Restaurant group
Harbour Table — +48% direct orders
Three sites, one PDF menu and a delivery app taking 30% of every order. The website existed but did nothing except point people somewhere more expensive.
All case studies
The situation
Harbour Table runs three restaurants in the same city. Between them they were doing a substantial volume of takeaway, almost all of it through a delivery marketplace charging around 30% commission on every order. Their own website existed mainly as a signpost to that marketplace.
The economics of that arrangement are brutal. On a $38 order, roughly $11 left the business before a single ingredient was paid for. The owner's instinct was right — they needed their own ordering — but two previous attempts had failed because the direct flow was slower and uglier than the marketplace, so customers went back.
There was a second, quieter loss. The menu was a PDF. Search engines could not read it, which meant that every local search for a specific dish resolved to the marketplace listing rather than the restaurant's own page. The business was paying commission for traffic it had generated itself.
What the audit found
A PDF is not a menu
The menu opened in the phone's document viewer at a fixed page width, requiring pinch and zoom to read a price. It carried no allergen data, no structured pricing, and nothing a search engine could index. Median time spent on the menu file before leaving was eleven seconds.
Ordering handed away at the decision point
The Order now button linked straight to the marketplace. The site's single most valuable moment — a hungry person who has already chosen the restaurant — was being sold to a third party at 30%.
Three venues, three sets of facts
Each location page had been edited by hand at different times. Two showed pre-pandemic opening hours. Customers were arriving to closed doors, and those complaints were landing on public review sites.
Invisible in dish-level search
Because the menu was an image-based file, no dish name existed as text anywhere on the domain. Searches for specific dishes in the area returned competitors and aggregators exclusively.
What was broken
- The menu was a PDF that pinched-and-zoomed badly on every phone.
- Ordering handed visitors straight to a marketplace charging 30% commission.
- Each of the three venues had different, out-of-date opening hours.
- Nothing on the site was readable by search engines, so dish searches never landed.
What we changed
Menu as real text
Every dish became structured content with allergens and prices, indexable by search and readable at any size — no zooming, no PDF viewer.
Direct ordering first
A first-party order flow placed above the marketplace links, with the commission saving explained plainly to the customer as a better price.
One source for hours
Venue details managed in one place and published to all three location pages plus the search listing at the same time.
The technical detail
The specific decisions behind the numbers, in plain language.
Menu as structured content
Every dish is a record with a name, description, price, allergen set and availability window. It renders as real text at any size, is announced correctly by screen readers, and is published as machine-readable menu markup for search.
First-party ordering built for speed
The order flow is three screens with saved details and no account requirement. It was benchmarked against the marketplace app on the same handset and finishes an equivalent order faster — the only standard that matters, because customers compare directly.
One content source for three venues
Hours, closures, contact details and menu availability are edited once per venue and published to the location page, the ordering flow and the search listing simultaneously.
Kitchen-aware availability
Sold-out items are toggled from a tablet in the kitchen and disappear from the online menu within seconds, which removed a recurring source of refunds and one-star reviews.
Images that do not cost the customer money
Food photography served as modern responsive formats at device-appropriate sizes. The menu page went from 6.2MB to 640KB, which on a mobile connection is the difference between browsing and leaving.
How it ran
Audit
Order economics modeled per venue, marketplace flow benchmarked, search gap mapped.
Content
Full menu structured, allergens verified with the kitchen, photography reshot for three venues.
Build
Ordering flow, kitchen availability tooling, content model and staff training.
Measure
Order mix tracking, search visibility reporting, two rounds of flow refinement.
How we measured it
Direct orders, marketplace orders and total order volume were tracked for twelve weeks post-launch against the preceding twelve weeks, with a like-for-like adjustment for one venue's seasonal closure.
Direct orders rose 48% while total order volume held — meaning the shift came out of marketplace share rather than from new demand, which is exactly the intended outcome. Average commission per order fell by 30 percentage points on the migrated share.
Menu page organic traffic grew 3.4× within four months as dish-level searches began resolving to the restaurant's own pages. Average order value on direct orders ran 9% higher than on the marketplace, which we attribute to sides and desserts being visible rather than buried behind a category tap.
direct orders
commission per order
menu page search traffic
“Same customers, same food. We just stopped paying a middleman to own the relationship.”
What we took from it
- If a marketplace owns your ordering, it owns your customer relationship and your margin.
- A menu locked in a PDF is invisible to the searches most likely to convert.
- Direct ordering only wins if it is genuinely faster than the app it replaces.