Ordering, Menu and Loyalty Apps Built for Your Restaurant

Every order that comes through a marketplace app costs you a commission, and you never even get the customer's phone number. With your own app, you set the menu prices, you design the promotions, and you can send a notification today to the customer who visited three times last month. The kitchen display, the courier and the till all work from the same order record.

How many separate apps does this need?

  • 01

    Customer app (iOS + Android)

    Menu, product options and portion variants, delivery/pickup/table ordering, addresses and cash on delivery, order status tracking, loyalty points and promotional notifications.

  • 02

    Kitchen and till display (tablet)

    Audible alert for incoming orders, preparing and out-for-delivery steps, per-item stock toggling, extended prep times during peak hours, automatic printing to receipt and kitchen printers.

  • 03

    Courier app

    A delivery queue for your own moped couriers, one-tap navigation, proof-of-delivery photo, records of cash and card collected at the door, end-of-shift courier settlement statement.

  • 04

    Web admin panel

    Menu and price management, opening hours per branch, promotion and coupon setup, revenue-product-hour reports, refund and cancellation handling, staff permissions.

What the app includes

  • Reorder a past order with a single tap
  • Combo builder: main dish, drink and dessert at one set price
  • Time-window promotions such as a lunch or late-night discount
  • Allergen, ingredient and portion details on each menu item
  • Pickup orders let the guest choose a ready-by time slot
  • Preset order-note tags: less spicy, no onion, no cutlery needed
  • Address records with floor, flat, doorbell name and directions, shown to the courier
  • Live courier location on the map inside the order-tracking screen
  • In-app payment with Turkish meal cards (Multinet, Sodexo, Setcard – employer-funded lunch cards)
  • Orders routed automatically to the nearest branch that is open
  • Single-use coupon codes printed on cards slipped into delivery bags
  • Separate post-delivery ratings for the food and the courier, with low scores flagged in the panel

State of the sector

Customers now browse an app instead of phoning an order in, and the places that stand out are the ones with photographed menus, visible delivery times and points to collect. Because marketplace apps have gathered up that demand, any restaurant without its own channel pays a commission on every order and never learns who the customer is — sitting one row below a competitor in the same list. While even neighbourhood spots are experimenting with QR menus and WhatsApp orders, restaurants that bring the order-kitchen-courier chain together in one place lose fewer orders at peak times and can reach repeat customers directly.

Metrics that matter here

  • Average basket value per order — Product recommendations, a drinks-and-dessert reminder at checkout and combo deals all grow the basket
  • Time from order acceptance to delivery — The kitchen display timestamps every step, showing whether the delay is in the kitchen or on the road
  • Repeat order rate (a second order within 60 days) — Loyalty points and well-timed notifications turn a first-time orderer into a regular customer
  • Cancellation and refund rate — Realistic delivery estimates and switching off out-of-stock items directly reduce the reasons for cancelling

Common mistakes in this sector

  • Publishing the menu as a PDF A PDF menu has to be pinched and zoomed on a phone, you cannot order from it, and it has to be redone every time a price changes. The menu needs to be entered as structured data, item by item; only then do search, stock toggling, promotions and sales reporting work.
  • Taking orders without accounting for the kitchen workflow If orders only appear in the admin panel, nobody is watching it during a rush. Without a display that alerts the kitchen audibly or a ticket that prints automatically, orders run late and customers cancel. The kitchen side belongs in the first release.
  • Defining delivery zones with a radius Drawing a circle on a map also captures hard-to-reach streets and the far side of the water. The courier spends forty minutes on the road and the food arrives cold. Zones should be drawn as polygons, each with its own delivery time, fee and minimum basket.
  • Treating a loyalty programme as nothing more than collecting points Points that are never redeemed do not bring customers back. It has to be visible when points become worth something and what they get; customers approaching the threshold should get a reminder, and the reward should be a real item on the menu.

Regulation and compliance

A restaurant ordering app touches regulation on two fronts. On the sales side, online payments trigger an obligation to issue e-Arşiv invoices and report them to GİB (Turkish Revenue Administration) under Turkey's mandatory e-invoicing system; for cash on delivery, the receipt from the fiscal cash register (ÖKC) must match the record in the app. On the customer side, names, phone numbers, addresses and order history are personal data: under KVKK (Turkey's data protection law, aligned with GDPR) a privacy notice must be shown, separate consent for marketing SMS and notifications must be collected and registered with İYS (Turkey's national marketing-consent registry), and account deletion requests must be handled inside the app. Displaying allergen information on the menu is a further point to watch under food regulations.

The real challenges in this sector

  • Option trees and price differences

    A single pide order might be “with cheese, extra cheese, no onion, medium”, and every option changes both the price and the kitchen ticket. Option groups are defined from the panel as required or optional, single or multi-select, with minimum and maximum rules. Price differences are recalculated on the server; the total sent by the app is never trusted. Options print on the kitchen ticket in bold and short form so whoever is preparing the dish sees them at a glance.

  • Order capacity during peak hours

    On a Friday night the kitchen cannot push out fifty orders at once. The app dynamically extends the delivery estimate based on the number of open orders and the average prep time; past a set threshold it temporarily stops new delivery orders or switches to pickup only. Otherwise the customer waits forty minutes and cancels, and both the food and your reputation go in the bin.

  • Delivery zones and minimum basket size

    Distance is about the driving route, not a straight line: the other side of a river or a ring road looks three kilometres away and takes twenty minutes. Zones are drawn as polygons on a map, with its own delivery fee and minimum basket value attached to each one. If an address falls outside the polygons, the order is blocked in the basket, not after the courier has already set off.

