Ratapässi
Built custom order management, reservations and full-stack infrastructure
The business
Ratapässi Cafe & Wine is a new restaurant in the old station building at Jokela. It serves breakfast, pizza and a general menu, sells all of it for collection and for delivery, and rents a private cabinet for groups.
Collection, delivery and the cabinet are three different things to arrange, and all three land on the same small team during service. Each one is also something a customer should be able to complete without a phone call.
Why nothing off the shelf fit
No conventional system covered ordering, delivery and cabinet reservations together, and the ones that covered any part of it sat on somebody else’s domain. Every combination meant sending a customer off the restaurant’s own site to finish what they had started, once for an order and again somewhere else for a booking. That handover is where people stop ordering, and paying two or three vendors for it does not make it shorter.
What was built
- A single ordering system covering collection and delivery, on the restaurant’s own site and domain
- Delivery priced by road distance and refused beyond seven kilometres, so an address that cannot be served is stopped before it is paid for
- A cabinet reservation system with its own backend, so a booking is taken by the site rather than by somebody answering the phone
- Domain, hosting and the rest of the infrastructure underneath it
- A menu the restaurant edits itself
- An announcement section for events
Running today
All of it is in production on ratapassi.fi. Orders and bookings arrive already sorted, so the time that used to go on taking them down and working out whether an address was even deliverable goes into service instead. A customer books a table, orders a collection or has food delivered without leaving the site, and sees what delivery costs before committing rather than after.
None of the individual pieces is difficult. What was not available was all of them in one place, on the restaurant’s own domain, with the restaurant’s own rules about who it will deliver to. That is the difference between a page about a restaurant and software the restaurant runs on.