RESTAURANT DELIVERY POS SYSTEM
Offering restaurant delivery without taking away from your bottom line


The challenge with adding delivery to your restaurant business plan is in the expenses. Taking on delivery as a service means taking on several related expenses, including:
Associated cost
Customer engagement
Implementation
In-house or outsource

Software
Training team members
Marketing
Profit
Worst of all, companies have few reliable methods to track the expenses and profits involved in these expenses. This means going back and forth between multiple homemade spreadsheets prone to human error. Another option might be 3rd party apps, but these may not offer the features restaurants need to manage delivery services. Either de-centralizes your daily operations, forcing managers to go back and forth between various resources.
POS systems have stepped up to fill this gap by offering features designed to make delivery easier in recent years. This page details how restaurants can use robust POS delivery options for their customers, including:
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- Online ordering
- Contactless pickup
- Data and analytics
Online ordering
Delivery doesn’t start on your front porch. It starts when a customer places an order. Online ordering has become a mainstay of the current restaurant market, especially over the last two years. As picking up food and take-out and delivery have become more appealing (or sometimes the only) options, restaurants need to focus on offering these services.
The problem with this model used to be the implementation; online ordering requires building a website with integrated payment features that allow customers to make payments from remote devices. Furthermore, they need to do so seamlessly – customers won’t use these features if they are bulky or unwieldy. In other words, setting up online ordering means hiring a savvy website designer and integrating the new site with your credit card processor.
This model costs time and energy, placing a strain on an industry where profit margins are already very thin. Luckily, POS technology offers some streamlined solutions to this problem, including:
What used to be the most expensive part of online ordering now can be handled through your POS in a matter of minutes. By using your POS software’s proprietary features, restaurants can create a custom branded website that can go live in a very short time. The best POS options have guided walkthroughs that streamline the creation process for owners: a name here, an address there, upload your restaurant’s logo, and voila! The site is live and ready to take orders.
This is the key to accessibility for your diners; making your restaurant available to customers at home expands your reach to new audiences. The service can, of course, be toggled off in the settings menu should the kitchen be unavailable at a particular time. This ensures that restaurants have complete control over their services and avoid customer confusion.
The best part about your new website is that it seamlessly integrates with your POS system. This means that when an order is placed online, it automatically comes through to the POS. This allows your staff to quickly prepare the order for delivery, streamlining your daily operations.
If your customers are picking up their order, POS options also provide an online timer to pickup (which customers can customize if they plan to pick up later in the day). This gives your staff a timeline to create the customer’s order; if there are any delays or if the order is prepared early, they can alert the customer via email using the POS interface.
These tools are vital for restaurants wishing to implement a restaurant delivery system due to their effect on cost reduction. POS features for delivery reduce a significant cost to building an asset that will generate a large profit. In this context, it contributes to your ROI while smoothing out daily operations.
Contactless delivery, contactless pickup
After the order has been placed, the restaurant now has to take over the actual work of the delivery. This means:
-
- Preparing food in a timely manner.
- Packaging it so that it’s ready for transportation
- Sending it out with a driver.
The actual pickup process on the front porch can be complicated as well, however. This is especially true if your website has the option for customers to pay upon delivery; in these cases, your driver will need to take payments at the doorstep. This was difficult enough before the pandemic; however, the fear of transmission adds another layer of concern to this transaction.
Contactless features provide POS systems with a perhaps unexpected area to shine. Modern POS systems include contactless features such as:
Near-field communication (NFC) payment has been around for decades but has become the new gold standard of card payments. NFC payment is typically taken one of two ways:
-
- Chip
- Tap
Traditionally, this has been done through the card’s RFID chip; however, recent models have focused more on the tap function due to lack of physical contact and heightened security.

Why use a card at all in the 21st century?
Digital wallets (Apple Pay, Venmo, Paypal, etc.) are becoming more of a preference for modern customers due to their heightened security and contactless features.
All customers have to do with a digital wallet is send money directly from their account to the account for the restaurant. This doesn’t require any physical interaction with the driver, making it a great fit for contactless payment.

But how are these payments being taken? This has been a problem for delivery drivers; bringing around a bulky card reader isn’t always an option, and they certainly can’t always count on customers to carry cash.
Modern POS systems focus on solving this problem through a comprehensive mobile platform. This allows employees to access the POS software from their smartphones, allowing them to finish the transaction for quick and easy payment.

Contactless features benefit just about everyone; for small business owners, the ability to accept new methods of payments like digital wallets adds additional revenue streams to pad your bottom line. For employees interacting with different customers regularly, contactless features keep them safe from the threat of viruses. Finally, for customers, contactless features maximize the customer experience, allowing for the easiest payment method for them.
Data analytics
One of the central concerns for any restaurant considering delivery options is the overall expense the business will incur to make it possible. Business owners have to consider their bottom line first and foremost; without a healthy bottom line, businesses can’t offer anything else.
However, measuring that bottom line can be exceptionally difficult if you don’t have the right tools to do so. Traditionally, this meant spending countless hours on spreadsheets trying to find that sweet spot between your profits and expenses. Instead, modern POS systems give small business owners access to valuable data analytics that measures restaurant health in real time.
These features include:

Sales data
The bottom line is all about profit; how much are you making, and how much are you spending? The single biggest boon that data analytics provides to your restaurant is laying these questions out in clean, easy-to-read charts.
Sales data also allows restaurants to break down larger data into smaller points, where they can zero in on:
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- Preferred payment methods
- Sales by shift (breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc.)
- Biggest sellers on the menu
Best of all, this system is provided by the POS itself. Connecting these programs ensures that data is up-to-the-minute and accurate, recording every transaction that takes place over the course of the day. In this way, restaurant owners get the most realistic depiction of their daily operations.

Employee Review
You can theorize a delivery system all you want, but your employees are the people you trust to make it happen. Unfortunately, employee evaluation has always been a nebulous process, and this is especially true for delivery drivers, whose entire job takes place far away from the eyes of managers and co-workers.
That’s why data analytics also helps gauge employee performance, as well, offering:
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- Attendance, indicating reliability
- Labor cost reporting
- Tip breakdown, indicating customer satisfaction
Although these reports aren’t perfect (people do get sick, and sometimes customers don’t tip), they can be powerful indicators of your employees’ performance. This can let you know whether you should consider them for a raise or additional training.
It might seem like data analytics solely benefit businesses; this is not necessarily true. For example, knowing your customers’ preferences indicates what dishes they like best or what kind of promotions to use. On the customer end, this means potential savings from those promotions and a better customer experience in-store. Having these benefits makes them more likely to return to your restaurant, in addition to recommending it to friends.
Restaurant delivery pos system
The central takeaway is that POS systems are a fast evolving technology; once only card processing now exists a centralized production center for several, if not all, your business needs. For example, online ordering, contactless payment, and data analytics allow restaurant owners to offer their customers delivery options without breaking the bank.
Implementing these options can be a challenge if you’re unfamiliar with the technology. That’s where POS providers like talech come in; we’ve worked with restaurants of every type, developing restaurant delivery POS systems tailored for every need. We want to talk with you about making your restaurant function even better than it does now. Best of all, we offer a free demo where you can try the system for yourself.
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