Guide
Where the orders leak out.
Somebody chose your food, built a basket, and left. That is the most expensive thing that happens on your website, and it is usually fixable.
In short
Restaurant checkouts are abandoned mainly because of slow loading, fees revealed late, forced account creation, unclear delivery times and awkward card entry on a phone. Fixing the order is: make it fast, show the total early, allow guest checkout, quote a real time, and support Apple Pay and Google Pay. These are the same handful of problems on almost every site.
Updated 28 August 2026
Speed, before anything else
A hungry person on mobile data has very little patience, and every second of load time costs conversion. This is the reason a menu delivered as a PDF is such an expensive mistake: it loads slowly, it does not reflow on a phone, and it cannot be ordered from. If you fix one thing, fix load speed, because everything else on this list only matters to people who waited long enough to see it.
Do not spring the fees at the end
A basket that says €24 and a total that says €31 reads as a trick, even when every line is legitimate. Delivery fee, service charge and small-order surcharge should be visible before the final step, ideally as soon as a postcode is entered. People will accept a delivery fee they were told about early and abandon the identical fee revealed late. The number is not the problem, the surprise is.
Forced accounts kill first orders
Requiring registration before a first order is one of the highest-cost defaults in online ordering. The customer wants dinner, not a relationship. Allow guest checkout, take the details you need to fulfil the order, and offer the account afterwards, once they have something to gain from it. You will get more accounts this way than by demanding one up front, and far more orders.
Quote a time you can actually hit
Vagueness costs orders and optimism costs customers. "45 to 55 minutes" converts better than no estimate and much better than "as soon as possible". But quoting thirty minutes on a Friday when you are running at seventy produces a worse outcome than quoting seventy honestly: the order is placed and then the experience fails. Quote wide during peak and narrow when you are quiet.
- Give a range, not a promise
- Widen it automatically at peak
- Show it before checkout, not after payment
Card entry on a phone is the last hurdle
Typing a sixteen-digit number one-handed is the single most abandoned step in mobile commerce. Apple Pay and Google Pay remove it entirely, and for a lot of restaurants turning them on is the largest single conversion change available. If your provider supports them and they are not enabled, that is free money sitting behind a settings toggle.
The honest limitation
Some abandonment is not fixable and chasing it is a waste. People browse menus to decide what they fancy and change their mind, or they price-check three places and pick one. A checkout that never leaks would mean nobody was browsing. Aim at the mechanical causes above, and stop worrying about the rest.
Questions, answered straight.
Not covered here? Just ask us.
What abandonment rate is normal?
It varies too widely by channel and market for a single figure to be useful, and most published numbers come from general ecommerce rather than food. Measure your own baseline, change one thing, and watch the direction.
Should I show a minimum order before or after they build a basket?
Before. Telling somebody at checkout that they are €4 short of a minimum is a good way to lose the whole order rather than sell a side. Say it at the top and suggest something that closes the gap.
Does removing the delivery fee increase orders?
Usually yes, and usually not profitably unless it is tied to a threshold. Free delivery over a set basket value works because it raises average order at the same time as removing the objection.
How do I even see abandonment?
You need analytics on the ordering flow with events at basket, checkout start and payment. If your ordering provider cannot show you where people drop, that is worth asking them about, because you are flying blind on your best conversion lever.
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