In an ever-changing landscape for businesses, some things may seem out of your hands. Even so, there are steps for you to take back control. Small changes to your delivery operations can make a big impact on your bottom line. Below you’ll find 5 easy-to-follow tips that can put you in charge in the new year.
Tip 1: Give customers more ordering options
Choose a delivery option that meets customer expectations and best aligns with your marketing goals and operational needs. Whether you’re looking for a partner that can manage end-to-end delivery or just a new order management tool, you can choose from a range of delivery solutions provided by third-party delivery platforms, like Uber Eats, to meet customer needs.
Delivery options
- Delivery with a third-party partner drives visibility with new customers and lets you accept and fulfill orders using a network, like Uber’s global network of 3.5 million active drivers and delivery people.*
- Delivery with your people lets you enjoy the marketing benefits and increased exposure of an online marketplace while using your own staff to deliver your orders.
- If you’re ever short-handed on a given day, you can fall back onto your delivery partner’s network for as little or as long as you need to meet your customers’ demands.
- Pickup gives your customers a fast and easy way to place and retrieve orders at your brick-and-mortar location with less overhead for you.
- Online ordering, such as Webshop, helps you turn web visits into sales—from people who are already viewing your website, following you on social media, or finding your business through search.
Tip 2: Make your offerings work even harder
The new year is the perfect time for restaurants and other businesses to freshen up their offerings. For restaurants, a sales-optimized menu means your customers can easily find their favorites or discover new ones that help your bottom line. User-friendly tools like the Uber Eats Menu Maker, make it simple, whether you have one or multiple locations.
A few things to try
- Focus on your most popular and profitable items. You might even consider creating a “featured” or “bestsellers” section made up of your biggest crowd-pleasers.
- The insights and analytics tools from Uber Eats can help you make informed decisions on which items to choose.
- Build more customization options so customers can order exactly what they want. Plus, you can charge them for add-ons and extras.
- Set your prices based on location if you have multiple stores. Because your operating costs may vary by locale, Menu Maker makes it easy to charge accordingly.
Tip 3: Balance online and in-store demands during peak hours
You can choose when to turn your availability on and off or how to handle orders. Using Busy Mode on the Uber Eats Orders app, you can decide what workflow works best for your day-to-day.
Note
- Busy Mode is crucial for restaurants that experience frequent busy periods.
- Grocery and retail businesses can also benefit during peak times when foot traffic is heaviest in-store.
Tip 4: Choose how you get paid
Stay in charge of your bottom line. Make sure your delivery partner empowers you to track and compare sales data, provides transparent performance metrics, breaks down fees by order, and gives you the ability to choose your payout frequency. On the Uber Eats platform, for instance, this flexibility is built into the Payments tab.
What you can do
- View your business’s earnings and fees paid for any custom date range and compare them with previous dates to better understand sales trends.
- Review performance data like payout amounts, orders by type, store views, and customer visits in a given time period to get a deeper dive into customer behavior.
- Get a granular breakdown of all your fees on every order or average fees paid so there are never any surprises.
Visit the Uber Eats Merchant Academy to learn more about how to use data to optimize your operations and make the right business decisions.
Tip 5: Try a new marketing strategy
You know your business better than anyone. Third-party platforms give you tools to plan for your busiest or slowest times of the year. For example, if your customers spend less on purchases in January following the holidays, this can be the perfect opportunity to try a new marketing strategy to avoid a sales slump.
For instance, Uber Eats gives you access to a range of marketing features that can help you reach customers and grow your business. You can choose when to launch campaigns, set budgets, and see data on your results. In other words, it’s a platform that lets you become your own marketer.
Marketing ideas to try
- Run ads to increase your exposure. Spotlight your restaurant in front of hungry people to boost your visibility, attract new customers, and increase your orders.
- Learn more about ads
- Offer promotions when you anticipate sales dropping. Experiment with “Spend more, save more” deals; “Free item with purchase” offers; and more.
- Learn more about promotions
This year, put yourself in the driver’s seat
Take control of your business in 2022. From how and when you deliver orders to how you market your business, it’s the year to do it your way. Getting started is simple.
If you’re new to delivery, get started >
Existing merchants can learn how to get the most out of Uber Eats with Merchant Academy >
*Internal data from Uber Eats and Small Businesses: Partnering for Impact report 2021.
