App development and restaurant expertise combine to solve a common pain point during the COVID-19 crisis.

Online ordering was already a widespread and growing trend before the COVID-19 crisis, with online orders for food delivery projected to climb to 30 percent of restaurant industry growth by 2022. As dine-in options are shut down for the foreseeable future, online ordering is skyrocketing.

While this creates a prime opportunity for restaurants to complement drive-through sales or offset lost dine-in sales, building online ordering revenue streams can present a significant challenge to operational efficiency. In some cases, restaurants wind up using multiple tablets to accept orders from different ordering platform and rely on employees to transfer orders, quickly and accurately, into their point of sale (POS) or restaurant management systems.

Around 2017, at Los Angeles’ popular Canter’s Deli, online orders had become unmanageable. That year, Alex Canter, the owner and operator of the deli, and his team developed Ordermark. As a restaurateur-turned-SaaS-developer, Canter understood the burden non-integrated, third-party ordering platforms put on restaurant managers, their staffs, and their ability to provide excellent online ordering experiences, especially during high-traffic times. Ordermark reflects Canter’s Deli’s experiences and insights, and the result is an effective way to manage — and grow — this part of a restaurant’s business.

Ordermark recently deployed its solution at a Which Wich franchise location in Austin, TX. The Ordermark solution gives the restaurant the ability to aggregate orders from all third-party ordering and delivery platforms such as Uber Eats, Doordash, Postmates, and ChowNow to a single dashboard and transmit them to a single printer.

“Building the Ordermark platform required us to create a flexible system that had the ability to integrate with a variety of disparate ordering services. The architecture of the system has allowed us to integrate with dozens of online ordering services to date,” says Ordermark CTO Arpan Desai.

Ordermark also provides Which Wich a way to sync online menus with a universal menu that the team can easily manage to ensure items and pricing are consistent regardless of how consumers choose to place their orders. Furthermore, the software collects data on Which Wich’s business, such as sales by day or time, stats on specific ordering platforms, and top-selling menu items, and allows restaurant operators to export data to help with end-of-month reporting.

Epson printers for the Austin Which Wich solution seamlessly integrate with Ordermark and automate the process of getting all orders to the kitchen and food prep areas quickly and efficiently.

“We partnered with Epson due to the quality of their product,” comments Desai. “Ordermark was born in the kitchen of Canter’s Deli, so we understand the negative business impact to a restaurant if technology fails. We wanted to make sure our customers don’t have to worry about that.”

As a SaaS company, Ordermark also eliminated worries about finding the budget for the solution, which customers like Which Wich can pay for on a subscription basis and count on Ordermark to maintain and upgrade its cloud-based software.

Ordermark is also committed to providing its customers with a solution that’s easy to use. Installation and training usually take only 30 minutes, and the system is typically live within 48 hours of when the customer signs up.

The restaurant online ordering trend is impacting every segment of the industry and every size business. Desai says, “Ordermark’s customer base spans from single locations to enterprise brands and everything in between.”

“As franchisees onboard our solution, they realize it is applicable across all locations that they own,” he adds. “Successful restaurant operators understand that growth and efficiency have to go hand-in-hand, and Ordermark’s solution is key to delivering both.”

Bernadette Wilson, a DevPro Journal contributor, has 19 years of experience as a journalist, writer, editor, and B2B marketer.