Under a new partnership between Google and order-integrator and digital service provider ItsaCheckmate, customers can order directly from their search results.
The partnership is one part of Google’s further push into the digital ordering space across commerce, and represents another service for restaurant partners, said ItsaCheckmate founder and CEO Vishal Agarwal.
“We are very excited to offer our Order with Google integration to SMB restaurants,” said Agarwal. “This will help them generate new digital orders at minimal costs, fully integrated with their POS system.”
He was quick to point out that it’s a free service for partners.
“We are giving this away for free to smaller restaurants. There has been a lot of talk about tech companies helping the smaller guys—we are actually doing it. There is no commission being charged by anyone, only the processing fee,” Agarwal added.
The integration is one of many from Google and yet another sign that the restaurant industry is getting more and more connected to the wider Internet infrastructure.
According to Agarwal, it will do three things for restaurant partners: Turn organic search into sales, protect profit margins and save time.
It turns the huge amount of “food near me” searches into a higher-level step in the restaurant sales funnel. From there, it makes ordering easy for customers and automatically updates the restaurant’s menu in Google search without another menu to manage.
“Through the Order with Google integration, changes made to menu items on a restaurant’s POS will automatically reflect on their Google menu. Moreover, orders placed through Order with Google will flow directly into the restaurant’s POS,” read a release announcing the program.
The new program is called Restaurant Direct and, according to the company, it’s already ready to roll out. Agarwal said the rollout started with small business customers with checks to ensure all the systems, APIs and digital orders are working properly. He expects the full rollout to small business partners to be complete by mid-October.