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So what’s new? What’s happening? What’s up?

Lots actually. But we’ll take it slow. Don’t want you to get too excited and break anything.

The first bit of news is that we’ve launched 3 plans — Basic, Plus and Premium. (We should probably come up with more creative names though.) The Basic plan has all the essential features you know and love. The Plus includes more features. And the Premium includes even more. You get the idea. Take a jump over here to get more info on the offerings.

We’ll be going into more detail about the new features in the coming posts, as well as talking about some upcoming features on the horizon.

Up until now, this service has been relatively simple and without frills.  eHungry account managers merely told our system that they wanted to be notified at a certain telephone number, and our system called each time an order was placed.

However, we are about to turbo-charge our voice platform to provide our customers with more value.  In particular, we are moving away from third-party providers for our voice operations and bringing those capabilities into our own data center on a custom platform that we have developed for our own use.

This has a great many advantages.  First, we expect that performance and reliability will be improved.  In the past, we have had restaurants tell us about late or missing calls – well, no more.  With the greater control we have over the precise operation of our own platform, we can provide better, more consistent service to you.

A second advantage is an expansion in features.  We plan to soon provide the ability to schedule exactly how many times you want our system to keep trying if it cannot reach you by phone; whether it ought to try to determine if a person or a machine answered; how long to wait before calling you after an order has been placed; and even what message it should speak to you when it calls.

But perhaps the greatest change coming down the pike with respect to our voice platform is the ability to now receive entire order details via phone instead of just a brief notification.  We plan to include this option as a primary order receipt method, which means our system can dial you and read you your orders by phone, in complete detail, all for a reasonable per-minute fee.

With this new capability, you have another option for receiving your orders even when faxing, thermal printers, and email are not good enough.  What’s more, we plan to provide this new capability as a fallback order receipt method as well, so that even if you prefer to receive orders by fax, our system can call you and deliver the order when faxing fails or your fax lines are busy.  And, we will be providing inbound calling service as well, so you can dial in to receive order details with just a few keypresses.

So, there’s a lot on the way!  We have not fully worked out pricing and availability yet, but you can expect to see some  of these features appearing within the next few weeks, with incremental additions to our new system arriving regularly thereafter.

We are excited about these improvements to our service offerings and we think you will be too! If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us at support@ehungry.com.  We value the feedback you can provide.

In the past, you could get them by fax or email (or in person, if you wanted to pay for the plane ticket for us to deliver it). But now you can get them sent directly to your printer.

So how does it work? We like to say magic, but our lawyers advise against that. So instead, you download a small program to your restaurant’s computer (Windows XP / Vista) called the eHungry Order Monitor. Or eHungry OM for short. Or eOM for shorter.

When you open it up, it’ll ask you to log into your eHungry account and select what printer(s) you want orders sent to. And that’s it. That little program will talk to our server and anytime a new order comes in, it’ll make a bunch of noise to alert you (assuming you have speakers) and print out the order automatically.

Why is this better than email? Well for one, email is inherently unsecure. For two, it’s unreliable (how many times have emails got caught in spam filters or accidentally deleted). Why is this better than fax? It’s less expensive ($0.08 an order vs. $0.11), it’s faster (you could print out 10 – 20 orders per minute vs. 1 for a fax) and best of all, it doesn’t tie up your phone/fax line.

How do you take advantage of this? Log into your eHungry  Manager, go into your Restaurant Locations area, change the method of receiving orders to Printer and then download and install the eHungry Order Monitor.

See, it is like magic.

P.S. Incase you’re wondering if you need a specific printer to use this, the answer is no. You can use an expensive thermal printer or an inexpensive inkjet you bought for $50 at Walmart. As long as you can print to it from your Windows computer, it’ll work. Plus, just think of the possibilities — your computer could be in a back office and you have a wireless printer that’s right next to your cash register. Orders will spit out like a llama at a petting zoo.

• You can now add options for extras. In otherwords, if you setup Side Salad as an extra, you can give it options such as dressings
• Ability to rename Extras to whatever you want — e.g., Add-ons
• Added a website link and button source code for faster/easier access to add to your own website
• More customizability with the website design features

We are always trying to improve the range of options available to the look-and-feel of the eHungry.com online ordering sites, so any feedback on these or other designs, just let us know. 

To take advantage of the new templates, look under “Settings” to see the currently-available options. And of course, keep on the look-out for even more down the road!

But, did you know that with eHungry’s online ordering for restaurants, you can create coupons for your customers?

Here’s how: Log into your Online Manager, click the Restaurant Manager tab and then the “Configure Coupons and Discounts”.

Now comes the fun part — you start by creating your coupon code — it could be something simple like FREEFRIES or cryptic like ICU8. Then determine when it expires (yeah, that’s right — you won’t have to deal with customers trying to pass off expired coupons — the system will stop them in their tracks). Next you can configure things like whether it’s a % off, $ off, free items, what type of customers or orders it can be applied to, whether they can reuse coupons, and more.

Finally, distribute the coupons — post them on your website, email them to customers, mention them in your restaurant, or even write them on your bathroom stalls. Then just watch the orders roll on in.