How ChowNow and Squarespace Enterprise Help Local Restaurants Secure Online Orders with Custom Websites
When ChowNow needed a solution to offer websites to their restaurant partners, they turned to Squarespace Enterprise. We chatted with ChowNow’s Head of Partnerships, Shannon Hajverov, to learn more about the business and how Squarespace boosts their product offering for thousands of local restaurants.
ChowNow’s mission is to help independent restaurants thrive, and they have partnered with more than 20,000 restaurants across North America to grow their pickup and delivery business. Their platform empowers restaurants with tools to offer online ordering on web, mobile, and custom-built apps, plus they provide data insights and marketing services. Restaurants love ChowNow because its commission-free platform saves them thousands of dollars a year and helps build a loyal customer base.
Since 2012, ChowNow has processed more than 250 million online orders and saved restaurants over $700 million in commission fees.
What drew you to work with Squarespace Enterprise? What were you looking to accomplish?
In a recent study, it was determined that 70% of diners visit a restaurant’s website before they order. In addition, if restaurants have equipped their website with a strong ecommerce capability, they will often be able to win the transaction there and avoid those orders going through a high-commission platform.
A lot of restaurants come to us with a limited digital presence, an outdated or sub-optimized website or no website at all. In order to help our restaurants succeed, we knew we needed to help them build out their online footprint and that really starts with a great website.
Squarespace was the perfect partner. Squarespace shares ChowNow’s mission to help entrepreneurs succeed. Adding ChowNow ordering and marketing tools to a Squarespace custom website is a great combination for restaurateurs to better connect with their customers.
What challenges did you face that Squarespace Enterprise is helping you solve?
ChowNow has over a decade of experience in helping restaurants build a strong digital presence to increase their online orders. Squarespace allows us to offer our clients a website that’s well-designed, created by our own design team, optimized for web and mobile, and easy for us to manage internally.
We also wanted to empower restaurant owners to make operational changes to the website themselves. Updating their opening hours or adding a new photo are common activities at restaurants. Squarespace offers the right level of flexibility to give our clients editing access to their site while giving us peace of mind that the overall experience will remain stable and optimized for high performance.
How does Squarespace Enterprise help you streamline site creation for ChowNow partners?
Squarespace Enterprise has allowed us to create custom templates that meet our rigorous brand standards. We’re very quickly able to launch websites for our clients while still giving them flexible elements to complement their important individuality and uniqueness. The Squarespace platform is very user-friendly, and it’s been a quick and easy learning curve for our team members building the websites.
Why did Squarespace Enterprise stand out in the selection process?
A significant factor during the selection process was the team at Squarespace. They were very easy to work with and felt like true partners along the way. They’ve been extremely knowledgeable and have been able to guide us through the buying and onboarding processes.
From a product perspective, Squarespace offers a feature-rich platform that's customizable without being overwhelming. That gives us the freedom to leverage multiple aspects of the Squarespace product with time and cost factors that are sensible for our business model.
We were also looking for a platform with a centralized view of our entire client website portfolio, along with built-in analytics to monitor performance. All of that is easy to find in the Enterprise dashboard.
What do you enjoy most about using the Squarespace Enterprise product?
The custom Enterprise templates have been a big time saver for us. We’re also very happy with the design quality. The websites appear completely custom, with no mention of Squarespace anywhere on them. There’s also a lot of helpful, easily discoverable training content on the Squarespace Help Center, which allows us to get up to speed quickly and continue building on our knowledge.
What kind of results are you seeing after using it?
The time we spend building new sites has been cut in half from the previous solution we were using. And so far, the vast majority of websites we’ve built score extremely high on Google best practices and Google SEO. So we anticipate search rankings for our clients’s direct sites to outrank their listings on third-party platforms, which means they can avoid more of those high-commission orders.
How is your experience working with an account manager? Do you find that valuable?
We’ve had a great experience working with our account manager. It’s been very valuable having someone in our corner to find creative solutions for us. We share feedback, provide feature requests, and get swift, actionable responses to our questions.
What did you like most about the way your sites looked? What kind of feedback are you getting from partners on their sites so far?
Our clients are very happy with the end result and feel like their websites are good representations of their brands. Some of the best feedback we’ve received is around the design customization options. Restaurants can choose from a selection of templates to best match their own brand identities.
We’ve also added optional design elements to our templates to boost functionality and search optimization, including an About Us section, a photo carousel, and a menu link. Our clients appreciate being able to make simple, but effective decisions about their websites without being overwhelmed by technical minutiae.
What advice would you give to other Squarespace Enterprise customers to get the most value out of the platform?
I’d recommend getting immersed in the Enterprise dashboard, reading the Squarespace Enterprise blog, and tapping your account manager’s expertise to get what you need!