Questions
Frequently asked questions
Everything restaurants ask before they commit — pricing, hardware, payments, and what happens to your data if you ever leave.
01 · Getting started
What hardware do I actually need to buy?
A phone or a tablet at the pass, and an Android tablet or any computer with a browser for the kitchen screen. Riders use their own phones. Most restaurants already own all of that. The one thing you may need to buy is a Bluetooth thermal printer for kitchen tickets — and if you already have one on the counter, there is a good chance the app will drive it.
Do my customers have to download an app?
No. Your ordering site is a web page — customers reach it from a link, a QR code on the table, or by searching your name. If they use it more than once they can add it to their home screen, where it opens full-screen and can send push notifications. A listed iOS and Android app under your own name and icon is an optional add-on at £9.99 a month.
Which payments can I take?
Card payments through Revolut, Stripe, PayPal, Razorpay or Mercado Pago, plus bank transfer and cash on delivery. Revolut's hosted checkout carries Apple Pay and Google Pay, and supports holding the money at checkout and capturing it only when you accept the order. On the commission plan you do not open a gateway at all — Zecoa manages the payments for you.
Can I run Zecoa alongside a marketplace?
Yes, and most restaurants do at first. Nothing about Zecoa touches your marketplace listings or your account with them. Marketplace orders keep arriving where they always did; Zecoa orders arrive on your own devices. You decide when, or whether, to pull back from the marketplace — usually once enough regulars are ordering direct that the commission stops making sense.
02 · Pricing and billing
What do the plans cost, and what is included?
Two ways to pay. Subscription: £40 a month for up to 600 orders, or £60 a month for unlimited orders. On those you connect your own payment gateway, money settles into your account, and Zecoa takes no percentage. Or commission: a flat 5% of order value, no monthly fee, with Zecoa managing payments end to end. All four apps — including the customer ordering site — are in every plan.
When is the 5% commission actually cheaper?
Only when you are small or just starting. 5% of order value beats the £40 Standard plan below about £800 of monthly order value, and beats the £60 Unlimited plan below about £1,200. Above those figures the subscription wins, and the gap widens with every order you take. If you are already doing more than roughly £1,200 a month, pick a subscription — we will tell you the same on the phone.
Are card processing fees on top of the subscription?
On the subscription plans, yes. Your gateway charges its own processing fee on each transaction, and that goes to them, not to us — Zecoa takes nothing on top of the monthly fee. On the 5% commission plan the card fees sit inside the 5%, so there is no second bill: 5% of the order value is the whole cost of taking the order.
What does the branded app add-on actually buy?
A published iOS and Android app under your own name and your own icon, in both stores, built and maintained by Zecoa for £9.99 a month. The ordering site included in every plan already installs to a home screen and sends push notifications, so what the add-on really buys is the store listing — being findable by name in the App Store and on Google Play.
03 · Running it day to day
What do we do when we get slammed?
Pause the store from the top of the order board and no new orders come in. Mark a dish sold out and it comes off the menu straight away. If you are behind rather than closed, apply a delay to every active order at once — one tap pushes back the ready-by on all of them and tells each of those customers, which is nearly always better than rejecting orders you could still cook.
What happens if a printer fails or the connection drops?
A ticket that fails to print is retried, then queued, with a banner telling you how many are waiting and a Retry button — and the order is always readable on screen regardless. If the connection wobbles, the kitchen board keeps the last good screen instead of blanking, a Connected / Reconnecting pill shows the true state, and anything that arrived while the socket was down is picked up by the background refresh.
Can staff use it in another language?
The apps ship in English and Greek, switchable on the device, and the interface supports right-to-left layouts. More usefully day to day, your kitchen's status names come from your own setup rather than fixed English words, so the board can say Firing or Prepping if that is what your team says. Anything untranslated falls back to English rather than showing a blank label.
04 · Data and leaving
Who owns the customer data?
You do. Customer accounts, saved addresses, order history, loyalty balances and marketing permissions belong to your restaurant — not to a marketplace, and not to us. Zecoa runs the software that holds them. You can see the whole list, and you can take it with you. Nobody is going to email your customers a discount code for the place down the road.
Does Zecoa store card details?
No. Card details are handled by the payment gateway, which returns a token — a reference that can be charged but is not a card number. Zecoa never stores card numbers, and neither does your restaurant. Apple Pay and Google Pay run through the gateway's own hosted checkout, so the card itself never passes through us at any point.
What happens to my data if I leave?
It goes with you. Your menu, your customer list and your order history are yours to take — ask and we will get them out in a normal spreadsheet. On a subscription plan your domain and your payment gateway are already in your own name, so there is nothing to untangle there; on the commission plan, payments already collected are settled to you as usual.
Still got a question?
Bring it to a thirty-minute call. We would rather talk you out of the wrong plan now than have you find out on your third invoice.