Why a busy takeaway should switch on collection orders

It's a Friday at half seven and the orders are coming in faster than anyone can get them out of the door. One app says a rider is five minutes away, then ten, then the bag is under the heat lamp going soft while a customer at home keeps checking their phone. Meanwhile there's a queue at the counter of people who live round the corner and would happily have come to fetch it themselves.

Dan Birch runs Sodo Pizza in London. Talking to the Bite Britain podcast (episode 8) about one of his sites, he put the rider problem plainly:

There's no delivery drivers to pick it up. Or if they do come, they come late.

When that happens, the order you can still get right is the one the customer collects. The food goes straight from your pass into the hand of the person who ordered it, hot, with nobody on a bike in between. That's collection, and for a lot of takeaways it's the channel sitting switched off.

One more order on the same screen

Collection isn't a way to come off the apps, and it isn't their rival. Deliveroo and Uber Eats put your food in front of people who'd never have walked past your door, and that's worth having. Collection is for the other half of your trade: the regulars who already know you, want it tonight, and don't mind the walk.

Mark Murphy runs Burgerism. On The Delivery Prophets podcast (episode 13) he explained that if you lived outside their delivery radius, you couldn't get their burgers at all. That seemed daft, so they opened one of their kitchens up for collection:

we just opened it up. And very quickly, we started to grow that channel.

As of that 2024 conversation he put Burgerism's split at about 65% delivery, 35% collection. Burgerism is a multi-site brand with a big local following, so that's their number, not a promise about yours. What travels from it is the shape of the thing: there were people who wanted the food and couldn't get it delivered, and once they could collect, they did.

With Rowbo, a collection order lands on the same orders screen you run everything else from. It rings until someone picks it up, shows the customer's name and exactly what they ordered, and if they paid by card the money's already taken, so there's nothing to ring through the till. Bringing your Deliveroo and Uber Eats orders onto that same screen is what we're connecting now, founding shops first, so before long a collection order and an app order sit in one list instead of on two tablets.

Switching it on

Collection is a setting, not a building project. We build your site from your Google listing, load your menu item for item, and turn collection on with you: your collection times, how long the kitchen needs, and whether a customer pays by card or on arrival. You check it all before a single order comes through. If you already take phone orders, this is the same job done once and written down, instead of on the back of a ticket that picks up a coffee ring by nine.

Where to put the link

A collection order starts with somebody knowing they can place one. The people who collect live nearby, so tell them where they already are: a sticker in the window, the link on your Google listing, a word at the till. "Order ahead next time and it'll be waiting for you" is all it takes.

The order you keep

None of this takes anything away from the apps. It gives the orders you were always going to get a cleaner way in: one screen, one menu, the money in your own account. On the night the riders don't show, it's the difference between a full counter and a room full of people waiting on somebody else's driver.

See how ordering works, or tell us your business name and we'll show you your own menu with collection switched on.