Take Orders and Bookings on Your Website, Commission-Free

Most small shops in Ireland already take orders. They just take them the hard way: a phone that rings during the lunch rush, a Facebook message at 11pm, a note scribbled on the back of a docket. None of it scales, and on the busy days orders slip through.

The other option you've been sold is a food-ordering app or a booking platform. They tidy it up, but they take a cut of everything you sell, and they put your customers on a list that belongs to them. There is a simpler way: take the orders and bookings on your own website, keep the lot, and run it from the phone in your pocket.

What "order ahead" actually means

A customer opens your site and picks what they want: two pork chops, a brown loaf, a dozen oysters. Then they choose a collection day and place the order. It lands on your WhatsApp as a tidy message: the items, the quantities, the name, the number, the day they want it. You reply to confirm, or to say a line is sold out. They collect, and they pay you when they do.

For food, you list the allergen information on every item, the way the law expects. For anything sold by weight, you set the price on the scales at collection, the same as you do across the counter today. Nothing about how you trade has to change.

And bookings, the same way

A barber, a salon, a B&B, a small restaurant: the same idea, for time instead of goods. A customer picks a slot on your site, the booking lands on your WhatsApp, and confirmations and reminders go out on their own, so fewer people forget to show. No marketplace sitting in the middle, selling your regulars a discount to go somewhere else.

The part that matters: you keep the money

A food-ordering app can take anywhere from 7% to 30% of every order. A booking app might charge 20% on each new customer it sends you. That is money off the top, every month, on sales you would often have made anyway.

Orders and bookings on ConnectEire are a flat fee. There is no commission and no cut on each order. You pay the same whether you take five orders or five hundred.

You run it from WhatsApp

There is no dashboard to log into and no till system to learn. The order or the booking arrives as a message. You reply to accept it. That is the whole job. If you can run a WhatsApp chat, you can run this, which is the same promise as the rest of what we do: you send a message, we handle the machinery behind it.

Is it for you?

Order-ahead suits a butcher, a bakery, a fishmonger, a cafe, or a farm-gate producer: anyone whose customers know what they want and will collect it. Bookings suit a barber, a salon, a B&B, or a small restaurant with fixed tables.

For now it handles collection, and customers pay you when they collect. That keeps it simple, and keeps you in control.

It sits one step above the standard website plan because it does more: it turns your site into something that takes orders and fills the diary. The website on its own is €40 a month. Orders and bookings together are €75 a month, with no setup fee and no contract. We build it first, and you only pay once you are happy it works for you.