Show HN: An app to create QR Menus | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: An app to create QR Menus

menu.cards

25 pointsattendos29 comments

Every time I follow a qr code pasted on the wall of a restaurant, I think "this goes against everything that I, a nominal computer professional, knows to be a good idea"

Problem is, it's not a big enough deal for me to turn around and walk out, instead my phones download folder is just cluttered with pdfs of bad scans of paper menus.

On one hand, when there was a chance coronavirus was spread by surfaces, I thought this approach was genius. With the appropriate amount of water being under the bridge... Bring back the old menus.

I agree that the PDFs & scans are not the best option. Thats why we created a dynamic menu, more like a Shopify store. Restaurant owners can update their menu at any time and even accept orders direct from the table (paid online if preferred).

Sure. The problem is that I don't know what I'm getting until I follow the link. Even when I beep the qr code but before following it, 3/4 of the time I get some url shortener.

To be clear, I think your website is a good idea and a good movement forward. I'm just a curmudgeonly old guy.

Maybe I would be happier if you did what I sometimes see others do: abuse the error correction in qr codes to make the one you produce more interesting or unique. So instead of an anonymous url injector, it looks like a menu and has your logo or brand somewhere clear.

Aah yea i think understand, we have a pretty nice custom QR builder where you can customize the colors, add tekst, or a logo :) We also don't use URL shorteners people can just choose a custom slug eg menu.cards/s/[slug]

Probably most more simple systems use url shorteners so they can update the URl it's revering to, since you sometimes need to update the menu. With Menu.Cards you can just update you menu dynamically whenever.

Btw if you want to see a demo of what a menu could look like: menu.cards/s/demo

I think it’s a net win for personal hygiene to not have to touch a menu that thousands of people have touched before you, right before you start eating. Maybe keep the QR codes, but have menus on demand for people who prefer them?

Yea you could for sure keep the printed menus, but one of the extra benefits of having an online menu is that your can keep your menu up to date with daily menus and all. Printing new menus everyday can be a struggle and is not very ECO-friendly.

Apps like this took off during the pandemic last year. Most restaurants here have QR code menus. Most download a PDF, some link to a Google Doc. It all works fine I guess.

Does your solution do anything different? Either way, what's your plan for getting customers?

Yea true most restaurants use a simple QR leading to a PDF from their menu. With menu.cards you can create a dynamic menu, receive payments, custom domain all the good stuff ;)

Currently most of the customers get acquired via outreach.

> Yea true most restaurants use a simple QR leading to a PDF from their menu

Most of them in my area that didn't stop using QR entirely with general reopening, IME, have dynamic menus that track tables (the one app I am most familiar with has the table number as part of the QR code), order, tab, and payment processing, etc.

Even having contextual prompts for users to identify potential food allergens relevant to the order is in one app I’ve seen.

Thats cool! And exactly the direct we're going for, creating less friction and an overal better experience.

The French on that website is so broken it’s impossible to understand. Do you have a link to force the website to display in English? Visiting /en redirects to /fr.

This one should work: https://menu.cards/en/?set_language=english

The translation is automatic at the moment and will be translated by a native this week :)

Anyway thanks for letting me know!

Do you plan to offer pricing in USD? You might also want to consider multi-language options for customers. Great idea for an app!

Our own pricing at the moment is just in EUR but you can offer you customers all currencies that Stripe offers. Yes, we're working on a multi-language menu :) For now it's just possible with creating multiple menus in different languages...

Please make it easy for parents to show children the kid's menu. QR/phone menus are painful for families because they can't just slide a kid's menu to the kids.

Great point! Something to think about :)

If the issue is having to give the phone to the kid, no solution that relies on the phone will solve that.

Am I misunderstanding the problem?

Do you want a censored version of the menu?

Censored and large font. No descriptions. No prices. Any paired drink or side choice obvious.

Yea, I was just thinking to turn in more into a game. Or some kind or Tinder for selecting what you want as a kid. The healthier the more points or something hehe ;)

QR codes are bad for security as they are opaque. How hard would it be for an attacker to replace a dining menu with their own link to a trojan?

Not sure, but something to look in to i guess ;)

The QR is only to go to the top menu, or it's possible to go to the submenus with another QR?

At the moment the built in QR just creates QR images for the front of your (store) menu, but we're planning to do this based on tables too, right now the customer manually has to fill in the table number.

To create different QR's per submenu would be possible already if you create a free QR generator and add the submenu URL of your menu.cards store. But could be a good add on to add to our QR generator! Thanks ;)

Looks very nice ;) fingers crossed

Thanks a lot!

“Menus” not “Menu’s”; English doesn't use apostrophes to form plurals.

Noted

Also "digitize" not "digitalize"

Thx again, it's fixed!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com