Algeria AgencyIndustries
Restaurants: the order, the review, and the rush
What you sell is eaten in an hour and judged in public the next day. The whole trade sits in that gap.
A restaurant has one property no other business in this series shares: what it sells disappears within an hour, and the judgement it produces stays online for years.
A service mistake at half past eight on a Friday does not cost one cover. It produces a sentence written the next day, indexed, read by hundreds of people who will decide from it.
That is why this article does not start with the website. It starts at the moment your operation is under the most strain, because that moment is what writes your reputation.
Figures here are sourced and dated. On delivery platform commissions in Algeria we found no published, verifiable data, so we quote none — the section concerned argues about the structure of the cost, which you can check on your own receipts.
What a customer decides before reaching the door
The decision to come in is taken on a phone, usually within five hundred metres, and usually in under a minute. What carries it is not your logo or your decor: it is two or three photographs of dishes and a score.
Restaurants almost always invest in the wrong order. The frontage, the printed menus and the logo come before the photographs, although the first three are only seen after the decision and the fourth causes it.
A dish shot with flash, at night, on a white tablecloth, does not tempt anybody. One shot near a window, in daylight, with the plate slightly angled, does — and it costs the price of one lunch at a quiet moment.
The photograph of the empty dining room, meanwhile, does almost nothing for the decision to come in, although it is what most restaurants publish first. It answers a question nobody asked.
The rule that follows is simple: five dishes, five recent and honest photographs, and nothing else until that is done. It is the only work in this article that has an effect in the week it happens.
A menu as a PDF is a menu nobody reads
The online menu is almost always a scanned or exported file. On a phone it opens in another screen, displays at a tenth of its size, and needs two zoom gestures per section.
The result is measurable in your own experience: ask somebody to find the price of a starter on your menu, while walking. Most give up before finding it.
A menu as text, in the page, reads without a gesture, can be searched, and can be pasted into a message when a customer wants to suggest somewhere to three friends. A PDF does none of those three.
There is also a direct consequence for what search engines understand about you. A dish written as text is a dish that can be found; a dish inside an image is not, and a good share of the searches that would concern you are for one specific dish rather than a category of restaurant.
The cost of fixing it is an hour of typing and nothing else. The cost of not doing it is invisible, like almost everything described in this article, and that is what makes it last.
Taking orders by chat app during service
Remote ordering runs through a messaging app, held by somebody who is also working the floor. It works on a Tuesday lunchtime and breaks on a Friday night, which is exactly when the takings happen.
The symptom is not the lost order, which is visible. It is the half-confirmed order — the customer wrote, nobody replied, they are neither served nor gone — and that is the one producing the next day’s review.
The fix is not installing an online ordering system. It is deciding who replies during service and what happens when that person cannot: an honest automatic reply saying "we are in the middle of service, call this number" beats silence.
Silence gets read as closure or as indifference, and both readings cost the same. Nobody assumes you are simply busy, even though that is always the real reason.
This is the point in the article where an organisational decision is worth more than any tool, and it is worth saying in a text written by a web agency.
The telephone is your counter, and that is measurable
The internet market observatory published by ARPCE counts, for the second quarter of 2025, some 59.10 million internet subscriptions in Algeria, of which 88.71% are mobile and 11.29% fixed.
For a restaurant that means nearly all your potential customers discover you standing up, outdoors, on a small screen, at a moment when they are hungry and choosing between three places.
Anything demanding effort in that situation gets dropped: a menu as an attachment, a booking form, a number that has to be copied out, a page taking five seconds to appear.
It also decides position in the result. Somebody searching at half twelve does not scroll: they take one of the first three listings, and the business listing does more work here than the website.
That proportion finally explains why the dining room’s Wi-Fi is a commercial subject rather than a technical one. Fixed subscriptions are a minority: for many of your customers, your access point is the only fixed connection they will touch all day.
- Mobile subscriptions88.71%
- Fixed subscriptions11.29%
ARPCE, internet market observatory, second quarter 2025
What delivery actually takes from you
We will not quote a commission rate: for Algeria we found no published, dated figure we could verify. What we can describe is the structure of the cost, and it checks out against your own receipts.
The first term is the commission, which comes out of your margin and not your turnover — the most expensive confusion in the sector. A low-margin dish can become a no-margin dish without the displayed price moving.
The second is packaging, which does not exist in the dining room and is almost never passed on. The third is remaking: a dish delivered cold or spilled gets made again, and its loss is double.
The fourth does not appear on any receipt: the platform owns the relationship. A customer who has ordered from you three times is the platform’s customer, and on the day it promotes a cheaper competitor you cannot write to them.
The conclusion is not to refuse delivery, which brings real volume. It is to know which dishes you are willing to put there — those that travel and whose margin absorbs the commission — and not to default to the whole menu.
Reviews are decided in the worst twenty minutes of your week
Your average score is not produced by your good services. It is produced by the most strained twenty minutes of your week, because that is where mistakes happen and annoyed people write.
That has an organisational consequence no tool replaces: the only thing that durably improves a score is serving fewer covers during the peak, or putting more staff on at that exact moment.
On the part that can be handled online, the rule is the one every service trade shares: you reply for the next reader, not for the author. A calm reply acknowledging one specific fact beats a general defence.
One reply to avoid absolutely: the one blaming the customer. It is read by people wondering how you would treat them, and it answers that question in the worst possible way.
Asking for reviews happens at payment, once, on something that does not require copying out an address. A code displayed on the table works better than a line from the waiter, because it asks nothing of anybody.
Opening hours, and the weeks when they decide everything
Wrong hours cost more than no hours. A customer who travels and finds the door shut does not come back, and often writes about it.
