Orly Stern Izhaki, General Manager of Wix Restaurants is answering our questions. With over 20 years in the tech field, Orly now leads Wix Restaurants as General Manager. She previously served as the GM of Wix Premium Service, and in this role, she was in charge of Wix’s business models and top products (premium plans, domains, and mailboxes). She owned the product vision, roadmap, and execution and led a company to develop B2B and B2C solutions and was responsible for user acquisition, expansion, conversion, retention, and the company’s billing platform. Prior to Wix, she held executive roles in Product, Business and Innovation and led the digital transformation for multiple financial companies. She was also a consultant for both corporations and startups and was a founding member of Pepper, the first digital bank in Israel.
How did Wix come up with the idea of creating a solution specifically for restaurants?
Our mission is to be a platform for any type of user to create, manage, and grow their online presence. With this in mind, early on, we identified that restaurant businesses are a large segment of users coming to Wix to build a website. Restaurant businesses and their operations are very complex, which we had to take into account when building the Wix Restaurants product. There are many different elements both online and offline including table reservations, take-out orders, and delivery channels – all tied to a point-of-sale. We established Wix Restaurants, a vertical dedicated to this segment of users and for nearly 10 years we have worked towards creating a complete online solution that supports restaurants’ evolving needs and helps them streamline their operations.
It’s been almost ten years since Wix Restaurant was released. How are the restaurants’ and their customers’ feedback?
We are constantly improving our offering and the best way to do this is by speaking with our users. This ensures that we are working to provide them with a complete solution for their business to compete in today’s and tomorrow’s industry climate. By listening to our users, understanding their needs, and adding capabilities to expand our offerings accordingly, we are able to not only provide our users with go-to solutions, but we are also providing their customers with a pleasant experience.
During the pandemic, we worked closely with restaurants to make sure they had the tools they needed to continue operating. That meant incorporating more delivery solutions and adding QR code capabilities. Now, we’re seeing an increase in demand for in-house dining so we’re launching a new table reservations product.
We see restaurants go through all stages of growth with us, whether a restaurant owner is opening their first restaurant or has multiple locations. From showcasing their menu online to managing their table reservations and deliveries and even managing their business operations, our platform provides solutions for every step of the process. Ultimately, our users’ success is our success and we will always rely on them to make our product stronger.
What is the difference between creating a simple Wix website and Wix Restaurants plugins (Orders, Reservations, and Menus) from Wix AppMarket?
Our business solutions, like Wix Restaurants, is an out-of-the-box solution that provides users with everything they might need to best optimize their website and ease operational burdens. Wix Restaurants is a full-service solution where a restaurant can showcase its menu, take online orders, receive payments, let customers book a table online, promote their restaurant, and bring more traffic to it with a suite of professional marketing tools, and more.
We are always working to build our own solutions and integrate them with relevant third-party solutions to provide users with everything they need in one place. Restaurants are unique in that they are working with many different marketplaces for deliveries and point-sale solutions. It’s our goal to make sure they can connect to these channels through integrations.
Can someone without any coding knowledge create a Wix Restaurant website?
Yes, someone without any coding knowledge can create a Wix Restaurant website. There are over 60 professional restaurant and food website templates that business owners can customize to fit the vibe of their businesses, with suggested features and apps that they might need. But, if someone who has coding knowledge wants to advance the solution, they can do so with Velo by Wix, a full-stack development platform that empowers users to rapidly build, manage and deploy professional web applications. With Velo, professional users can use the Wix Editor and then add custom functionality using standard JavaScript and Velo APIs in the built-in IDE to instantly build more dynamic sites with more control and flexibility.
Additionally, we understand that restaurant owners don’t always have time for the technical nuances of building and managing a website, and may prefer to turn to a professional designer, developer, and/or agency- which at Wix we call Partners. Partners can help restaurant owners throughout the journey from building a website to showcasing their menu to handling everything related to running and maintaining their website. Partners are able to utilize our offerings and build solutions on top of them to seamlessly reach their business goals.
After the COVID pandemic, most restaurants switched from physical menus to online menus via QR codes. Does Wix Restaurant provide a separate option to show different prices for takeaway and dine-in orders? Can restaurant owners set different prices for particular days and/or hours of the day for dine-in customers?
