How Long Does It Actually Take to Set Up Direct Ordering?

The most common reason takeaways stay on 30% commission isn't that they think it's good value. It's that setting up an alternative sounds like a project, and they haven't got a project in them on top of running a kitchen.

Fair enough. So here's exactly what's involved, honestly, including the bits that take longer than anyone admits.

The short version

Your time: about two hours, spread over a couple of days. Most of it is checking things we've already done.

Our time: a day or so of actual work. That's what the setup fee pays for.

Elapsed, if you're one of our first restaurants: two to three weeks. Not because the setup takes that long — because we'd rather give you a date we'll hit than one that sounds impressive. More on that at the end.

Step 1 — Send us a photo of your menu

This is the bit people dread and it's the bit you don't do.

Take photos of your menu — the printed one, the board on the wall, a PDF, whatever you have. Send them over. We run them through a system that reads out every item, price, size and option, and builds the menu for you. Then we send it back as a working ordering page for you to check.

Your job: take the photos, then read the result and tell us what's wrong. There'll be a few things — a price that changed and never made it onto the printed menu, an item you stopped doing, a spelling of "aubergine" nobody agrees on.

Time: twenty minutes to photograph, half an hour to check.

The bit worth knowing: options and sizes are where menus get complicated. "Large chips" isn't a separate item, it's a size. "Curry sauce" isn't a size, it's an extra. Getting that structure right is most of the work, and it's the difference between a menu customers can order from quickly and one they give up on.

Step 2 — Connect your bank

Payments go through Stripe, straight into your own account. Not ours — yours. Your business name on the customer's card statement, your bank details, your payout schedule.

Your job: fill in Stripe's onboarding form. Business name and address, company number if you have one, the bank account you want paying, and a photo of your driving licence or passport for identity verification. It's the same anti-money-laundering check any card provider does.

Time: twenty minutes, if you have the details to hand. We do it with you on the phone if you'd rather.

What can slow it down: if your business details don't match Companies House, or the bank account is in a different name to the business, Stripe will ask for more documents. Usually a day, occasionally a week. This is the single most likely thing to delay a launch, which is why we do it first rather than last.

Once it's approved, money from an order is in your account on your normal payout schedule — typically two working days, and the same or next day once you've got a history.

Step 3 — The web address

Two options, and neither requires touching your existing website.

Use ours. You get yourplace.order.porkenpence.com immediately. Nothing to configure. Link to it from your existing site with an "Order now" button, put it on your leaflets, done. This is what the Starter plan uses and there's nothing wrong with it.

Use yours. You add one DNS record — a CNAME on order.yourplace.co.uk pointing at us — and we issue the certificate. Your ordering site is then genuinely on your domain.

Your job: if you want your own domain, either give us access to wherever your domain is registered, or add the record yourself while we're on the phone. It's one line.

Time: five minutes to add. Up to a few hours for DNS to propagate, though usually it's minutes.

The honest snag: a surprising number of small businesses don't know who controls their domain. It was set up by a nephew in 2016, or by a web company they've since fallen out with. If that's you, find out before you plan a launch date — recovering a domain from an unresponsive third party is the one part of this that can take weeks. Using our address in the meantime costs you nothing and you can move later.

Step 4 — The tablet on the pass

Orders arrive on a device in the kitchen. Any phone or tablet from roughly the last five years will do — an old iPad is perfect.

Your job: open the link, add it to the home screen, and press "turn sound on" at the start of each service. That's the whole setup.

Time: five minutes, plus ten showing whoever's on the pass.

New orders make a noise until somebody accepts them. Accepting means picking a time — 20 minutes, 30 minutes — which is what the customer sees. There's a button to take an item off the menu when you run out, and a switch to pause ordering entirely when you're drowning.

The thing we'd tell you to actually practise: rejecting an order. It's the button nobody presses in training and everybody needs at some point. Rejecting releases the customer's card immediately — they're never charged — and emails them. Knowing that in advance stops people accepting orders they can't cook.

Step 5 — Staff and a test order

We set up a login for each person and give them the role that matches their job. The owner gets admin. Whoever's on the pass gets kitchen. Drivers get driver, and they see runs and nothing else.

Then we put a real order through, end to end, with a real card, and refund it. Order on a phone, accept it in the kitchen, hand it to a driver, mark it delivered. Everybody sees their screen do the thing it does.

Time: half an hour. Do it before a service, not during one.

So how long, really?

The work adds up to about a day. The elapsed time is a different question, and it depends on three things.

Two are outside anyone's control. Stripe's identity verification can come back in twenty minutes or ask for more documents and take a week. And if nobody's sure who controls your domain, recovering it from an unresponsive third party is measured in weeks, not days. We start with both of these precisely because they're the slow bits.

The third is us, and it's worth being straight about it.

We are onboarding our first restaurants right now. That means you'd get a level of attention nobody gets later — we'll build your menu ourselves, sit with you for the first service, and change things because you asked rather than because they were on a roadmap. It also means we're not going to pretend we can turn you around by Thursday.

So for the first few shops we work with, plan on two to three weeks from first conversation to first order. Some of that is Stripe. Some of it is us doing things carefully the first time that will be routine by the tenth.

If that's too slow for you, say so on the call and we'll tell you honestly whether we can meet your date. We'd rather lose the job than miss a launch you'd told your customers about.

Once this is properly worn in, a shop with its details to hand and no domain drama will genuinely go live in a day or two. We're just not going to quote you that until it's true.

What happens after

The first week is where the real work is, and it isn't technical. It's telling people the website exists.

Cards in every bag. A QR code on the counter. Mentioning it on the phone. A discount for ordering direct — you can afford one, because a direct order leaves you about £3.70 better off on a £25 delivery than a marketplace one does, and around £5.30 if they collect. Put the better offer on collection, where the room actually is.

That part is on you. Everything before it is on us.

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See what it costs, or have a go on the demo — order something, accept it in the kitchen, and drive it to the door.