Scan the QR code on the table. It opens a PDF. The PDF is the menu you already had printed. You can read it on your phone now instead of on paper. That's the whole upgrade.
A huge number of small hospitality and service businesses call this "online ordering" because it involves a phone and a QR code. It isn't. Nothing about it lets a customer actually place an order, pay, or have anything sent to the kitchen or the till. It's a menu with extra steps.
Meanwhile, the businesses that do have real online ordering usually got it by signing up with a third-party delivery platform β and traded one problem for a more expensive one.
What a QR Code Menu Actually Isn't
A digital menu answers "what do you sell." It doesn't answer "can I buy it right now, from this screen, without calling or walking up to a counter." That gap is exactly where a customer decides ordering is too much friction and goes somewhere that made it easier β often a competitor with a worse product and a better ordering flow.
The Commission Trap of Third-Party Ordering Apps
The businesses that do offer real ordering often do it through a third-party delivery app, because building or buying ordering software from scratch looked harder than it was worth. The trade-off rarely gets explained up front: commission rates of 15β30% per order, a customer relationship that belongs to the app (not the business β the app owns the email, the order history, the repeat-customer relationship), and zero control over how the business is presented next to every competitor on the same platform.
A business doing $250,000 a year through a 25% commission app is handing over $62,500 annually for the privilege of processing its own sales.
A QR code menu answers what you sell. It never answers whether someone can actually buy it.
Orders That Land Directly in Your Dashboard
Mika Order is built to close that gap without introducing a new middleman. It turns a site's existing menu or product catalogue into something customers can actually order from β on the business's own domain, under the business's own brand, with the order landing directly in the business's own dashboard, not a third-party portal the business has to separately log into.
Live order status is visible in real time from the moment an order comes in, so staff aren't refreshing a tablet from a different company to see what needs making. And because there's no commission model sitting between the business and the sale, the economics scale the way they should: more orders is just more revenue, not more fees.
How Mika Order Handles This
Once Mika Order is active, the existing site's menu or product listings become orderable directly β no separate storefront to build, no separate catalogue to maintain in two places. Orders flow straight into a live order board in the dashboard, visible the moment they're placed, so the gap between "customer taps confirm" and "kitchen knows about it" is seconds, not a notification from an app the business doesn't fully control.
It's the same site the customer was already looking at, with an actual way to buy from it β not a redirect to a marketplace, and not a PDF pretending to be a checkout.