In this article
A guest who opens your menu, adds something to the cart, and then quits isn't just a missed order. It's the most expensive kind of loss there is — because you already had them.
Every euro you spend on Google Ads, social media, or a good photo of your pasta serves one purpose: getting someone to your online ordering page. If that person arrives, browses the menu, adds an item to the cart — and then clicks away without paying, you're not back where you started. You're worse off, because you already paid for the expensive step (getting the attention) and lost the cheap one (confirming the order).
Grow Online Ordering: 7 Ways for Restaurants is about volume — getting more people to your ordering channel. Cut Delivery Costs: 7 Strategies Against Platform Commission is about margin — keeping more of every euro that comes in. Neither looks at what happens between "someone opens your menu" and "someone pays": the checkout itself, the screen where an order is won or lost.
For most independent restaurants, that screen is a blind spot. You see how many orders come in, and maybe how many visitors your site attracts — but rarely what happens in between. How many people started an order and didn't finish it? At exactly which point did they quit? Without those numbers, fixing the problem is like treating a broken bone without an X-ray: you do something, but not necessarily the right thing.
This article is that X-ray. Seven numbers, each a concrete point in your ordering process where guests fall away — plus a calculator at the end that uses your own visitor count and average order value to work out what a leaky checkout is really costing you.
Why the checkout is the most valuable screen on your website
A guest who sees your Instagram post and clicks through to your menu already cost you something — time, ad budget, years of building your brand. A guest who then quits before finishing checkout costs you all of that again, because you'll have to advertise again, create content again, hope that person comes back again. A better checkout, by contrast, costs nothing extra per guest: you improve one screen, and every future visitor benefits from it.
That makes the checkout the single best-return screen on your website — better than a new ad campaign, better than another discount promotion. Yet it's usually the least tested part of it. Menus get rewritten, photos get replaced, prices get revisited; the checkout sits untouched for years, precisely because nobody thinks of it as "content".
Research into checkout behaviour in online shopping is large and consistent: the Baymard Institute has tracked, across thousands of online stores, why buyers abandon an almost-finished order. The numbers below are drawn from that research and translated into what they concretely mean for a restaurant handling its own orders — through an own ordering page, table-side QR ordering, or a takeaway form. They are explicitly general checkout research adapted to a hospitality context — not a precise measurement of your restaurant, but a reliable map of where things go wrong.
1. The funnel: from a hundred opened menus to a handful of payments
Picture a typical day at a restaurant with its own online ordering page: a hundred people open the menu. Not everyone arrives with the same intent — some are just browsing, others already know what they want. Of those hundred, 42% add something to the cart. Of that group, 69% actually start checkout — entering name, address, phone number. And of those who start checkout, 64% go on to actually complete payment.
Multiply those three percentages and you end up with roughly 19 of the original hundred visitors who actually pay. That isn't a bad restaurant — it's an average, unoptimised ordering page. What matters next isn't the "19%" itself, but exactly where in that chain the biggest drop happens, because that decides what you fix first.
The graphic below shows exactly that: how many people reach each stage, and how many are lost at each transition. Every step further in this article corresponds to one of those transitions.
A hundred guests open your online menu on a typical day. Here's how thin that group gets at every next step.
↳ 58 guests (58%) drop off here
↳ 13 guests (31%) drop off here
↳ 10 guests (36%) drop off here
Example numbers for an average restaurant with its own ordering page — calculate your own numbers in the tool further down this article.
2. Number 2 — 48%: hidden costs that only appear on the final screen
In checkout research this is consistently the number one reason people abandon: buyers only see — on the very last screen, after already entering name, address and phone number — that a delivery fee, service fee, or minimum-order surcharge gets added. A €14 dish that suddenly costs €19 because of delivery fees doesn't feel transparently priced — it feels like a bait-and-switch.
For restaurants this leak is especially painful, because the costs that surprise people — delivery fee, packaging fee, a minimum-order surcharge — are often exactly the costs you can't simply remove. The fix isn't the fee itself, it's the moment you show it: calculate the delivery fee as soon as the address is known (by postcode, not only at the final step), and show the total — including everything — at the top of the cart, not just on the payment screen.
EU price-transparency rules actually work in your favour here: the total price, including mandatory fees, has to be visible before the final payment step anyway. What's a legal requirement is a conversion opportunity — show it early instead of exactly on time.
3. Number 3 — 24%: being forced to create an account before you can order
A quarter of abandoners cite this reason: being forced to invent a password, confirm an email address, or create an account before the order can even be placed. For a guest who's hungry at 7:30pm and wants to know in ten minutes when the pasta will arrive, that's a wall in exactly the wrong place.
