Restaurant website traffic now 40% mobile | Hacker News Reader

Restaurant website traffic now 40% mobile

happytables.com

31 pointsjoe_hoyle24 comments

I don't get why many restaurant owners don't bother putting a decent website online. If they actually do have a website, most of the time it's outdated, ugly, doesn't offer any useful information (such as opening hours, specials or a menu) or is just completely unusable. I'm not even getting started on any 'fancy' stuff such as usability on mobile devices or online reservation.

I know a few restaurateurs and they simply don't care, even more so than other types of small brick-and-mortar shops. First, they operate on very thin margins and most of the time simply can't or don't want to afford extra services such as a website. Moreover, most of their first-time customers still get there by word-of-mouth. It's as if most of the sector marketing-wise is still pretty much stuck in the early nineties.

I spent a few months of my time selling to Restaurant owners. Most of them are afraid of technology. They are constantly being pushed to pay lots of money for expensive proprietary technology.

There tend to be two classes of them:

Far away owners. They come to the store once a week, handle some of the finances, but mostly, someone else manages the store. The owner puts in minimal effort, the manager has a hard time spending money to effect any changes

Owner/Operators. They're often cooking or other help around the restaurant. They work a ton of hours, and don't have time for much else. Many of them "don't do computers".

Neither of these groups is going to make their own website in most situations, unless they're relatively tech savvy. So they hire someone to do it, but then it never gets updated with menu and hour changes, specials and new technology.

As much as getting a website up and running for a small business seems so easy for the median reader of this site, the reality is different. Restaurant owners don't know how to do it. Regardless of the software you put in front of them, they probably won't come up with a good result and chances are that if they select the software themselves it will be a poor choice.

The internet is full of bad advice and the phone book is full of bad consultants. It's actually quite hard to be a good consultant to this kind of business. They're hard to work with and aren't willing to spend very much.

I kinda wish it weren't so, but I've found that Facebook is the place to go for Restaurant info. Most all of the places around me regularly update their FB pages with specials, events, etc. The learning curve and processes to "update a website" seems to be too high for the average busy restaurant manager, but FB is a user interface they likely already use and are familiar with.

Does FB have a place for menus or do you still need to add an app to your page for that?

It's so sad/frustrating when you need to look up a restaurant's page on-the-go and then you find out it's flash-only.

Or the PDF menu is embedded in an iframe, making scrolling a pain.

Yeah, talk about coming so close to a sale as a restaurant.

This is an interesting market that you are targeting, but I'm curious what your revenue looks like. It looks like you are banking on people upgrading to a premium account to make money, but to me it seems like you are giving away fully functional websites for free. You are giving so much away that there really isn't an incentive to upgrade.

> There is no setup fee or minimum term (even for our free plan).

>Can I stay on the free plan forever? Definitely. If you operate a small business or are simply growing, we want to support you. Our premium features are aligned to those of a larger restaurant, so once you’re more established you’ll have the ability to upgrade, but it’s all up to you!

and you don't put ads on the restaurant's site either, so there is no revenue coming in to you on that end. Maybe I missed something when I was digging around?

Hi Ryan, so there are number of restrictions on the free website, but the main one they end up "converting" on is the "powered by happytables" logo at the bottom of each page (in other words, removing the branding).

I don't believe you are. It's unfortunate because there needs to be more innovation/competition in the space.

46% of apartment traffic is now mobile as well. I work for a company that hosts 10,000+ apartment websites and pulled the google Analytics that we aggregate across all of them.

i am frustrated by the number of restaurant websites that simply _don't work_ on iOS at all. Like you can't even look at a menu or figure out the hours.

Of all the websites I look at, restaurant ones are the most likely to fail horribly on mobile.

I guess it's because restaurant owners/managers 'buy' a website from a small contractor, and what they look for and are willing to pay for is something that looks 'pretty' -- lots of flash, lots of big graphics, etc.

You mean they don't work because they use Flash? As much as I hate saying it but if you did not choose a mobile OS that limits your choice of software, you could simply install flash. You cannot really blame the restaurants for using technology that was hailed for its interactivity by some people and webdesigners for so long.

"Simply install Flash" is not possible on newer Android versions. "Install Flash with some methods that are complicated for end-users, if you have the right phone and there's a package available for you" is more reality.

The fact is, Flash isn't supported on mobile devices. It's merely possible on Android. Sure, you can't blame the restaurants (you don't need to blame anyone), but "simply install Flash" isn't true.

>As much as I hate saying it

It sounds as if you love saying it.

Anyway, I agree with gp: so many restaurant websites seem to focus on being cool more than on providing the information I need: address and menu. And yes, Flash is a big part of this but even if that worked on iOS, these websites would still be annoying.

That's exactly our goal with Happytables, focusing on: accessibility, information and engagement. All the additional fluff can really bog down those sites.

Even if you have flash for your mobile, the sites are usually designed for the desktop. Meaning wide screens and hover effects. Some even use hover to scroll. Now how do you hover with a touchscreen?

I'm not the only one that chose that mobile OS, millions of others did, too. But, hey, if a restaurant wants to try and dictate my choice of technology, no hard feelings. There are plenty of other places to eat.

And "simply install flash"? It doesn't work on iOS, it hasn't been supported on Android in over a year, and has stability issues on Jelly Bean. I could almost be convinced that you're being facetious...almost.

Sometimes it's flash, sometimes it's something else. I don't always spend time debugging/diagnosing exactly what it is, I'm not at work!

I doubt that restaurant owners are thinking "So my customers can't see my website? I don't care, it's because they picked an Apple device and everyone knows Apple devices are shitty!"

Um, what?

And do you really hate saying it?

Doesn't everyone just use Yelp? Gives me review highlights, hours, and often the menu too not to mention undoctored photos from other customers.

I presume that to use "connecting to domain" feature a restaurant owner would need to alter DNS records, which does represent an extra hurdle.

So my questions are:

1. In reality is utilizing this feature a real hurdle?

2. Any other way to do this w/o mangling DNS records?

Founder here. Indeed an additional hurdle! It's probably the hardest part of setting up the website. Handled via CNAME (similar to Shopify), this way they can still control any other services (i.e. e-mail).

Man... my stupid childish head... I can't unsee the "butt cheeks" in their favicon now

Reply on news.ycombinator.com