Question 1

How do I reduce my restaurant POS fees?

Accepted Answer

Total the whole line for one month before you negotiate any part of it: subscription per location, a licence per register, payment processing (a separate bill at your processor's rates), any per-order fee on orders placed through channels you already own, and what it would cost you to leave. Most restaurants discover the biggest reducible number is not the subscription at all — it is a percentage taken on their own repeat customers, and hardware they were told they had to replace. Those two are worth more attention than a few pounds a month on a plan.

Question 2

How do I start online ordering for my restaurant?

Accepted Answer

Decide what each channel is for before you sign up for anything. A marketplace is a discovery channel — you are renting reach and paying a commission for customers who did not know you. Your own ordering page is a retention channel — cheaper per order, but it only works for people who already know your name. Most restaurants should run both and judge them differently. Then do the unglamorous parts: cut the menu to what survives a bag, set a delivery radius you will actually drive on a Friday night, and make sure online orders land in the same place as counter orders so nobody is watching two screens during a rush.

Question 3

How do I build a restaurant loyalty programme that actually works?

Accepted Answer

Measure your repeat rate before you design anything, so you can tell later whether it moved. Then make enrolment cost the customer nothing — no app to download while a queue waits behind them. Reward the second and third visits rather than the tenth, because the customer you are most likely to lose is the one who came once. And give the programme a job beyond discounting: filling a slow Tuesday, or earning permission to email someone, is worth more than a few pence off a coffee they were going to buy anyway.

Question 4

What are the best marketing tools for a restaurant?

Accepted Answer

For an independent restaurant, the highest return per hour is not software you buy. It is a complete, current Google Business Profile, a website where the menu is real text rather than a PDF, and a habit of asking happy customers for reviews. After that comes the list of customers you already have — email to people who have eaten your food outperforms almost anything aimed at strangers. Paid tools are worth adding once those are done: social scheduling to make posting sustainable, offers and loyalty to bring people back, and marketplaces or ads when you specifically need reach. PatronWorks covers the customer-list half of that; it does not post to social, buy ads, or do your SEO, and you should not buy it expecting that.

Straight answers to the questions operators actually ask.

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Why these are written as questions

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