WhatsApp orders and enquiries for restaurants

WhatsApp orders versus delivery apps

Delivery apps bring you customers you did not have. They also take a share of every order, decide how your menu looks, and keep the customer's details for themselves. A guest who ordered from you five times through an app is still the app's customer, not yours.

WhatsApp orders are the other half. They come from people who already know you: the regulars, the office down the road, the family that orders every Friday. On WhatsApp the order is yours, the margin is yours, and the guest's history is yours. The problem has only ever been handling those orders fast enough. That is what the system is for; it is not a replacement for the apps, it is the part the apps cannot give you.

How an order comes in

A guest messages your number with what they want, or asks for the menu. The assistant sends the menu (as a WhatsApp catalogue or a short link), takes the items and quantities, asks the questions you have told it to ask (spice level, delivery or pickup, address), repeats the order back with the total, and confirms. The order appears on a screen in the kitchen and in your order list with the time it was promised. When it is on its way, the guest gets a message. The guest never waits for someone to pick up the phone.

Table bookings work the same way. "Table for four at 8 tonight?" gets a yes with a confirmation, or the nearest times you do have, from the floor plan and the booking rules you set. The booking is on the host's screen before the guest has put the phone down.

The questions that are not orders

Half the messages a restaurant gets are not orders. Do you have parking, is the place child friendly, can you do a cake for a birthday, are you open on the holiday, do you have Jain options. The assistant answers those from the information you give it, every time, in the same tone. A guest who asks for something it has not been told, a private dining request, a complaint about last night's order, goes straight to the owner's or the manager's phone with the full chat.

What the kitchen and the manager see

The kitchen sees orders in the order they are due, with the promised time, and marks each one ready. The manager sees the evening at a glance: orders by hour, tables booked, which orders are late. At the end of the night a summary reaches the owner on WhatsApp: orders, bookings, the dishes that sold most, and any complaint that came in.

If you already use a billing or POS system, orders from WhatsApp are pushed into it, so the bill and the stock stay right. If you do not, the order list in the system is enough to start with, and we add the billing link later.

Setting it up without disrupting a working kitchen

A restaurant cannot stop for a software project. The setup is done in steps that each stand on their own. First the menu and the answers to the common questions, so the assistant can reply and take orders while your staff still confirm each one by hand. Then the kitchen screen, so orders stop being re-typed. Then table bookings, then the POS link if you use one, then the guest list and the evening summary. Each step is tested on a quiet afternoon before it runs on a Friday night.

Your staff need to learn two screens: the order list and the booking list. Both are built to be used on a phone by someone standing up with wet hands, with large buttons and one action per order: ready, dispatched, done. Menu changes, a dish that has run out, a new price, are made by the manager from a phone and take effect at once. Nothing requires a laptop, and nothing requires a call to us.

What you keep: the number, the menu, the guest list and the order history, all in your own account. If you ever stop using the system, the data is yours to export.

The guest list you finally own

Every guest who orders or books on WhatsApp is in your list with their history: what they order, how often, the last time they came. That is the list you use for a message about the new menu, or a quiet midweek offer to the people who have not ordered in a month. Those messages go only to people who have messaged you first and have not opted out, which is both the WhatsApp rule and the right way to treat regulars.

Two things to say plainly. Automatic sending on your own number needs the WhatsApp Business API and Meta's approval, which we arrange; the demos on this site use a simulator. And the AI reads messages as a strong first guess, so an order it is not sure about is repeated back to the guest for a yes before it reaches the kitchen.