or does anyone have ways around this?
Remove the notes section or just place a message before checkout that say’s any extra items added in the notes section will be charged accordingly once received.
We just get over it. Customers order extra stuff in there all the time. It’s usually for comedic effect though. Like draw a picture of a unicorn on the box, or have the driver dance a jig on my front porch. We throw this kind of stuff in for free being we don’t have a button for it on the POS.
We get a lot of requests like this also.
Overall, with online orders, the customer modifies the items so much because they see what we can see in the POS when they are placing the order. Most of the time it adds up to increased ticket average. Whenever I see a pattern of something being added/noted I make a point to decide if this is an option that should be added so the customer can select and pay for it next time. You can get some ideas of how your customers like to eat your food, not just how you normally would prepare it.
Dan
I had this exact problem when I started using online ordering 6 years ago.
At first, we let it go , but had to remove the “special instructions” box permanently due to excessive abuse.
we had a few complaints , but got rid of the abusers this way…
We just add a new ticket with the same name and add the additional items on it. They quickly learn they can’t add 3 meats for onions without getting charged. No one has complained yet as we sub single items for single items all the time. Add a topping–we make it the way you asked and you will be charged. Hasn’t been an issue.
We get the crazy draw a picture on my box requests occasionally and we do these as it makes the customer happy and also gets the driver a bigger tip. But when they do add an item in the notes sections we do give them a call back and let them know that there is a charge for this that way there are no complaints from anybody. Maybe you can put up a disclaimer on your online ordering page that states you charge for items added in the notes section
We had this issue at first. Now notes is disabled on our system. No one ever asks about it but they do call from time to time with requests which somewhat defeats the benefits of online ordering from our point of view in that someone has to take time to be on the phone.
Move the notes into the checkout form and no abuse so far has happened. We have them there and people write in it, but it’s mostly to say Thanks or any other simple things about something specific from something they ordered.
Im going in circles with the issue.
I use an outside service called ChowNow, its only CC sales, so by the time the order is sent to my store the orderhas already been paid for so I cant just add it to the price, some customers actually do use the notes section for the right reasons like ‘no cheese dairy allergy’ so I think im going to keep the notes section just move it to the checkout screen only. Thanks for the replies!
same here…never looked back