Business Implementation
Implementing an online food ordering business also needs some field work beside the website preparation. Works, responsibilities and infrastructure required to establish your online business vary depending on the way you decide to manage your entire business.
You need to first decide how you are going to manage Norsani, either Self or Shared Management?
Self Management
When you decide to self manage your food ordering business, you should definitely be wanting to establish your food ordering business for a small town or city with vendors having limited access and usage to computers and internet in their stores.
Your main responsibility will include:
Registering and fully managing vendors accounts: This includes posting their items, setup their settings, and processing their orders. You do not need to login to each vendor's account to process their orders you can do that from your admin front-end orders dashboard page. However, you will need to login to each vendor's account when you need to update their items or change some settings or create discount coupons.
Processing orders on ground: You will need to manage the entire ordering process from notifying the vendor to prepare the order, to picking up the item and delivering it to the customer.
Updating vendors & items data: You will need to update each vendors items and information whenever their's a change. For example, vendor offer new items or have stopped offering some items or have change location and delivery zone and fee or some items have finished for the day because of either online or ground orders so you will need to login to that vendor's account and "offline" that item and before the next opening day of the vendor you should "online" the item again.
If you will be offering delivery service, which most of the self implementation businesses do, you will also need to do some logistics preparation. As a very first start you will need:
One delivery vehicle: This could be a motorcycle.
A delivery person: You can either hire someone or do it yourself.
A smartphone: To quickly manage orders anywhere.
An office: As a start this could be your home.
However, those requirements will expand as your business expands.
Also if you will be offering pick-up, dine-in or curbside orders, you will need to make some sort of agreement with vendors to prepare and handout the order to customers. i.e making an advance deposit to vendors so they can deduct the amount of each order referred by a call/message/email by you, while you have received the amount online.
Shared management
Shared management is the best way to manage your online food ordering business as it will give you more time to focus on marking. Each of your vendors will manage their store and orders by themselves while you focus on getting more customers and expand the business by adding new vendors.
You should always consider this way of management whenever it is possible even if you are implementing in a small town or city or have few vendors. i.e when vendors use computers or smartphones and have an internet connection in their stores.
Your main responsibility will include:
Introduce your business to vendors and encourage them to register on your website. This could be done by making field visits and meetings with your vendors - with a tablet device having an internet connection - where you introduce your service and it's benefits and go through the vendor's registration form step by step with your vendors.
Provide your vendors with a quick training session on managing their store and orders. This could be also done during your meeting with the vendor by opening a demo vendor account that have few items and orders - you can create this account previously in office with disabled selling privileges - and showing your vendors how to create new items, discount coupons, withdraw requests and process orders.
For the infrastructure part, you will only need to have an office. As a start, you can use your home but you should consider renting an office as your business expands you will need to hire employees for customer support & satisfaction, marketing, legal afters, etc.
Marketing
From the technical part, Norsani will do it's best to insure the consistency and functionality of your business but from the management and marketing part, it's all your responsibility to insure success of your business.
Whenever you plan to open an online food ordering business you should think of the way you are going to provide your service and it's potential success, and this depends on your implementation geographical area and the uniqueness of available vendors on your service.
The city/town you are planning to implement in already HAVE one or more online food ordering businesses working?
If yes, you should think of ways to provide your service in a better way than your competitors, for example you can do the following:
Targeting vendors that do not exist on other online food ordering businesses. i.e small vendors that provide good food but do not use computers and internet in their stores.
Specialize in a single cuisine. i.e you can make your online food ordering business only for Chinese food, or Indian food, or Korean food, and include most of those vendors within your city in your website so whenever people think of ordering some of that kind of food your website comes as the best resource.
Apply lower fees on vendors. This will encourage vendors to engage with your service and promote you to their customers.
The city/town you are planning to implement DO NOT have one or more online food ordering businesses working?
If yes, you are lucky and should focus on advertising of your service so people get to know the benefits and start using it.
You can also start with a self implementation of your business and try to get as much vendors as possible and provide as good service as possible.
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