OrderUp

The team at OrderUp has been working hard to help our franchisees with their marketing efforts. We’ve been going beyond fulfilling our current franchisee requests and getting out ahead to work on some new marketing items we haven’t produced before. We’ve taken our most effective marketing promotions with years of proven success in cities nationwide and made it easier for our franchisees to drive transactions. The marketing team has also done its research, finding the best vendors for each marketing item. With these vendors, we’re already maintaining great relationships. Our vendors offer competitive pricing, great quality, and quick turnaround times.

OrderUp HQ is introducing a new line of marketing items, our ‘swag’ line. This swag will do the marketing for you. Hand it out to anyone in town and it will speak for itself. We think it’s some pretty sharp stuff. Putting together this new swag has been a big project that we’re very proud of. We’re streamlining processes and making it easier for everyone to get what they need. Keep an eye out for an easy new way to order these new marketing items and others later this spring.

Here’s a sneak peak of some items to come.

Making decisions based off customer data can help your franchise grow revenue and profits. Cohort analysis is an excellent way to get meaning from raw data. This is the first in a series of posts meant to serve as a basic introduction to cohort analysis and how we use it at OrderUp to gauge customer loyalty and engagement. OrderUp is a digital franchise that allows entrepreneurs to bring online food ordering to their hometown.

What is Cohort Analysis?

A cohort is a group of people who share a common characteristic or experience within a defined period.  Cohort analysis is a great way to look at customer behavior and loyalty over time.  An example would be group of customers who placed their first order with a vendor in Fall of 2009. A cohort analysis is a study that focuses on a particular behavior of the cohort.  In Figure 1 the cohort is the group of new users who made their first purchase from a site powered by OrderUp in the Fall of 2009.  The behavior is the revenue generated by that cohort expressed as the cumulative online sales.

Below, we’ll walk through the different ways cohort analysis can help your business understand customers.

Figure 1

Today, I’m happy to announce that Eatbmore.com is now OrderUp Baltimore, found at baltimore.orderup.com.  

When we first launched Eatbmore.com, toward the end of 2011, our goal was to duplicate what we’ve been successful at doing around the country and bring online food ordering to Baltimore, to make it really easy for Baltimoreans to order food for takeout and delivery from the best local restaurants.  The OrderUp team was excited to be launching a company owned market (as opposed to a franchised market) in our own backyard (OrderUp HQ is in Canton!).  Before launching,

Last week, the OrderUp team attended its first franchise conference and it was a tremendous success!

The Multi-Unit Franchise Conference, held at Caesar’s Palace Las Vegas, was last Wednesday, March 27th through Friday, March 29th.  The conference attracts multi-unit franchise owners who are invested in single or multiple brands. Many own restaurant franchises such as Qdoba, Smoothie King, and Pita Pit, and are interested in expanding their portfolio with other franchised concepts and brands.  A good amount of the exhibitors were franchisors, like OrderUp, and others were vendors trying to work with franchisors or franchisees, such as Bill.com.   

Right off the bat, I knew we’d have an interesting and productive conference as people were coming up to ask us about our recent Inc. article and inquire about the “digital franchise” concept.  

Without a doubt, the highlight of the conference was

As the Multi-Unit Franchise show in Las Vegas, NV from March 27th-29th approaches, the OrderUp team headed out is quite excited!  In line with OrderUp’s expansion efforts and focus for 2013, the OrderUp marketing team decided to start attending franchise and business opportunity shows across the country, and this conference will be our first.

Mark Johnson is leading the team out there. With his experience building two of the top 10 fastest growing franchises in the country,

This past year was a big one for OrderUp. We launched a new national brand, released an updated technology platform, designed a much-improved user experience and made the most revenue ever for our restaurants and franchisees. All in all, a tough act to follow. So what’s in store for 2013?

A new year brings a time to reflect and a time to plan. And on that note, in search of a refined product strategy for the coming year, the OrderUp team drove deep into the Virginia Blue Ridge mountains for a three day working retreat. We’ll admit, it wasn’t totally a working retreat. We definitely took part in a little archery, football, and even an underground hike through Luray Caverns. But most importantly, we left Virginia motivated, fresh, and hungry to work on some freshly-minted strategic objectives.

After the jump, a quick overview of what our franchisees, restaurants and customers can look forward to in 2013:

We believe food is meant to be ordered online at OrderUp. By bringing the internet to takeout and delivery via an online franchise model, we give our users the power to discover local restaurants and the convenience of a seamless ordering experience. Part of how we’re able to do this is by relying on the abundance of robust services on the web today. For any hard problem that is secondary to our core business, there is likely already a third-party solution. Our goal is to design a product that takes advantage of this by choosing the best services and integrating them intelligently with the OrderUp online franchise platform.

A Few Services We Use
OrderUp’s vision depends on the existence of a rich foundation of web services. Our customer facing application, for instance, makes tens of thousands of requests every day to multiple services:

Guest Post by Trevor Anderson - OrderUp Lawrence Franchisee 

When I first opened HungryJayhawks.com a little over a year ago, I was excited about licensing the software that powers the site from OrderUp and buying into the OrderUp system. Back then, OrderUp was called LocalUp. Hungryjayhawks has come a long way over the past year, and so has OrderUp. Now, OrderUp has a new brand, and a new distribution model. With their new online franchise distribution system, OrderUp aims to create a national brand while still empowering local entrepreneurs like me—and of course, keep us Jayhawks from getting too hungry.

As discussed in this blog post late last year, we adopted a new brand and are moving forward with a consolidated brand approach with our online franchise distribution model.  Part of this process includes transitioning the white-label sites we originally launched with over to the OrderUp brand so those restaurants and content can be found on OrderUp.com.

Identifying groups of users and personas helps a business better understand its customers. We, the OrderUp team, are our own customers because we too use our product. On any given day of the week someone from the team is ordering lunch for themselves or a couple team members. But there is one special day that everyone from the team sits around the lunch table together for an OrderUp feast, that day is Monday.


Some of the team during Monday lunch on February 25.

As I’ve been analyzing data from our customers to put together personas I thought it would be fun to run some numbers on our own OrderUp team Monday lunches.