Comment by joe_mamba
4 days ago
>but does a restaurant or small accounting firm really need that?
Where I live in my part of Europe, most small restaurants, cafes, bakeries etc. only use a Facebook page and their Google maps entry to share their menu, phone number and interact with the customer base. They have no use to spend time and money owning and maintain a website, plus the advantage of even grandmas knowing how to update a Facebook page versus stuff like shopify or squarespace.
With a website that has a table reservation system you don't have to get interrupted by the phone all the fucking time by people when you're trying to chop onions or set tables.
Ordering apps handle that nowadays, it seems routine for restaurants have have multiple apps on multiple devices as their intake.
You're only seeing this in the perspective of a customer. Ordering apps take a huge chunk of the tiny margin restaurants have. Smart owners put up their own ordering system instead.
Dine-in restaurants that are on the fancier side sometimes have that. I know US is phone call adverse but phone call appointments and bookings via talking to a real person rule here. Austria is very old school both in terms of service offerings and in consumer behavior (cash based, tech adverse, etc)
Each person who makes their reservation or take out order online is one less phone call to interrupt the work in the restaurant. So even if you get just half of the people to book online, that's still a great improvement.
And restaurants very commonly have events, either private events closing the place for other guests, or public events with a lot of people wanting to book. In these cases an online platform is even more useful. Then you remove a whole lot of calls.
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Table reservations are only for fancy restsurants.
And non-fancy restaurants have take-away orders or delivery orders, which also benefit from online bookings.