topic Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether. in Restaurant Operations

Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

rodeak — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 14:33:18 GMT

I know that many places only use third party delivery services for their deliveries - but for the ones who still use in house delivery drivers, do you still take phone calls for delivery orders? We stopped taking credit card payments for phone in deliveries a while back because we had to key the cards in and would often get chargebacks for them. But taking only cash is risky too - we recently had a big order not answer the door/phone and we were stuck without payment for it. We've decided to end call in deliveries altogether and just send people online. Are we the last ones to do this? Are you still taking call ins for delivery?

Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

Kirsten_H — Tue, 23 Sep 2025 15:58:05 GMT

We still take phone orders for delivery and take-out. *knocks on wood* Our chargeback rate is fairly low overall, and we've seen them on both call-in and online orders, so at this point it doesn't make sense to cut off the phone orders.

Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

HearthpizzeriaB — Wed, 24 Sep 2025 23:28:48 GMT

I believe you are going to have the same risk on charge backs doing online ordering since you are still having a card not present situation. I believe hypothetically you could send drivers with the new Toast Go 3 that has cellular service to collect payment in person on deliveries and would get rid of the risk of card not present.

Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

Kirsten_H — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:50:28 GMT

I was excited to see the Toast Go 3 for this very reason. We do have an order threshold at which a credit card is required for take out and delivery orders. Is there a way to take key the payment and then 'change' it to an in-person payment via swipe/tap/dip on pickup or delivery?

We were recently burned by a chargeback on a take-out order that was over our threshold, so the payment was keyed upon order, no signed receipt at pickup. Perhaps if we could 'verify' the card with the transaction in-house, without creating the dreaded second authorization, we could avoid that problem.

Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

rodeak — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 13:51:18 GMT

Thanks for letting me know, I did not know about the Toast Go 3, we'll look into it. Do you know if Toast (or anyone) is looking into ways to prevent chargebacks from online orders? Seems crazy that there's no development on that front for years. We originally switched to Toast partly because of the chargebacks we were seeing in restaurant for swipe charges.

Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

HearthpizzeriaB — Thu, 25 Sep 2025 19:59:53 GMT

To the best of my knowledge, charge backs are really the purview of the issuing card's bank. Beyond requiring a tap/chip payment, you don't have much luck fighting a charge back. Its not something that I think a payment processor like Toast can do much about.

Re: Curious how many restaurants have ended phone in deliveries altogether.

HearthpizzeriaB — Thu, 02 Oct 2025 22:39:19 GMT

That would be amazing if we could verify like that, but I fear that even in doing that, banks would still side on the customer's end more times than not. Im very lucky that we very RARELY get any sort of chargebacks