It is ten past seven on a Friday and someone in a sitting room is deciding what to order. They have three questions: are you open, do you deliver to their estate, and what is on the menu and how much. If the answer takes more than one tap they will order from whoever is on the app in front of them, and the app will keep a cut. Websites for takeaways in Dublin are not about design. They are about putting those three answers where the hungry person is looking, which is Google, and making the phone number tappable.
We set the site and the Google listing up so they are right every night, and we keep them right. You run the fryers.
Friday at seven
The phone is the bottleneck. On a Friday night it rings off the hook and half the calls are not orders, they are ‘are you open’, ‘do you deliver to Firhouse’ and ‘how much is the family meal’. Every one of those calls is a minute someone at the counter is not taking an order. A page that answers them, linked from your Google card, is a second person on the phone who never gets flustered. The call button on the site goes straight to the shop line, and the WhatsApp button lets someone send ‘two spice bags and a garlic cheese chips, collection, ten minutes’ without tying up the line.
Do you deliver to us?
Delivery area is the question nobody puts on their site and everybody asks. List the areas and estates you deliver to, plainly, by name: the ones people say when they ring. Add the minimum order, the delivery charge, how long to expect on a quiet night and a busy one, and whether you take card on the doorstep. If there are places you do not go, say so, and you stop the ten o’clock argument with someone across the river. The Google listing carries the same delivery area so you appear when someone in those estates searches ‘takeaway near us’.
The menu that Google shows
Google pulls menu details for takeaways from wherever it can find them, and if it cannot find yours it shows a photo someone uploaded years ago with the old prices. The menu goes on the site as text with prices, grouped the way your board is grouped: meal deals, burgers, chicken, kebabs, pizzas, sides, drinks, kids. When the price of a quarter pounder meal goes up, you change it on your phone and it is live before the evening rush. Photos matter here too, but of your actual food under your actual lights, not stock. Six good photos of the sellers, shot on a phone on the counter, do the job.
The apps, the commission and your own customers
Just Eat and Deliveroo bring orders and take a slice of each one, and the customer belongs to them, not to you. Nobody is suggesting you leave them. But a regular who orders every Friday should know your own number and your own collection deal, and the site is where you tell them. A line like ‘collection orders by phone get the free can’ is worth putting at the top. If you want to take orders through your own site rather than only through the apps, that is an online shop add-on, quoted first and separate from the plans.
Match nights, Christmas week and Good Friday
A takeaway’s calendar is a list of evenings: a big match on the telly, Halloween, the Friday before the bank holiday, Good Friday, New Year’s Eve, and Christmas week when half the shops on the road are shut and the ones that are open clean up. Then the dead weeks after Christmas. For each, your hours on Google need to be true. A closed-for-Christmas note posted on the listing and the site the week before stops forty wasted calls and a few one-star reviews from people who drove over to a dark shop.
What to send us
Your menu with prices, your hours for each day including late nights, your delivery areas and charge and minimum, your collection times, whether you take card over the phone, your payment methods at the door, and a handful of photos of the food and the shopfront. The checklist in what a small business website should include is a useful ten minute read before we talk. If your listing has never been claimed or the pin is in the wrong place, getting your business on Google Maps explains what we fix first.
Cost
Essentials is €499 to set up and €50 a month and covers the site, menu, delivery area and Google listing. Complete at €1,499 and €100 a month adds the chat box, review texts, the managed listing and ads if you want them. The pricing page lays both out. If you are a chipper first and a takeaway second, the chippers page is written for the smoked cod and the Good Friday queue.