Where food businesses lose customers online.

Every one of these takes about two minutes to check on your own phone. Do it standing behind your own counter before you talk to anybody, me included.

1. 01

   Your menu is a picture.

   A PDF, or a photo of the printed menu taped onto a page. Google can't read the words inside either one, so the dishes in it don't come up when somebody searches for them by name. And a customer holding a phone at a red light has to pinch and drag around a page that was laid out for paper. Most of them give up and order somewhere else.

   Check it: open your menu on your phone and try to read a price without zooming.

2. 02

   Google doesn't know when you're open.

   Blank hours, or hours that were right two years ago. Someone drives fifteen minutes across town on a Sunday and finds the lights off. You lost that customer and you'll probably read about it in a review. There's a quieter cost too. With no hours on file you fall out of Google's "Open now" filter, so you don't come up at all for the person searching at 9pm for somewhere still serving.

   Check it: search your own name on your phone. The hours sit right under it. Look at the holidays as well.

3. 03

   Nobody can tap to call you.

   Your number sits on the page as plain text. On a phone that means copying it by hand and pasting it into the dialer. Sounds like nothing. It's the easiest thing a hungry person can do and your site makes them work for it.

   Check it: pull your site up on your phone and tap the number. If nothing happens, there's your answer.

4. 04

   Every online order goes through an app.

   DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Slice. If the only order button on your site sends people to one of those, a cut of every ticket leaves the building before you've paid for the chicken. The bigger loss is quieter. The app knows who ordered and how to reach them. You don't, so you can't text that person about Tuesday.

   Check it: tap your own order button and see whose logo you land on.

5. 05

   The site loads fine at your desk and nowhere else.

   On your office wifi it opens instantly. On a phone with two bars in a parking lot it's a white screen for six seconds, and people don't wait out white screens. When I check a site I count anything past three seconds as a problem, and if it hasn't loaded in eight I treat it as down. It's almost always one enormous background photo nobody ever resized.

   Check it: turn wifi off on your phone and count out loud while your own site loads.

You already know about the commission. So I'll skip that part and go to the ones that cost you more.

There are four steps, and every one of them is a place you can lose somebody. Each one is simple on its own. It's just usually nobody's job.

1. 01

   Somebody two miles from you is hungry right now and has never heard of you.

   They're not comparing you to anybody. They don't know you exist. Before you spend a dollar telling them, the free version has to be working: whether your Google listing is right, whether the hours are right, whether the photos are yours and recent, whether you're even filed under the right category. That's what somebody two miles out sees first. It costs nothing but the work, so it's where I start.

2. 02

   They found you, and now they're picking between you and the place next door.

   This happens on a phone and it's over in seconds. They look at your photos. They check how many stars you've got. They tap the menu and find out whether it opens or whether it's a PDF that loads sideways. Nothing about your cooking is involved yet, which is the frustrating part, because the cooking is the thing you're actually good at. So I rebuild the menu as a real page, get current photos on it, and set the review requests to go out on their own so your rating isn't just whoever was annoyed enough to type something.

3. 03

   They want it. Ordering is the last thing in the way.

   Ten seconds or three minutes. That's the whole difference, and it gets decided by things that sound too small to matter. A checkout that demands an account. A phone number that doesn't dial when you tap it. An app taking a cut of a ticket your own site could have taken for free. I put ordering and payment on your site so the order comes to you and the money stays yours. If they'd rather talk to somebody, the AI picks up, takes the order, and nobody sits on hold.

4. 04

   They came once. Can you reach them again?

   You already paid to get them in the door. Getting them back costs almost nothing by comparison, and it's still the step that gets put off, because nothing breaks when you skip it. So here's the plain version of the question. Do you have their number? If somebody ordered from you in March and hasn't been back since, is there anything at all that reminds them you exist? I set up the review ask and the win-back text, and the list that makes either of them possible.