What Restaurants Need to Know About Online Order Settlement
In today’s on-demand world, consumers want to easily order food with just a few taps, whether on a restaurant’s own platform or from a third-party ordering and delivery service. The pandemic further accelerated this trend, increasing demand for online food ordering services. According to ReportLinker.com, the global online food delivery services market is expected to grow from $115.07 billion in 2020 to $126.91 billion in 2021.
As a restaurant operator, it’s important to cater to consumers’ expectations for convenient online ordering services. That’s why implementing a range of ordering options for consumers is becoming a priority in the industry. However, when deploying these solutions, restaurants often need to meet complex payments settlement and funding requirements. This isn’t surprising since there’s often multiple providers, platforms and portals to manage.
To overcome this obstacle and ensure integrations are seamless, restaurants must evaluate three key areas of their payments settlement system.
1. Have Access to Real-Time Reporting
A restaurant might be managing its own online ordering and delivery platform, but it could also have multiple third-party partners. Each party, like Uber Eats or DoorDash, has its own report and reconciliation methods. This becomes complicated to manage each payments process.
The solution to this is to implement one settlement portal that provides a single source of truth in real time. Online reporting through an ACH setup portal gives all departments convenient access and management of every transaction. By normalizing all the data into a single set of reports, restaurants can streamline operations with clarity and ease.
2. Handle Disbursement of Funds
As soon as a customer places an online order, that single transaction goes through multiple steps to ensure that the payment is disbursed properly, all associated fees are accounted for, and all parties can access the real-time reporting we discussed. Now, think about how complicated that can get when there’s hundreds or thousands of transactions and locations to account for.
To make disbursement and reconciliation seamless, restaurants can take advantage of a solution like OLS Payments to manage ACH distributions from the business’ bank accounts to the accounts of any of the partners and franchisees involved.
3. Administer Refund Requests
Restaurants can’t forget about the reverse equation. Customers may request a refund for one reason or another, whether it’s for the wrong order or for an overcharge on delivery fees. That’s why it’s pivotal that restaurants can adjust and process refunds in a timely manner.
A settlement system that provides access to consolidated banking information will give restaurants the ability to correctly file and send money as needed.
OLS Manages the Complexity of Your Settlement and Funding Needs
As the online food ordering market continues to grow and evolve, it’s become more important than ever for restaurants to have a proper system in place to deal with the complexity of settlement and funding needs. This is especially true given that managing the payments process for both an in-house platform and third-party services can be a heavy burden to restaurant’s already taxed payments resources.
Luckily, OLS Payments has designed a highly configurable settlement and funding solution to handle nearly any disbursement and fee assessment scenario without relying heavily on a restaurant’s resources.
Learn more about how OLS Payments can support restaurants with payments settlements here.