An online ordering system for restaurants that ships as one stack.
Not a checkout page bolted onto four other tools. A direct online ordering system where the ordering site, kitchen tablet, CRM, marketplace ingestion, and sales-tax automation are one product on one bill. Commission-free, $499/month flat. The diner pays the per-order fee, not you.
An online ordering system for restaurants is the integrated stack that takes, routes, and fulfills orders without a phone call. A complete direct system has five modules working together: a branded ordering site, a kitchen tablet/KDS, a customer CRM, a marketplace-ingestion layer, and sales-tax automation. Zay-OS ships all five on one bill for a flat $499/month per location, with the service fee ($0.99 pickup / $2.99 delivery) paid by the diner and zero commission on food revenue.
What makes it a system, not a widget.
A direct online ordering system is more than a checkout page. The value is in the five modules handing off to each other — an order flows from the site, to the tablet, into the CRM, alongside the marketplaces, with the tax set aside, without anyone re-keying anything.
The diner-facing ordering site on yourrestaurant.com — mobile-perfect, Lighthouse 100, saved-card checkout with Apple Pay and Google Pay. This is the storefront the whole system feeds. Menu, photos, modifiers, hours, and scheduling all publish from one place; a repeat customer reaches "Place order" in about 8 seconds.
One iPad or Android tablet shows every channel in one ticket flow — direct orders, Uber Eats, DoorDash, Grubhub, and phone-ins — with audio alerts, sticky orders, and an 86-an-item flow. The kitchen never watches four screens. This is where a "system" beats a checkout widget: the expediter sees one queue, not one per app.
Every diner who orders direct becomes a row you own — name, email, phone, full order history, exportable. Reorder campaigns run over SMS via Twilio (A2P 10DLC handled) and email via Resend, plus web push for opted-in regulars. The CRM is what turns a one-time direct order into a repeat channel that costs cents instead of 25-35%.
Otter pulls every marketplace order into the same kitchen tablet and pushes direct orders into your POS. It connects to 25+ POS systems (Toast, Lightspeed U-Series, Square, Clover, Aloha, Brink, Oracle Micros, Par Brink, NCR, and more). This is the ingestion layer that lets a restaurant run direct and marketplace side by side without double-keying.
DAVO sets aside sales tax daily on every direct order and files and remits it when due, in all 50 US states. The tax never sits in the operating account waiting to become a liability. It is wired into the same checkout so there is no separate reconciliation step at month end.
Concept vs. system.
This page and our restaurant online ordering pillar cover different jobs on purpose. Here is how they split.
Our restaurant online ordering page covers the strategy — marketplace vs direct vs hybrid, why direct ordering matters, and what to demand of any platform. Start there if you are deciding whether to build a direct channel at all.
Read the pillar →This page is about the system itself — the five modules that ship together as one product on one bill, and how they hand off to each other. Read this if you already know you want direct ordering and are evaluating the actual software.
Everything the stack needs, one line item.
The alternative is stitching a checkout tool to a separate CRM, a separate tax service, and a separate marketplace manager — four vendors, four bills, four dashboards to reconcile. The system model collapses that into one.
- Ordering site + hosting
- Kitchen tablet + KDS
- Customer CRM + SMS + email + web push
- Otter marketplace ingestion + POS push
- DAVO sales-tax set-aside (all 50 states)
- Stripe payments (Apple Pay / Google Pay / cards)
- SEO + GEO + Google Business Profile
The handoffs are the product.
Any vendor can sell a restaurant a checkout page. What breaks in practice is everything downstream of the checkout. The order has to appear on a kitchen screen the expediter is already watching — not a fifth tablet. The customer has to land in a CRM the restaurant can actually message, not a data export nobody opens. The DoorDash and Uber Eats tickets have to sit in the same queue as the direct orders, or the kitchen runs two workflows and the wrong one always wins during a rush. And the sales tax has to be set aside the day the order clears, not scrambled for at the end of the quarter. A stitched-together set of point tools makes each of those handoffs a manual step. An integrated online ordering system makes them automatic.
That is the difference between "we have online ordering" and "we run an online ordering system." Zay-OS is built as the second thing. The branded site, the kitchen tablet and KDS, the CRM with SMS and email, the Otter ingestion layer across 25+ POS systems, and DAVO sales-tax automation are one platform where every module already knows about the others. A direct order writes a CRM row, sets aside its tax, and prints on the same tablet as a Grubhub order — with no operator in between. Only Naya Grill in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach is live today; every other restaurant is now onboarding for its first direct order within a week of signing.
The ordering system, answered.
What is an online ordering system for restaurants?
How is a direct online ordering system different from DoorDash or Uber Eats?
What does an online ordering system cost per month?
Does the ordering system connect to my POS?
Do I need separate software for CRM, sales tax, and marketplace orders?
How long does it take to set up the whole system?
One system. One bill. Zero commission.
Run the free grader to see what the marketplaces cost you last month — then get the whole stack live in about a week.