Happier restaurants and guests

Anyone who has ever stood in a long bar queue or waited for ages for the waiter to show up will be happy about the arrival of the Happy Order app. The idea for the app was born when the LaWeKa group, that owns restaurants in Örebro in Sweden, needed to solve a staffing problem at one of their terraces.

"It was a huge terrace with room for over 600 guests where they had a staff shortage. The idea was to solve the problem through developing an app that would let customers order on their own", says Rikard Bjerkenius who was given the job to develop the app.

But what started as an internal project soon grew to something bigger. Rikard explains that they started getting more and more questions about the app from other restaurants and soon made the decision to start Happy Order as a separate company.

The first version of the app was launched in the spring of 2017, and despite some growing pains it was clear that they were on to something. Through the app customers could handle all ordering and payments on their own and either have the food and drinks deliveed to their table or pick it up themselves when it was done. That way, the app saved time for both restaurant staff and guests while also driving sales.

"Once you have made an order with the app you know how incredibly fast it is and we also see that the average tab is higher when customers use the app. It is so smooth and easy with visual menus, that they simply end up buying more".

"Bambora understood our business model"

But building an app that made it easier to order turned out to only be the beginning. To get more restaurants to join, Happy Order faced a series of completely new challenges. One challenge was finding a payment partner that actually understood the business model. Rikard explains that a lot of payment companies seamed to equate their app with e-commerce and wanted to charge transaction fees accordingly. With the thin margins that most restaurants have, those type of fees was a non-starter financially.

"That's why it was so nice to come to Bambora who had done similar solutions before and understood what we were trying to do".

With Bambora, Happy Order got a payment solution that worked for restaurants and where every restaurant got paid directly from Bambora. With a payment solution in place, Happy Order began to grow and today they have signed 40 restaurants all over Sweden. According to Rikard, the goal is to reach 300 Restaurants in Sweden before starting to look at opportunities outside of Sweden. In that growth strategy, he thinks that Bambora is a prefect partner that has both the size and the local presence needed to grow internationally.

"The big challenge that we and Bambora face now is setting up a really efficient boarding process for our new customers".