Wix Restaurants provides a solution for QR codes, as well as other trends that have become industry standards over the past few years, such as contactless dining. The QR code solution enables users to offer a QR code so their customers can scan it to view the menu and pay their bills.
Restaurant owners can create menus for different meals of the day (i.e. breakfast, lunch, and dinner), and price the items on the menus differently.
Last year, Wix released a mobile application named Dine by Wix. Can you explain the shift to mobile that restaurants are seeing?
Mobile is definitely dominating the restaurant industry whether it’s used for placing a to-go order, browsing menus, scanning QR codes for dine-in menus and payment options, and more.
This is why it was important for us to launch Dine by Wix, an app providing a seamless communication channel between restaurants and their customers. Through the app, customers can order food for pickup or delivery, receive order status updates, make reservations, view order history, discover new restaurants, live chat with the restaurant along with direct call options, and more directly from the app.
The shift to mobile also affects how restaurants are managing their operations. We are seeing more of a mobile-first approach, with fewer restaurant owners using desktop solutions and migrating over to using mobile devices such as phones and tablets to run operations. Restaurants owners with a website on Wix can manage their business with the Wix Owner App, enabling them to manage online orders and gain actionable insights into how customers interact with their site and more from their mobile devices. Furthermore, we offer the Branded app, which allows restaurant owners to not only place online orders but also fully customize and personalize the app to reflect the brand of their restaurants.
After the COVID pandemic, food delivery services became much more popular. What does this mean for restaurants and how do they use their websites?
After the pandemic, restaurant owners faced significant pressure to quickly implement solutions that would allow them to continue operating through the use of third-party marketplaces and delivery services. Oftentimes these services are charging 15 to 30 percent of an order’s sales, cutting into the restaurant’s profit.
It was important for us to help restaurants find solutions to help mitigate those costs by offering delivery solutions that don’t take a commission. For example, Wix offers a commission-free online ordering system, enabling customers to order directly from the restaurant via their Wix website or mobile application. Wix’s online ordering system allows restaurant customers to order from any branch by featuring menus, opening and delivery hours from restaurants’ different locations.
Additionally, the platform enables users to manage orders from one dashboard reducing potential order errors and decreasing the time from the receipt of the order to when it arrives at the customer’s door. Furthermore, restaurant owners can encourage online food orders by offering coupons and special offers to their customers and providing a fast checkout with a diverse range of secure payment options such as cash, credit card, PayPal, Stripe, and more.
Does Wix Restaurant provide any security features? What kind of protections do you provide for both restaurants and their customers?
Wix places security as one of our highest priorities for our users and their customers, and as a company, we strive to implement high standards of security processes and practices. To help ensure we attain this goal of protecting our users’ personal data, we have invested a great deal of effort in making sure our platform is safe and secure.
What kind of improvements are you planning for Wix Restaurant in 2023?
We are always listening to our users, understanding their needs, monitoring industry trends, and adding new capabilities, features, and integrations to expand our offerings accordingly. Restaurants are complicated on the operational side, and we want to make it easier for owners to connect all the different parts of running, managing, and growing their businesses. We see that the solutions and integrations we currently offer are successful in easing the burden on restaurants and we plan on continuing to grow the offering, without compromising our platform’s performance or reliability.
We are currently seeing an industry shift towards users wanting to use platforms that are more open and provide more flexibility and options. We see this through the rising use of applications using low-code and no-code platforms. At Wix, we are already seeing our Partners and other advanced users use our solutions as infrastructure and building on top of it. We plan on continuing to open our platform to provide standalone solutions that can be easily integrated into other systems to match user expectations and preferences.
Do you have any other solutions designed for any other specific industries? Do you have any plans for introducing new ones?
Wix has invested resources into building out the proper infrastructure to support a diverse range of other industries, ranging from retail to events to hotels and more. For example, we have our solutions for the hospitality industry, Wix Hotels – now powered by HotelRunner. The Wix Hotels platform provides a complete solution for all types of accommodations to manage and grow their hospitality business online. The solution provides a full suite of professional tools for every touchpoint needed to launch, manage, and grow a hospitality business of any size and maximize revenue.
Another example is Wix’s eCommerce platform which provides a complete solution for users to sell eCommerce products through their Wix website, social media, and sales channels, or in-person with point-of-sale (POS). The solution enables users to manage shipping, payments, marketing, and more, from one unified place, so they can grow their eCommerce business quickly and successfully.