Olo

Olo publishes a modular restaurant platform including Ordering as a free and flexible front end, Serve for direct delivery, Dispatch for marketplace delivery, Rails, Catering+ for catering, Olo Loyalty for guest rewards and Google order management.

Separating Serve from Dispatch is the architectural detail that identifies this as enterprise software, because it distinguishes two delivery models that look identical to a customer and are entirely different operationally.

Direct delivery means the restaurant owns the customer relationship and arranges fulfilment, whether with its own drivers or a courier service acting on its behalf. The order, the data and the customer belong to the restaurant.

Marketplace delivery means the order arrives through a third party who owns the relationship, sets the terms and holds the customer data. The restaurant supplies the food.

A large chain does both, in different proportions in different markets, and needs to manage them as one operation while keeping the commercial distinction intact. That is a substantially harder problem than a single restaurant faces, and it is why enterprise platforms exist in a category where a small operator can use something far simpler.

Google order management is the detail worth noting, since ordering directly from a search result is increasingly where transactions begin, and being present there is a distribution decision rather than a technical one.

The free and flexible front end positioning suggests Olo expects chains to build their own ordering experience and use the platform underneath, which suits organisations with development capability and their own brand standards.

Pricing is not published, which is standard for enterprise restaurant platforms.