  • Payments, cash on delivery and refunds on cancellation

    Money taken through a virtual POS or iyzico/PayTR (Turkish payment providers) has to be refunded if the kitchen rejects the order; with cash on delivery, the money stays with the courier. Payments are authorised first and captured once the restaurant accepts. Cancellations, partial refunds and returns of stock-tracked items run through a single flow in the panel and reach accounting broken down by daily collection type.

  • Merging table QR orders and app orders onto one bill

    The customer at the table orders via QR without installing anything, while the delivery customer orders in the app. Both have to land in the same order-number pool, or the kitchen ends up watching two separate screens. The QR session is tied to the table, follow-up orders are added to the same bill, and a single receipt is produced when the customer asks to pay; the waiter closes the bill from the app.

Required integrations

  • Online payments and bank virtual POS via iyzico, PayTR or Craftgate (Turkish payment providers)
  • e-Arşiv invoicing (part of Turkey's mandatory e-invoicing system) and fiscal cash register (ÖKC) integration, GİB (Turkish Revenue Administration) compliance
  • Restaurant POS and billing software, plus a bridge to kitchen and till thermal printers
  • Meal cards: accepting Multinet, Sodexo, Setcard and Ticket (meal-card providers)
  • Maps and navigation: delivery polygons, courier route guidance
  • Bulk SMS and push notification infrastructure, İYS consent registration (Turkey's national marketing-consent registry)

Who this page is for

  • A newly opened single-location restaurant or café

    No couriers, no POS history yet. The right scope is the menu, table QR and pickup ordering with a kitchen screen; delivery and loyalty wait until real order volume is visible.

  • A regional chain of three to five kebab, pide or pizza branches

    The real need is branch logic: routing to the nearest open branch, per-branch prices and stock, one shared menu, revenue reports broken down by branch, and a link to the existing till software. The courier module belongs in the first release.

  • A delivery-only cloud kitchen with no dining room

    No table or QR flow needed; the weight sits on delivery polygons, courier dispatch and live tracking, throttling at peak hours, and running several brand menus out of one kitchen without mixing them.

A phased plan that splits the budget

  1. 1

    Phase 1 — Core that runs on pickup and dine-in orders 6-8 hafta

    Delivers the iOS and Android menu app with option groups, pickup orders with a ready-by time, online payment, the kitchen and till tablet screen, and the admin panel for menu, prices and reports. It works fully without delivery: an order comes in, the kitchen sees it, the till closes it. Courier logistics is the most expensive part, so it waits.

  2. 2

    Phase 2 — Delivery and the courier chain 5-7 hafta

    Adds delivery polygons drawn on the map, per-zone fees and minimum baskets, cash and card collection at the door, the courier app, live tracking and end-of-shift courier reconciliation. Because Phase 1 has already produced real order volume, zone borders and prep times are set from data rather than guesswork.

  3. 3

    Phase 3 — Loyalty, table QR and integrations 4-6 hafta

    Brings points and rewards, coupons and segmented notifications, table QR menus merged into the same check, meal-card payments, POS and e-Arşiv (Turkey's e-archive invoicing) connections, and multi-branch management. These depend on third-party systems and approvals, so leaving them last keeps the launch date safe.

Typical scope and timeline

A typical first version: iOS and Android customer app (menu, option groups, delivery and pickup orders, online and cash-on-delivery payment, order tracking), kitchen and till tablet display, web admin panel (menu, promotions, reports), delivery zone definitions and e-Arşiv invoicing integration (part of Turkey's mandatory e-invoicing system). The courier app, table QR menu and loyalty programme are added in a second phase. Scope and budget are agreed after a scoping call.

Estimated timeline: 10-16 weeks

Off-the-shelf or custom build?

Topic Off-the-shelf Custom build
Speed of getting started A ready-made package goes live in days: enter the menu, print the QR. For a new venue that wants to test demand this really is the fastest route. Custom development takes weeks; the menu structure, kitchen flow and payment setup are built around how you actually operate, so the first release lands later but fits better.
Kitchen-specific workflow Standard option groups and fixed order steps are enough for most cafés, but they strain in kitchens with their own prep sequence — a grill house, a döner shop, a patisserie. Splitting tickets per prep station, per-item prep times and throttling rules at peak are written to match how your kitchen actually sequences work.
Existing POS, meal-card and invoicing links If it ships a bridge to your till software, you are done; if not, daily turnover gets keyed in by hand and order records drift from the till. Integration is written for the till software, meal-card providers and e-Arşiv flow you actually use, so cash-on-delivery and receipt records reconcile in one statement.
Cost structure and data ownership A monthly subscription, often plus a cut per order: costs rise with volume, and the customer list stays inside the provider's system. The investment is up front, then maintenance and hosting; order history and customer data sit in your own database and can be exported and moved.

Sector glossary

Adisyon (the open check on a table)
The running check for a table in Turkish restaurant practice: everything ordered from seating to payment goes onto the same record. If QR orders do not land on it, the kitchen ends up watching two separate lists.
KDS (kitchen display system)
The kitchen screen that replaces paper tickets: orders arrive with a sound, move through preparing and ready, and each step is timestamped, which is how you tell whether a delay happened in the kitchen or on the road.
Modifier (option group)
The part of a dish the guest can change at order time — size, doneness, extra toppings, removed ingredients. Each modifier changes both the price and the wording on the kitchen ticket, which makes it the touchiest part of menu data.
86'ing an item (marking it out of stock)
Taking a dish off service because an ingredient ran out. If the app cannot switch it off in one tap, orders keep coming and the cancel-and-refund cycle starts — the most common source of cancellations during evening service.
Food cost (plate cost)
The share of a plate's selling price taken by its ingredients. It is the number you check before designing a promotion or combo: if the discount breaks the ratio, more orders will not show up as profit.

Frequently asked questions

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