- The challenge: online orders felt like a constant juggling act
- The change: a more manageable online ordering workflow
- The results: 526 direct orders and nearly $20K in website sales
- Why ongoing support mattered
- What other independent restaurants can learn
- The bottom line for Carbrys
- Frequently asked questions
- More Helpful Reads
In this restaurant online ordering case study, Carbrys BBQ & Soul Food used Orders.co to make online order management easier and add a direct ordering channel. From February 26, 2024, through August 6, 2026, the restaurant’s Orders.co-powered website recorded 526 orders and $19,582.89 in sales, with an average website order of $37.23.
Before adopting Orders.co, that flow felt like a constant juggling act across multiple platforms. Two years in, the direct website has become a steady additional revenue channel working alongside the restaurant’s delivery-marketplace orders.
The challenge: online orders felt like a constant juggling act
For a busy independent restaurant, the hardest part of online ordering is rarely a single app. It’s keeping track of all of them at once. That was the reality at Carbrys BBQ & Soul Food before Orders.co.
Online orders arrived through more than one platform, each with its own screen, its own menu to update, and its own way of reporting what had come in. Keeping those pieces aligned meant manual updates and a lot of switching back and forth.
The bigger problem was visibility. With orders spread across separate systems, it was hard to see, at a glance, what was coming in and what was going out. During a rush, that uncertainty adds pressure to a kitchen that is already moving fast.
In a small, high-volume kitchen, that kind of friction has a real cost. Every minute a manager spends reconciling platforms is a minute not spent on the food or on the customers in front of them.
“From day one, Orders.co made managing my online orders noticeably smoother,” says Tina Martin of Carbrys BBQ & Soul Food.
The change: a more manageable online ordering workflow
Adopting Orders.co gave Carbrys BBQ & Soul Food two things at once: a direct ordering website of its own, and a more manageable way to handle the online orders it was already receiving.
The direct ordering website for restaurants gave customers a way to order straight from Carbrys under the restaurant’s own name, rather than only through a marketplace. Alongside it, the day-to-day work of managing online orders from multiple channels moved into one place instead of several disconnected screens.
Just as important, Tina Martin gained clearer visibility into what was actually happening across channels: which orders were coming in, and through which. That kind of channel-level restaurant reporting turns a guessing game into something a busy operator can actually read.
None of this required Carbrys to rebuild how it worked. The change was less about adding software and more about removing friction from a process the restaurant relied on every day.
“The improvement in how we handle orders was immediate. It took the pressure off from day one,” says Tina Martin.
The results: 526 direct orders and nearly $20K in website sales
Across the reporting period, Carbrys’ Orders.co-powered website recorded 526 direct orders and around $19,500 in sales. On its own, that’s a meaningful direct channel. What makes it interesting is the size of each order.
The average website order came to $37.23. Across all four of the restaurant’s tracked ordering channels, the average order was about $31.38, so website orders ran roughly 18.7% higher than the overall average. In fact, the website carried the highest average order value of any tracked channel, ahead of DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub.
In other words, the direct orders weren’t just extra volume. Within this data, there were also higher-value orders.
The contrast with Grubhub is the clearest single comparison. Over the same period, the website generated about four times as many orders as Grubhub (526 versus 131) and 4.8 times as much revenue ($19,500 versus $4,000).
The useful takeaway is narrower and more durable: Carbrys built a direct, higher-ticket ordering channel under its own brand, and folded it into a broader ordering mix that became easier to manage, without walking away from the marketplaces that bring in new customers.
Why ongoing support mattered
For Tina Martin, the reason to stay with Orders.co wasn’t only how the platform worked on day one. It was what happened afterward.
When questions came up or when she wanted to get more out of the platform, help was there. That has mattered as much as any single feature. In a small, high-volume kitchen, a problem left unanswered during service isn’t a minor inconvenience; it’s lost time the restaurant can’t get back. Support that responds when it’s needed, during the hours a restaurant is actually open, is worth a great deal.
“The team has always been there, responsive, hands-on, and genuinely invested in making sure things work for my business,” says Tina Martin.
That kind of ongoing, 24/7 hands-on partnership is a large part of why Carbrys has kept using Orders.co for about two years, rather than treating it as a tool to set up once and forget.
What other independent restaurants can learn
Carbrys’ experience points to a practical lesson for other independent operators, and it isn’t “drop the delivery apps.”
DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub are good at one thing in particular: putting a restaurant in front of new customers who might never have found it otherwise. A direct ordering website does something different. It gives a restaurant a channel it owns, where repeat customers can order under the restaurant’s own name, often at a higher average ticket, as Carbrys’ numbers suggest.
The two can work side by side. A direct ordering website is increasingly one of the basics a modern restaurant website needs, and the trap most operators want to avoid is bolting on yet another disconnected system to run. The real value in Carbrys’ setup was making direct ordering available while pulling the wider mix of orders into a view that’s easier to read, so the team isn’t operating blind across platforms.
The shift matters because off-premises ordering is now the majority of restaurant traffic: the National Restaurant Association reports that nearly three-quarters of restaurant traffic is off-premises.
The bottom line for Carbrys
For Carbrys BBQ & Soul Food, the direct website turned into 526 orders and nearly $20,000 in recorded sales over the reporting period: orders that ran higher on average than any other tracked channel, handled through a workflow that got easier to manage, backed by support that showed up when it was needed.
See what a simpler online ordering setup and direct website channel could look like for your restaurant. Schedule a free and personalized Orders.co demo, or read more restaurant customer stories.
