An online order aggregator for restaurants is software that collects a restaurant's orders from every food delivery app, and from its own website, onto one screen, and sends one menu change out to all of them. It is also called online ordering integration software.
Without it, a restaurant listed on two delivery apps keeps a separate tablet at the counter for each app. Each tablet rings with its own orders. An employee then types every order again into the billing system, and mistakes creep in.
The aggregator connects to each food delivery app through the app's API. Here the API is a fixed set of messages through which the delivery app's software sends orders to the aggregator, and accepts menu changes from it. When a customer orders on any app, the order arrives at the aggregator within seconds. The aggregator passes it straight to the restaurant's restaurant POS and to the kitchen display system. So nobody types it again.
Changes also go the other way. The restaurant keeps one menu in the aggregator. When it changes a price, its opening hours or the stock of a dish, the aggregator sends the change to every app.
Consider a Chinese restaurant in Nagpur that sells on two delivery apps and on its own website. At 7:40 p.m. on a Sunday, it runs out of prawns. Without the aggregator, the manager would have to log in to each app separately to hide the chilli prawns. In those minutes, two more prawn orders might arrive, and the restaurant would have to cancel them. With the aggregator, the manager marks "chilli prawns" as out of stock once. Within a minute, the dish disappears from both apps and from the website.
Prices can differ by channel. The restaurant may charge ₹320 for chilli chicken at its tables and on its own website. On a delivery app, it may charge ₹360, to cover the app's commission. The aggregator holds one menu with each channel's price.
The aggregator also records every order, with its channel, price and time. These records are needed later, when the restaurant checks each app's weekly payment with delivery app reconciliation software. A cloud kitchen that runs several brands uses the aggregator to keep a separate menu for each brand on each app.
How is it different from a food delivery app? Customers use the delivery app to find food and place orders. The restaurant uses the aggregator, which sits between all the apps and its own kitchen. The aggregator has no customers of its own.