from Hacker News

Restaurant website traffic now 40% mobile

by joe_hoyle on 9/20/13, 12:49 PM with 24 comments

• by BjoernKW on 9/20/13, 1:33 PM

  I don't get why many restaurant owners don't bother putting a decent website online. If they actually do have a website, most of the time it's outdated, ugly, doesn't offer any useful information (such as opening hours, specials or a menu) or is just completely unusable. I'm not even getting started on any 'fancy' stuff such as usability on mobile devices or online reservation.

  I know a few restaurateurs and they simply don't care, even more so than other types of small brick-and-mortar shops. First, they operate on very thin margins and most of the time simply can't or don't want to afford extra services such as a website. Moreover, most of their first-time customers still get there by word-of-mouth. It's as if most of the sector marketing-wise is still pretty much stuck in the early nineties.

• by egwynn on 9/20/13, 1:12 PM

  It's so sad/frustrating when you need to look up a restaurant's page on-the-go and then you find out it's flash-only.

• by ryanx435 on 9/20/13, 1:29 PM

  This is an interesting market that you are targeting, but I'm curious what your revenue looks like. It looks like you are banking on people upgrading to a premium account to make money, but to me it seems like you are giving away fully functional websites for free. You are giving so much away that there really isn't an incentive to upgrade.

  > There is no setup fee or minimum term (even for our free plan).

  >Can I stay on the free plan forever? Definitely. If you operate a small business or are simply growing, we want to support you. Our premium features are aligned to those of a larger restaurant, so once you’re more established you’ll have the ability to upgrade, but it’s all up to you!

  and you don't put ads on the restaurant's site either, so there is no revenue coming in to you on that end. Maybe I missed something when I was digging around?

• by josh33 on 9/20/13, 1:47 PM

  46% of apartment traffic is now mobile as well. I work for a company that hosts 10,000+ apartment websites and pulled the google Analytics that we aggregate across all of them.

• by jrochkind1 on 9/20/13, 2:22 PM

  i am frustrated by the number of restaurant websites that simply _don't work_ on iOS at all. Like you can't even look at a menu or figure out the hours.

  Of all the websites I look at, restaurant ones are the most likely to fail horribly on mobile.

  I guess it's because restaurant owners/managers 'buy' a website from a small contractor, and what they look for and are willing to pay for is something that looks 'pretty' -- lots of flash, lots of big graphics, etc.

• by calbear81 on 9/20/13, 6:44 PM

  Doesn't everyone just use Yelp? Gives me review highlights, hours, and often the menu too not to mention undoctored photos from other customers.

• by daemon13 on 9/20/13, 3:50 PM

  I presume that to use "connecting to domain" feature a restaurant owner would need to alter DNS records, which does represent an extra hurdle.

  So my questions are:

  1. In reality is utilizing this feature a real hurdle?

  2. Any other way to do this w/o mangling DNS records?

• by rschmitty on 9/20/13, 3:24 PM

  Man... my stupid childish head... I can't unsee the "butt cheeks" in their favicon now