The paradox is that restaurants often put up that wall precisely because they want to collect customer data — for a newsletter, for repeat orders. But the order works against itself: ask for the email address after the order, as a confirmation, rather than before it as a condition. A guest who just successfully ordered hands over an email address far more readily than a guest who's still deciding whether it's worth the hassle.
"Order as guest" is the shortest route to more completed orders here: make the account optional, offered after the fact, with the order details already filled in so creating one costs a single click instead of a whole form.
4. Number 4 — 18%: a checkout that simply takes too long
Address, house number, unit, phone number, note for the courier, preferred time, payment method, billing address if different from delivery address — each field feels small on its own, but together they build a form a guest has to fill in on a phone, one-handed, between two other tasks.
The number of fields matters less than the number of decisions. "Want an account?" is a decision. "Which payment method?" is a decision. Every extra choice that isn't strictly necessary to deliver the order is a moment where someone can pause to think — and never come back.
The rule of thumb: anything not needed to get the food to the right person at the right address doesn't belong in checkout. Move notes, preferences and marketing consent to after the order. Ask for address and phone on one screen, not spread across three.
5. Number 5 — 17%: no visibility of the running total until the very end
This is a different problem from number 2 above: it's not about hidden costs, it's about simply not being able to see a running total while ordering. A cart with no visible subtotal forces the guest into mental arithmetic — and nobody enjoys doing sums after a long workday.
The comparison below lines up all seven numbers from this article side by side, so you can see at a glance which friction point weighs heaviest and therefore deserves your attention first.
The fix is simple but often overlooked: keep the subtotal permanently visible at every step of the order, not just on the very last screen.
Share of buyers who cite each reason as (one of) the causes of checkout abandonment. People often cite several reasons at once, so these numbers don't add up to 100%.
Drawn from checkout research across thousands of online stores (Baymard Institute), translated into a hospitality context. See each number above in this article for the restaurant-specific explanation.
6. Number 6 — 18%: uncertainty about when the food will actually arrive
"Delivery: 30–60 minutes" isn't a time, it's a guess the guest has to interpret themselves. On a busy Friday night that window can turn into two hours in practice — and nobody tells the guest until the order is already on its way, or conspicuously not.
Delivery-time uncertainty is exactly the kind of risk that makes people quit right before paying: it's the moment the decision feels most real, and doubt strikes most easily. A concrete time ("ready at 7:47pm") instead of a range ("30–45 min") meaningfully reduces that doubt, even when the estimated time isn't perfect — people accept a time that runs a little late far more easily than a range they can't plan around.
For takeaway the same principle applies even more directly: an exact pickup time, tied to a kitchen display that realistically estimates how busy the kitchen is, prevents both premature abandonment and a guest standing there waiting for a meal that's gone cold.
7. Number 7 — 13% and 9%: a slow page, and too few ways to pay
Two smaller but real leaks that both come down to the same thing: the checkout doesn't work the way the guest expects. Thirteen percent of abandoners cite a website that loads slowly, freezes, or throws an error — often exactly when the mobile signal in a busy dining room, or on the move, is a little weaker. Nine percent quit because their preferred payment method simply isn't offered.
That last figure matters more than the percentage suggests, because it varies sharply by country: in Belgium a large share of guests expect Bancontact, in the Netherlands iDEAL, elsewhere KBC/CBC payment buttons or Payconiq. A checkout that only offers card payment excludes a substantial share of how people ordinarily pay in some markets — not because guests don't have money, but because they can't find their own banking app on the screen.
For load time: test your ordering page on ordinary 4G, not on your own kitchen's wifi. For payment methods: simply ask your regular guests which app they use most, and make sure it's on the list.
Calculate what your checkout is costing you
What is your checkout costing you per month?
Enter your own visitor count, average order value and current conversion — the tool shows what a checkout performing at a well-optimised level would earn you on top.
Percentage that carries through from the previous step to the next — estimate from your own ordering system, or use the starting values if you don't know yet.
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The 'target' rates are realistic goals for a well-optimised flow, not a published industry standard — treat this as a 'what if', not a promise. The tool never counts back more than the gap between your current and your target numbers.
The number that matters
Of the seven numbers in this article, there isn't one you'll fix in a weekend — and you don't need to. The calculator above points you straight at the weakest link in your own funnel: is it the transition from cart to checkout, or from checkout to payment? Start there, not with whichever number happens to sound easiest to fix.
The core of this whole article is worth repeating once: a guest already inside your checkout has already made the hardest decision — deciding what they want to eat, from you, today. Every piece of friction you remove after that is the cheapest revenue growth your restaurant can book, because it costs no ad budget at all — only attention to a screen most owners never look at.
Want to make that attention structural rather than a one-off? The next step once your checkout is sharp is how much of every completed order you actually keep — see Cut Delivery Costs: 7 Strategies Against Platform Commission.