Online ordering, delivery and table bookings, run by the owner.
Online booking systems
Bookings taken on your own site, on your own terms, with no per-booking fee to anyone.
Booking widgets rented by the month have a habit of owning the thing they were hired to help with: your availability lives in their system, your customer list lives in their system, and their branding sits in the middle of your page.
A booking system built into your own site does not. You set the hours, the capacity and the closures. What comes in is yours, and it sits alongside the bookings you took over the phone rather than in a separate list nobody remembers to check.
That last part is the one most systems get wrong. A staff member looking at the day needs the whole day — the online bookings and the ones taken at the counter — or they will end up keeping a paper diary as well, and then the paper diary is the real system.
How it works
One sheet for the day
Bookings from the website and bookings taken on the phone in the same place, so what is in front of your staff is the whole room.
Your hours, your capacity
Opening hours per day, plus one-off changes for the dates you are closed or fully committed. Set by you, in a form, whenever.
Confirmation the customer trusts
An immediate confirmation with the details they gave, so nobody is left wondering whether the form went through.
No per-booking fee
It is part of your site. It does not charge you a slice of each booking, and it does not put someone else's brand in front of your customer at the moment they commit.
See it working
Not a mockup and not a list of logos — the systems described above, running, with a way in.
Questions
Can staff add a phone booking?
Yes, and this is the point. Online and phone bookings go into the same day sheet. A system that only shows half the bookings gets replaced by a paper diary within a week.
Does it work for something other than a restaurant?
The demonstration above is a restaurant because that is what it was built for, but the shape — hours, availability, one-off closures, a confirmed booking on a sheet someone reads each morning — is the same for a clinic, a salon or a workshop.
Can I still use my existing booking tool?
If it works, keep it. This is for the case where the fees, the branding or the fact that your customer list is not yours have stopped being acceptable.
The rest of the work