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Unwrapping
FoodGetters
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Portals are
changing the face of Internet ordering
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12 years ago, you would have been
hard-pressed to find a Restaurant Delivery Service that offered
on-line ordering. The name-of-the-game at the time surrounded call
center operations; the Internet was considered a "nice to have",
not mission critical.
Today, just about every RDS in business has some sort of on-line presence for their customers. Whether it's a web
site that just offers simple menus to be displayed, or a full-featured
on-line ordering system, most RDS have discovered that having a web site is critical to their continued operations and success.
RDS
marketing strategies, however, are still largely concentrated on LOCAL
advertisements, attracting LOCAL customers to LOCAL business resources.
Customers located in Phoenix, for example, have no idea what the
equivalent RDS is in Portland.
Enter food ordering portals.
Over
time, like any other Internet resource, customers will tend to
gravitate towards the resource that offers the highest amount of
selection and the broadest amount of choice.
Much like the travel portals transformed the travel industry, the food
ordering portals are quickly transforming the way that customers find
the delivered meal they have been looking for by putting menu and
restaurant information into a single place.
Slowly, customers will no longer have to know the name of a local RDS
in order to get a prepared meal delivered... all they will have to know
is the name of a national food-ordering portal.
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In 2003, DataWedge wrote its first on-line
ordering portal called "MealMonger". This initial portal was
essentially planted "on top" of the existing web structures DataWedge had,
mimicking the exact same on-line ordering behavior that existed on
current web engines.
Initial success was, to say the least, extrememly limited. While
MealMonger did a great job in aggregating together all of the
existing RDS data (for those that chose to participate), it was simply
not broad enough to be scanned by search engines... and thus was
never "found".
In response to the growing number of Internet portals popping up on the
virtual landscape, DataWedge began the FoodGetters project in March of
2009.
Rather
than trying to re-tool MealMonger, DataWedge decided instead
to
start from SCRATCH... and created an ordering engine that is able to
not only aggregate individual RDS and menu data, but be DEEPLY searched
and scanned by Internet search
engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
FoodGetters went into beta with 9 RDS's in August of 2009, and finally (and quietly) emerged in January of 2010.
You
may have noticed the FoodGetters logo popping up in places around the
DataWedge web site, and in the newsletters starting at the beginning of
the year.
In any case, we're ready to expand the FoodGetters service to the rest of the DataWedge U.S. customer base at large.
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Put very simply, FoodGetters is designed to "cast the fishing nets much wider" in an effort to generate more orders.
As
we have seen the Internet landscape changing over the past few years,
we have seen the need to provide a larger website that goes beyond
the separate marketing efforts for each RDS, and shore up the
independant markets with a national presence.
Due
to the nature of the way FoodGetters is contructed, each RDS that
opts-in to FoodGetters provides the web site with MORE content,
giving the search engines MORE to chew on, and thus making BOTH
entities (the individual RDS as well as the FoodGetters portal) much
more visible on the internet front.
To
this end, the goal of FoodGetters is to capture as much organic screen
real estate as possible on the major search engines... with the final
result being the same: landing an order directly into the end
dispatch screen.
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Why FoodGetters is different
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The job of an ordering portal is simple: to generate business by
giving customers a single place to go for information. Google is
(for all practical purposes) a portal for search. Orbitz and
Travelocity are portals for the travel industry.
In the food ordering world, the job of the Portal is no different: generate orders.
But in the Portal world, their job is one of ORDER ACQUISITION, not
CUSTOMER ACQUISTION. Because the food ordering portal only
receives additional revenue from customers that RE-ORDER from the same
Portals, many portals are starting to put in contractual protections
that prevent an RDS from marketing to customers that originated as the
result of the Portal.
Because of the nature of the relationship DataWedge has with each of
their RDS's, the FoodGetters portal can be thought of as not only an
ORDERING ACQUISITION TOOL, but also a CUSTOMER ACQUISITION TOOL.
DataWedge is extremely supportive of cross-marketing efforts, and fully
supports marketing efforts to continue recurrent ordering from
customers regardless of which web site they order from.
Take a look... opt-in to the FoodGetters network...
FoodGetters is fully integrated into your copy of DMS... when you join
the FoodGetters network, menus that are uploaded to your website are
immediately synchronized with the FoodGetters website.
Orders taken over the FoodGetters network are immediately sent to your
copy of DMS, just like an order taken over your individual web site.
FoodGetters has been generating orders for our participating RDS's for nearly 8 months now, with more being added very quickly.
Like your web site, FoodGetters is a "pay-as-you-go" system, offering
you no risk to join. Pay for transactions when they arrive in
your system, with no other additional monthly recurring fees for use of
the FoodGetters system.
If you are interested in becoming a member of the FoodGetters network,
and interested in becoming part of our strategy to broaden your
expanse, give us a call... we'd love to hear from you.
Check it the site at: http://www.FoodGetters.com
If you have other tips/tricks you
would like to share, or if you want to see how other RDS's are using
the DMS program, we encourage you to visit the DataWedge discussion
forums, located at: http://forums.datawedge.com
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| DataWedge Services |
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Web Services...
The process of caring and feeding your own
web server on your local network can be an expensive and daunting
task. Not many companies have the financial resources to
purchase and maintain the hardware necessary to run a web server out of
their office, in addition to the technical savvy necessary to keep it
secure from hackers on the internet.
DataWedge created an On-Line Ordering engine
to help solve some of these problems. Your restaurant and menu data is
uploaded and hosted securely on a DataWedge professionally hosted
internet server, away from your office internet connection - giving
hackers no place to scratch away at your network.
 DataWedge Sample Site.
The DataWedge system is a "pay-for-what-you-use" system. This
means for as little as $30 per month, you can have a professional web
presence available on the internet including restaurant information,
menus, and on-line ordering. Use of our templates and get on the
internet in a matter of days! For an example of a template
site, you can click here,
or click here.
Do you have an existing web site, but just
want to include on-line ordering functionality? No problem...
our On-Line Web engine has the ability to be wrapped inside a
frame. Measuring only 720 pixels wide, you can easily
integrate your own web site around an instance of an ordering engine,
and have the ability to push DMS data out to the internet, and have
orders push directly into your system. To see examples of
companies that have integrated their own web sites with our ordering
engines, you can click here, or you
can click here.
If you would like more information on our
on-line ordering engine, please don't hesitate to contact us (208)
874-4185 .
FoodGetters...
FoodGetters.com
represents our new aggregated web site, aimed at being firmly planted
as a national on-line food ordering portal.
Because DataWedge utilizes
a
"pay-for-what-you-use" billing system, it's in our best interest to
drive as many transactions as we can towards your service.
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Credit Card Processing...
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DataWedge has teamed with Nova - the
nation's second-largest credit card processing system - to provide a
seamless charge authorization system that accepts a full range of bank
and T&E cards. The DataWedge/Nova partnership offers
a number of advantages over other card processing alternatives:
- Low transaction/discount charges
resulting from the purchasing power of one master contract for DMS
clients
- Elimination of ICVerify as a card
processing gateway. DMS is certified with the NOVA system for
direct data transmission to their system.
- The ease and efficiency of a
"seamless" process from order entry to authorization to funds transfer
into your account
If you would like to know how much you can
save over your existing credit card services,
please click here and fill out our request form
Copyright
2005-2010, DataWedge, LLC
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