How-to: offer delivery through BeerMenus
How does placing a delivery order work for customers?
Basically, when you enable delivery (or pickup) orders, you turn your BeerMenus page into a store. There are prominent "Buy" buttons next to each beer that's available for sale, and customers have their very own cart, just like on any ecommerce site:
And, just like any other ecommerce site, they'll find what they want to buy and add it to their cart:
And then they'll check out with a credit card payment:
During this flow, we check to make sure the customer doing the ordering is in your stated delivery area, and we'll also make sure they hit the order minimum that you establish. (More on those topics below).
Here are a few businesses already accepting delivery orders through BeerMenus. Check out their BeerMenus pages and play around with the customer experience to see how it works:
Setting up BeerMenus delivery for your business (3 steps)
Step 1: Set up your sell settings
If you’re able to deliver orders to local customers, you can start offering delivery through BeerMenus in just a few minutes!
Start by heading to the Sell tab on your update menu page:
Once you're there, set up your sell settings:
This will only take a couple minutes. You'll fill in things like how you want to be notified about new orders, where you want to offer delivery, your delivery fee, order minimum, etc.:
Delivery area
You're in total control of where you'll offer delivery. You can either choose to limit your delivery area by setting a certain radius from your business that you're willing to deliver to:
Or you can choose to deliver to a set list of zip codes:
👉 If you’d like to offer delivery, but aren’t able to deliver orders yourself, please email support@beermenus.com to let us know. We’re currently working on a few partnerships with third party delivery companies that could handle the delivery for you.
New order notifications
You can receive new order notifications via email, text, and/or an automated phone call:
Step 2: set up payment processing with Stripe
After you set up your sell settings, you need to set up payment processing in order to start taking orders. After all, you've gotta get paid!
Follow the instructions in this document to set up your account with Stripe, the payment processor we partner with. (More on Stripe below.)
Step 3: Enable items for delivery ordering
After you set up your delivery settings and connect Stripe, you can enable items for online ordering. Simply visit your update menu page and find the item(s) you want to sell. When you find the item, click the associated "Edit" button:
This brings you to the top of your update menu page. Check the “Sell this item on BeerMenus” box and enter the price and quantity available. Optionally, you can set a purchase limit.
NOTE: If you'd like to enable all your menu items for sale on BeerMenus or all items in certain menu sections, just send an email to support@beermenus.com and we can take care of that for you.
Accepting orders
A customer's credit card won’t be charged (and you won't get paid) until you accept that customer's order.
However, before you accept your customer's order you need to make sure you have everything that's in it.
You can review and accept a customer's order by clicking the button associated with the new order (this is on your Orders page, which you're linked to in an email whenever you receive a new order):
If the order looks good (i.e. everything in the order is, indeed, available for purchase), just click "Accept order and process payment":
Just like that, your customers receive a notification that their order has been accepted, their credit card gets charged, and you can load the item up for delivery!
Editing orders when items are unavailable
If an item in an order is unavailable, you can either remove the item from the order or (if it's their preference) you can contact the customer and edit the order to add a replacement item.
If you need to edit an order, click "Edit order" at the top of the page.
That scrolls you down to the place where you can remove an item entirely, reduce/increase the quantity of certain items, and add totally new items:
To add an item to an order, either click the "+ Add items" link in the "Edit order" section (see above screenshot) of the page, or just scroll down beneath the "Finalize updated order and process payment" button, where you'll see your full BeerMenus menu. To add an item (or several items), just find it (them) on your menu, and click the associated "Add" button(s):
That will load a modal where you can select the quantity of the item you're adding to their cart:
Click "Add to order" to add the item(s) to their order.
The changes you make to a customer's order will automatically reflect on the order review page. Once you're finished adjusting, review the order one final time and then click the "Finalize updated order and process payment" button:
At that point, your customers receive a notification that their order has been accepted, the adjusted order will process your customer's card will be charged, and you'll be ready to load up the order for delivery!
Delivering your orders
When you deliver an order to a customer you should, of course, make sure to check the customer's ID to make sure they're of legal drinking age.
Within your BeerMenus page, you should also make sure to mark an order as delivered when you deliver it:
This helps to keep your orders page organized on BeerMenus.
Email campaign to your local customers
After you set up accepting delivery orders, we’ll send a dedicated email campaign to your followers on BeerMenus and to other BeerMenus locals to let them know they can now order delivery from you through BeerMenus.
There's no charge for this email campaign; please shoot an email to support@beermenus.com if you have any questions about it!
Do I have to pay any fees?
There’s no fee to get started and no monthly fee. We charge a 5% fee on the order subtotal (pre-tax and pre-tip) in addition to payment processing fees from our payment processor (Stripe). Setting up a Stripe account for payment processing takes a few minutes.
When do I get paid?
With our payment processor, Stripe, your first payment makes it to your bank account in 7 business days. After that, you'll receive the money from your orders 2 days after they're placed and accepted by you (see above).
For example, you'll get the money from the orders you receive and accept on a Monday on the following Wednesday, 2 days later.
Questions? Feedback? Want some help?
Please schedule a call or email support@beermenus.com. We're happy to answer any questions you have, and because this is relatively new for us, we'd love to hear your feedback!