Online ordering for ice cream shops, built around a product that melts

Keeping ice cream delivery from costing you reviews

Ice cream is one of the few foods where the delivery problem is harder than the cooking problem. A good product can leave your shop and arrive ruined with nobody having done anything wrong. The restaurants that make delivery work treat it as a packaging and timing problem first, and a menu problem second.

The radius decides the quality

Every extra minute in the bag is a degree of softening. The honest way to set a delivery area is to time a real trip: pack a tub exactly as a customer would receive it, give it to your rider, and have them bring it back after a loop to the edge of the area you want to serve. Open it. If it is scoopable, the area is fine. If it is not, the area is too big or the packaging is too thin. Do this once in the hottest part of the day and you will know your real radius, which is usually smaller than the one you wanted.

Scoop at the door, not at the order

The order screen lets you accept an order and set a preparation time without starting it. For ice cream, the preparation is seconds, so the only thing that should trigger scooping is the rider arriving. Keep tubs in the freezer until the bag is open and the rider is standing there. If you use Porter, that means waiting for the rider to confirm arrival before filling; if you use your own scooter, it means the rider calls the counter from outside. Ten minutes of sitting on the counter waiting for a pickup is the most common cause of a soft delivery.

Packaging that actually holds

An insulated bag with a gel pack keeps a sealed tub solid for roughly the length of a short local trip. Dry ice extends that but needs careful handling and a warning on the bag. Lids must seal, because a tub that tilts leaks. For cakes, nothing in a rider’s bag is good enough: use a flat box, your own staff, and a car or a steady hand. Put the packaging cost into the delivery charge rather than the item price, so counter customers are not paying for a bag they never see.

Summer peaks: the counter is the bottleneck

On the busiest days the queue runs out of the door and people leave before ordering. The fix is to take ordering off the server’s hands. A QR code at the counter and in the window lets anyone in the queue order and pay from their phone; the order lands on the screen with their name, the server scoops in order, and the handover takes seconds. The QR code ordering page covers the setup. On those days, one person on the screen and one scooping is faster than two people doing both.

Off-season: keep the page alive

Winter is when delivery of tubs and cakes carries the shop, and when the counter is quiet enough to look at the menu properly. Switch off the seasonal flavours rather than deleting them, so they come back in a tap when the fruit does. Add the hot desserts or the coffee if you serve them. The customers who ordered through your link in August are still in your order records; a message in December telling them the cakes are back costs nothing and reaches people who already trust the page. The guide to increasing direct online orders covers how to do that without spamming anyone.

Keep marketplaces for discovery, not for regulars

A marketplace listing will still bring in the family searching for ice cream at 9pm who have never heard of you. The commission on that order is the price of the introduction. The same commission on the family that orders every Friday is money you are giving away. Put the QR code on the lid of every tub that leaves, and the second order has a cheaper route home.