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by floppydisk 5421 days ago
Couple off the top of my head:

1) If you have live acts performing at your establishment Friday-Sunday, the website can raise awareness.

2) Specialty products / menu items.

3) Paraphernalia / SWAG from the restaurant.

4) Take out -- order online, pick up in store.

5) If you sell things like coffee beans, web presence increases the number of eyeballs on your product.

At the end of the day, restaurants are about putting bodies in chairs and serving them food. Thus, the focus of a good website should be increasing traffic into the restaurant.

One way I could see functionality between restaurant and website would be linking time-to-wait dynamically with the website. So if I go to a restaurant's website, I could see # of people waiting and average time to wait for the evening. This does go back to putting bodies in seats, but it would better link web presence with what actually happens in the restaurant.

1 comments

Building something you might be interested in as far as wait times...
Really? I'd be curious to see how someone implements this. From my admittedly limited knowledge of the space, I see three different ways to tackling this. First, build out your own reservation system that uses your custom software to link the reservation system to the website and provide a vertical stack. Second, build plugins/hooks for existing electronic reservation/seating systems currently in use. Or third, work with the OpenTable's API.
OpenTable doesn't really have an official API. Urbanspoon has been touting Rez as an alternative but same story there. Will definitely let you know when we're ready for primetime.