Online Orders for the Wrong Location

[Tinku_S]

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

[Tinku_S]

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.

[Sdaniel]

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

[Tinku_S]

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.

[Sdaniel]

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.

[Tinku_S]

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.