topic Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location in Guest Experience

Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Tinku_S — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 22:54:43 GMT

Toast Community,

We have noticed a significant uptick recently on online orders for our 9-unit group going to the wrong location and are wondering if anyone else has noticed the same issue, and if so, if you all were able to figure out a way to reduce that. This is more than simple user error (though I am certain some of it is likely tied to that), and the recent uptick suggests (last month or so) makes me think there is something else going on here.

@Sdaniel @Rob: Is there any known issue that you are aware of that would be leading to this spike?

Tinku

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Sdaniel — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:24:34 GMT

Hi!

Yes, we’ve encountered this issue before, often enough that we created a comp code specifically for situations like this.

In the most recent case, we traced the problem back to the “View Menus by Location” section on the website. Previously, the locations in that section were organized by address rather than by location name, which may have contributed to customers ordering from the wrong location. There may be a deeper underlying issue that I haven’t identified yet, but the “View Menus by Location” section stood out as the most likely cause. It would explain why the location Elmhurst continued receiving orders that were intended for other locations, as they are the first location in that section.

I updated it to display by location name instead with the location names toggle in website editing. However, the downside is that it does not list them in alphabetical order. I believe this may be related to the location's GUID. I submitted a request to be able to organize that section in alphabetical order.

Listed by Address

Listed by Location Name

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Tinku_S — Fri, 27 Feb 2026 23:45:12 GMT

Thanks for the quick response. We already have it set up by location name, so that's not the issue. We have also created a specific comp for that purpose. Just to confirm, you have not seen any recent uptick in that type of issue?

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Sdaniel — Sat, 28 Feb 2026 01:31:46 GMT

As of recently I have not seen an uptick of this type of issue. Managers will usually flag it, but I may run the report to see if there's a spike in that comp usage.

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Rob — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 19:07:40 GMT

I have not seen this issue reported, but I have relayed it to my team to see if they have seen any reports of similar behavior!

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Tinku_S — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 13:29:01 GMT

We added a pop-up to the online ordering page asking guests to confirm the location name and address before ordering and I believe that may be yielding positive results but will report back once I have more data. Toast back in 2023 said they were working on a popup confirmation right before checkout, but it looks like that effort was abandoned.

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Sdaniel — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 15:35:50 GMT

Hi! Funny timing, this issue just came up again. Have you found the root cause by any chance?

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Tinku_S — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:12:56 GMT

Are you by any chance using Toast Advertising? We believe there is/was a bug in the ads set up that was showing ads meant for one location, to guests near other locations. We adjusted the radius the ads are shown to prevent overlap and excluded the zip codes for each of our locations from getting targeted by one others. After doing that and setting up the pop up to ask guest to confirm the location, the issue has been resolved.

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Sdaniel — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 18:21:53 GMT

I don’t believe we’re currently using Toast advertising, but I’ll confirm with our marketing team to be sure. I did notice today that when searching for a location on Google, the menu link that appears is tied to the location that reported this issue. One of my colleagues is looking more into the Google side of things.

Could you share how you set up the location confirmation pop-up? If you have a link to your online ordering page, I’d love to see it in action, this might be something our marketing team would consider implementing as well.

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Tinku_S — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 13:15:37 GMT

Here is the link to our online ordering page: https://order.tarkaindiankitchen.com/

The place to configure this is in the Websites Editor under the Global section. See attached screenshots. Unfortunately, it is just a generic message and doesn't actually force the guest to confirm the location. It just reminds them to double check they are ordering from the right store. There are two options on how to dismiss the popup. We originally had it set to where guests can click anywhere on the screen but to make it more fool-proof, we decided to change that to where the guest has to click on the close button in the popup.

Re: Online Orders for the Wrong Location

Sdaniel — Thu, 19 Mar 2026 15:33:35 GMT

This is awesome, thank you for sharing! I’ll be sure to pass it along to our marketing team. I’ve also seen some earlier requests from other Toast customers asking for a similar feature built directly into online ordering, so hopefully that’s something we’ll see in the near future.