The period when this matters most is Ramadan, when almost every restaurant changes its operation and almost none updates its listing. Searches, meanwhile, rise sharply, and the gap between what is published and what is true peaks exactly when it is most consulted.
The same holds for public holidays, for Fridays, and for annual closures. Those are precisely the days somebody checks before setting out.
Fixing it is free and takes five minutes per change. It gets neglected because it produces no visible effect: you never see the customer who did not come because your listing said "closed".
Put it in the service routine rather than in a good intention: whoever opens on Friday updates the listing, the same way they switch on the window lights.
Staff change, the accounts must not
Turnover is high in this trade, and access rarely follows. The business listing account is often in a former employee’s name, the social page is administered by somebody who has left, and nobody notices until they need it.
The moment of noticing is always the wrong one: a review to answer, hours to change urgently, a photograph to take down. The loss is not theoretical, it is immediate.
The rule is simple and rarely applied: accounts belong to the establishment, with an email address in the restaurant’s name rather than a person’s, and access is granted on top to whoever needs it.
Removing access is part of an employee leaving, exactly as returning the keys is, and it is the only way not to discover the problem six months later.
The same goes for photographs: they have to exist somewhere other than the phone of whoever took them, or they leave with that person.
The dining room’s Wi-Fi is a commercial subject
A customer who stays longer spends more, and a customer whose connection does not work leaves earlier. That is the entire mechanism, and it is more direct in this trade than in almost any other.
The problem is never the headline speed of the subscription. It is the number of devices connected at once: consumer equipment serves five devices acceptably and degrades markedly at thirty, which is an ordinary Friday evening.
The second mistake is placement. Equipment sitting behind the counter, on the floor, against a load-bearing wall, covers a full room badly — and a room full of people is a room full of water, which absorbs the signal.
The third is putting customers on the same network as the till. That is a security problem before it is a performance problem, and it is settled once, at installation, by separating the two.
We have written a whole article on this question and it treats the subject in more detail than this section can; the essential point for a restaurant fits in one sentence: capacity is counted in devices, not in square metres.
What to check before signing with a supplier
Who the business listing will belong to. It is the only digital asset that genuinely matters for a restaurant, because it carries the reviews, and a supplier who creates it on their own account holds your reputation.
Who owns the domain name and where the access sits. The same rule as everywhere, and it is settled by one question asked before signature.
What happens to your photographs. They are yours, they have to be handed over at full resolution, and they will go on being useful longer than the site will.
What the supplier proposes for the menu. If the answer is "we put your PDF online", you are buying precisely what this article describes as not working.
And a direct check: ask to see another restaurant they built, on a phone, outdoors, at midday. Thirty seconds is enough to know whether the work was tested under the conditions it will be read in.
What actually gets measured
Follower counts on your social pages predict nothing. They correlate neither with covers nor with takings, and yet they are the number most restaurants look at.
Three useful measures, all countable by hand. Calls received from the business listing, reviews received per month, and the share of your covers coming from delivery.
The fourth is slower and more important: the return rate. How many customers from three months ago came back. It can only be measured by keeping a book, and it is worth more than the other three together.
Record the starting state now: average score, number of reviews, photographs less than a year old, whether the hours are right. Four lines to compare against in six months.
And always compare like periods. A Ramadan month against an ordinary one says nothing, and it is the sector’s commonest reading error.
What we do, and what we will not do
What we do not promise: a number of covers. It depends on your kitchen, your location and your service far more than on your online presence, and nobody honest will quote you a figure on it.
A limit of competence to state plainly: we will not fix your peak. If your reviews are sliding because Friday night exceeds what your kitchen can produce, no digital work corrects that, and saying so is more useful than selling you a rebuild.
What we do: the business listing, on an account you own, with real opening hours kept current, photographs of dishes, and a review routine that survives an employee leaving.
The menu as text in the page rather than as a file, a page readable in three seconds on a phone outdoors, and the dining room network separated from the till where we handle that part too.
And the thing you should do without us, this week: five photographs of your five best-selling dishes, near a window, at a quiet moment. It is free, it takes an hour, and it will do more for covers than anything we could bill you for this month.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need a site when we already have a social page?
The business listing matters more than either, because it carries the reviews and appears at the moment of decision. The site mainly earns its place by holding a readable menu and accurate information.
Should we be on the delivery platforms?
Often yes, for volume, but not with the whole menu. Pick dishes that travel and whose margin absorbs the commission, bearing in mind the commission comes out of margin and not turnover.
How do we get more reviews?
At payment, once, with a displayed code rather than a spoken request. And above all, reply to the ones you have: the reply is read by the next customer, who is the one you are convincing.
What about an unfair review?
Reply calmly, on the facts, without blaming the person. You are writing for the next reader. Blaming the customer reads as how you would treat anybody.
Does free Wi-Fi really make a difference?
It lengthens how long people stay, which ties directly to what they spend. Provided it works at thirty devices rather than five, which is a question of equipment and placement rather than of subscription.
Are there Algerian figures on delivery commissions?
We found no published, dated data we could verify, so we quote none. The section concerned argues about the structure of the cost, which you can check on your own receipts.
Where we come in
Search for your restaurant outdoors, at noon, in a customer’s words. What you see at that exact moment is what the market sees of you.
- We take the listing back onto an account you own, real hours included.
- We write the menu straight into the page, never as a file to download.
- We make a passer-by understand the page in three seconds, in sunlight.
We will not solve your peak problem: a room overflowing at one o’clock is a kitchen and staffing question, not a page.
Read next
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The speed printed on the box was never the problem. The problem is how many devices are connected at once.The guest network: what your customers reach, and what they cost you
A guest network exists the moment a waiter gives out the password. What it should reach, what it takes off the line, and what not to collect.
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