Online Ordering - Which Toast Platform (not 3rd Party platform, e.g. DoorDash) is best?

[SofaFishing]

Questions for those of you using Toast for online ordering (see below for my thoughts and some details of things we've seen):

• What are your thoughts regarding each of the Toast Online Ordering platforms (see below for some, maybe all, of the options)
• Have you seen the same issues we’ve seen (see below)? Have you seen other issues?
• What are the benefits of one Toast online ordering platform/link over the other?
• Do you promote just one of the Toast online ordering platforms on your website, social media, etc., or is there a reason to promote more than one Toast platform? If so, which ones and why? 
• Since Toast gives the option of opting out of the Toast App, is there any reason you see to do this?

The 4 platforms I’m aware of are (I’ve excluded alternate 3rd party integrations such as Doordash, etc. – none of which we use and if considered in this post may make answers and thoughts much more complicated - but if you want to respond about 3rd party integrations, please do!):

• Original Online Ordering: https://toasttab.com/RESTAURANT-NAME
• Toast Local: https://toasttab.com/local (and search for zip code or restaurant)
• Order with Google: The link listed on a restaurant's Google Business Profile (that can be enabled or disabled in the ToastTab backend). I realize this isn't actually a Toast platform from start to finish, but in essence Toast hooks into Google's "Order with Google" interface and makes it their own.
• Toast App

I’m asking because my thinking is (since we don’t use the 3rd party online ordering integrations such as DoorDash) that it’s probably best for a restaurant to choose only one of Toast’s online ordering platforms/links to “promote” on a restaurant’s main website, social media, etc. And from my experience, each platform/link has a slightly different interface and idiosyncrasies.

Some of my thoughts…

Original Online Ordering (https://toasttab.com/RESTAURANT-NAME):

• Works pretty well, from what I see. This has been our “mainstay” and is the site we link to from our website for online ordering.

Toast Local https://toasttab.com/local (and search for zip code or restaurant):

• Many restaurants (including ours) don’t show any review counts there, even though Toast says this review count is a consolidation of online review sites (including Google reviews, of which we have 100s). We did submit a support ticket on this. Toast support says they use a "3rd party" for the review counts so they didn't really have control over this. I (half seriously) suggested they give me the name of this 3rd party and permission to follow up with this 3rd party, but I think the support ticket ended up getting closed without this being resolved. 
• While the original online ordering site pulls business hours from “Online Ordering Hours” from Toast Tab backend (which makes sense to me!), Toast Local pulls the hours from the “Services” section. This caused us an issue because we allow same day advance ordering, so we had listed lunch service listed 4am-4:30pm and dinner 4:30pm-3:59am – in order to have our daily revenue equal the sum of revenue during the 2 service periods. But since Toast Local pulls hours from the “Services” section it showed customers that our hours were 4am-3:59am. So, we had to change the service times to 11:30am-4:30pm (lunch) and 4:30pm-9pm (dinner) instead, with the result being that our revenue during these 2 periods now doesn’t equal daily revenues, since we almost always have same day advance orders “off hours”. But at least our business / online ordering hours now show correctly here!

Order with Google:

• Receipt emailed to customers doesn't show a tip charge or our to-go service charge (although the total shown is correct). Toast says this is a known issue and that they are addressing this.

Toast App:

• I can see why Toast might like this to be used, as it helps keep customers ordering from Toast, so credit cards are processed through them.
• In our market, Toast is the dominant POS, so customers can go to one app and from there order from most of the local restaurants (good for Toast's CC processing revenue, but maybe not so good for an individual restaurant's revenue).
• Users of smartphones generally like apps for online ordering (rather than googling a restaurant or going directly to a restaurant’s website to find the online ordering link, or even having to go through the process of putting a shortcut on their mobile desktop pointing to a restaurant’s online ordering site). But I’m not sure if there is any benefit from a restaurant's perspective to promote the Toast App over the other options (or promote it at all). Or am I missing something?

Thanks all! I look forward to hearing your feedback!

[Rob]

@SofaFishing, thanks for sharing your feedback! I just wanted to let you know we will be sharing this conversation with internal teams, so thank you for bringing this up!