Restaurant technology in the UK, from Dublin.

Straight answer first, because it matters more than anything else on this page. Eclyde was built in Dublin by people who have worked restaurant floors. Ireland is our home market. The UK is the next one, and we have no British customers, no case studies from British kitchens and no office in London to point you at. We are not going to invent any of those. What we can do is show you the product working against your own menu and be honest about our timelines. Everything below is about the British trading conditions the platform is aimed at, not about work we have already done here.

Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo are now how a great many British customers order, and the price of that convenience lands on the kitchen. Commission runs as high as around 30 percent of an order when the platform handles delivery, less when you deliver yourself, and the rate on your own contract is the only figure worth working from. On a typical delivery order that can be most of the margin. The customer belongs to the platform too, so you cannot invite them back, and your listing sits beside every competitor on the street.

Card and contactless are how nearly every British hospitality transaction now happens, and plenty of independents are still on legacy terminal agreements with monthly rental, minimum billing, PCI charges and a rate nobody has looked at since they signed it. Eclyde uses Stripe-powered payments with per-transaction pricing you can read: card, contactless, Apple Pay and Google Pay, at the counter and online, with tips and refunds handled on the same screen. Nothing to rent, and no separate provider to reconcile against your till at midnight.

Per item and per order type, applied automatically. UK food VAT is one of the fiddlier regimes in hospitality: hot takeaway food and anything eaten on the premises carries the standard 20% rate, while most cold takeaway food is zero-rated. A mixed menu where the same sandwich is zero-rated cold and standard-rated toasted is exactly where returns go wrong. You set the treatment once, the till and the ordering page apply it, and the reports come out in a shape your accountant can use.

Not all of it, and be wary of anyone claiming otherwise. A rising wage floor, higher employer costs and a tight labour market mean every rota decision now carries real money, and no software makes a shift cheaper. What it can do is make the decision better informed: staff scheduling sits on your actual sales data, so you can see what each shift costs against what it takes and stop staffing a Tuesday like a Friday. The other half is the work the platform absorbs, the order aggregation, the review chasing, the end-of-day reporting, so a lean team gets through the night without extra hours.

A typical independent runs a till from one supplier, online ordering from another, two or three marketplace tablets, a scheduling app and a mailing tool nobody has opened since January. Five bills, no shared data. Eclyde covers the till, ordering, kitchen display, delivery with zones, scheduling, loyalty, reviews and the reporting over all of it, so every order from every channel feeds the same numbers. The marketing runs off that: it spots the regular who has not ordered in three weeks and sends them their usual with a few pounds off, without anyone writing the message. No contract, no lock-in, so it earns its place monthly or you walk.