Day by day, what actually happens between signing up for Zayos and taking your first direct order: payments, menu import, soft launch, custom domain, Otter, and exactly which parts are your job.
Short version: a Zayos storefront goes live in under 2 weeks, and most restaurants take their first direct order inside the first week. It moves that fast because the owner only owes us four things: a menu, photos, bank details for payouts, and a decision on colors. We build everything else. Nothing gets ripped out of the kitchen and your staff does not learn a new job. Here is the actual sequence, day by day, with an honest split of what we do and what only you can do.
Two terms first. Your POS is the point of sale, the register your cashiers ring orders into. Marketplaces are DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub. Neither changes during a build.
Zayos does: build the storefront, type in your entire menu, set up payments, configure zones and hours, wire the kitchen tablet, connect the marketplaces, point your domain, and turn on the marketing tools.
The owner does: hand over a current menu with current prices, supply or approve photos, enter your own bank and business details for payouts, pick a color direction, and answer questions inside a business day. That last one is the real timeline lever. Owners who answer same day launch in 8 to 10 days.
Day one is a form and a phone call. We collect the legal business name, each address, phone numbers, hours per location, and whether you want pickup, delivery, dine-in, catering, or all four. Hours are what operators get wrong most. Give us the real kitchen hours, including the day you close early.
Then payments. Card processing runs through Stripe Connect, so order money lands in an account in your business name, not ours. You complete that yourself with Stripe: EIN, address, owner ID, bank account. About 10 minutes, and we never touch your banking credentials. Payouts then run on a rolling schedule straight to your bank, and the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. What stalls this step is a bank account under a different legal entity than the business license.
This is the step owners dread and the step we own completely. Send the menu in whatever form you actually have:
We build the categories, items, descriptions, and the nested modifiers that break most systems. A platter with a choice of protein, then two sides, then extra sauce at $0.75, is three levels deep, and software that cannot handle it sends wrong tickets to the line.
Your job here is one hour of proofreading. You are the only person who knows the lamb went up to $24 last month. Read the prices, flag what is missing, send it back. Photos run in parallel, and they move conversion on a phone screen more than anything else on the page. If you have none, we will tell you which 15 items are worth shooting.
The storefront is your restaurant, not our template with your name on it. We work from your logo and palette, or from your signage and menu if there is no usable logo file. What we need back is a decision, not a design brief: look at two directions, pick one, tell us if the red is too orange.
Before your real web address is involved, the storefront goes live on a temporary one, a subdomain such as yourrestaurant.zayrev.com. Fully working and completely quiet. Nobody finds it unless you send the link.
This is where the first real orders happen, and it is why "first direct order within a week" is not a marketing line. You order on your own phone. Your manager orders. We order. Cards get charged for real, then refunded. The ticket prints, the kitchen sees it, and no customer is waiting on it. We also run the checks that cost money later: delivery radius, delivery minimum, county tax rate, prep times by daypart, and what a diner sees when an item runs out at 8pm Friday.
Now the storefront moves onto your own web address. This is the most common reason a build slips past 2 weeks, and the cause is always the same: nobody at the restaurant knows the login to the domain registrar, because the nephew who built the website in 2019 stopped answering texts. We send you two DNS records to add. With the login it takes five minutes. Without it, recovery is a support ticket with a third party and can take days. Go find that login on day one.
This is the part that keeps direct ordering alive after launch. Otter is an order aggregation service: it takes orders from DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub and pushes them into one place instead of three separate tablets. Most kitchens running delivery apps have it. We connect Zayos into that same flow, so direct orders from your own site land on the exact screen your expo already watches. No fifth tablet, no new station.
This matters because standalone direct-ordering sites fail on the floor, not in the software. If the kitchen has to watch one more screen during a Friday rush, the direct site gets ignored inside three weeks and dies. Our comparison of the options is at Otter vs Chowly vs KitchenHub. If you do not run Otter today, we will tell you whether you even need it. Plenty of pickup-heavy restaurants do not.
A storefront with no traffic is a brochure. The last stretch points your existing demand at the new door: QR codes on receipts, delivery bags and table tents, so the marketplace customer you already paid for orders direct next time. The order button on your Google Business Profile switched to your own site. A customer list that starts filling on the first direct order and stays exportable and yours. SMS and email with a compliant opt-in. And direct-only specials, because a combo that exists only on your own site teaches diners the rule in about two weeks. Full channel ranking in the 10 restaurant marketing channels post.
Second and third locations build faster, because the menu and brand work is done. See the multi-location breakdown. For context, marketplace commissions are 15% to 30% on the base rate cards and 25% to 35% blended once delivery, marketing and processing stack on top. Sourced figures at Zayos delivery commission statistics.
One restaurant group is live and taking orders on Zayos today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach. Naya has kept $48,000+ a year in commissions that used to go to the marketplaces. Modeled across volumes the range is $48,000 to $300,000+ per location per year at 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month, and that is a model, not a customer result.
More storefronts are built with ordering opening at launch: Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, and Yalla Market. Our Google Business Profile, "ZayOS-Zayrev," is 5.0 from 12 reviews. We would rather show one kitchen running real dinner rushes than a wall of logos.
No. Nothing changes on DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub or your existing website until the day you go live, and the marketplaces keep running after that. You are adding a door, not closing one.
No. Photograph it and send it. We type it in, modifiers and all, then send it back for you to proofread. Paper is the most common starting point we get.
Usually no. Direct orders route to the same tablet you already use for the delivery apps, through Otter. If you run no tablet today, we will name the cheapest device that works instead of selling you hardware.
You do. Payments go through Stripe into an account in your business name, and payouts land in your bank on a rolling schedule. Zayos never sits between you and your food revenue.
The build waits at whatever step needs you. Nothing breaks, but two weeks becomes three. The build is only as fast as the slowest reply.
Next step · grade your setup free at grader.zay-os.com · see the build at Zayos · start at zay-os.com · or open a live storefront on the demo.
30 minutes. We look at your business and tell you exactly what we'd do. client or not.
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