Few orders on GrabFood and GoFood. Where to start looking for the cause
The five steps where an order is lost
The first thing to check is how long the restaurant was unavailable. Not "closed per schedule", but offline inside the app: an order not accepted, a confirmation missed, an item stopped and never un-stopped, an order cancelled from your side. The platform remembers this. An unreliable restaurant gets fewer organic impressions, and from there the problem feeds itself: fewer impressions, fewer orders, less data for the algorithm. USSR Phuket had 3,977 offline minutes a month; once the offline time was removed, search impressions went from zero to 7,481 a month. Enjoy Healthy Food had a 73% offline rate — brought to zero, impressions grew from 7,038 to 25,543 a month. Not a single advertising dollar was spent at this step. The number to look at right now: offline minutes and the share of cancelled orders over the last month. If there is any offline time at all, you are on step one and the other four do not matter yet.
A person sees your listing in the feed and does not tap it. On that screen they see four things: the photo, the name, the rating and the delivery fee. That is all. At Etna Phuket, 39,211 people saw the listing each month. 5.2% of them opened the menu. That is 37 thousand people who looked and moved on — before the menu, before the prices, before everything the owner thought was the problem. The number: how many people saw the listing and how many opened the menu. If your gap looks like that, it is not the prices and not the ads — it is the first screen.
The menu is open and no order follows. This is where menu structure, descriptions, item photos, prices relative to neighbours and promo economics do their work. At Etna the through-conversion was 0.5% against our 0.9% fleet average. That is not "slightly worse" — it is nearly half, meaning half the orders were lost for no reason. On promos specifically. A discount lifts your position and cuts your margin at the same time. What to count is not how many orders the promo brought, but what is left after the discount, the platform commission and the ad spend. A promo that does not pay back looks like order growth and behaves like a loss. The number: through-conversion — of those who saw the listing, how many ordered.
The rating works in both directions: the algorithm serves impressions more willingly, and a customer choosing between two listings looks at the number next to the name. USSR Phuket went from 4.5 to 4.8. Zaytun Ubud from 4.67 to 4.8. This is not "we worked on the reviews": a rating rises through prep speed, order accuracy and work on the causes of bad scores — not through replies to them.
When the first four steps are in order, ads start multiplying instead of paying for holes. At Zaytun Ubud the GoFood campaigns were losing money: 0.25x ROAS, Rp 3.1M spent, Rp 763K returned. After the rebuild — 15.52x on nearly the same budget. At Etna, moving from auto-bidding to manual CPO with daily management took CTR from 2.8% to 5.59%, cost per order from 42 to 29 THB, ROAS from 14.75x to 34.57x. The budget was raised by only 50% while ads revenue grew 3.4x — and it was raised only after the listing had been fixed.
How to tell which step you are on
| What you see in the dashboard | Step | What to fix |
|---|---|---|
| There are offline minutes or cancellations | 1 | Availability and item stops |
| Few impressions, no offline time | 1–2 | Ranking and reliability |
| Many impressions, the menu is rarely opened | 2 | Photo, name, rating, delivery fee |
| The menu is opened, few orders follow | 3 | Menu structure, descriptions, prices, promos |
| Orders are there, margin is not | 3 | Promo economics and commissions |
| Rating below 4.8 | 4 | Prep speed, accuracy, causes of one-stars |
| All of the above is fine, you want more | 5 | Ads |
Order matters more than speed: step 5 with a broken step 1 means paying for impressions of a listing nobody can order from.
Who does this
Everything above is not a one-off setup but daily work: item stops go on and off every day, bids are managed by hand, reviews are broken down by cause, promos are recalculated every week.
That is why "what to do" turns into "who will do it" almost immediately. There are four options: the owner, an in-house manager, a freelancer or an agency. Given the same task list they produce different results — we broke the difference down separately, who should run GrabFood and GoFood, and we counted how many hours a week running the account yourself takes.
We are Delivery Booster, the agency that runs delivery for restaurants in Bali and Phuket. The numbers above come from our clients’ dashboards, not from illustrations. What exactly we do and what it costs — on the home page and in the method.
Case studies with the full numbers
Enjoy Healthy Food — offline rate 73% → 0%, impressions 7,038 → 25,543 a month. USSR Phuket — 3,977 offline minutes removed, search impressions 0 → 7,481, rating 4.5 → 4.8. Etna Phuket — 0.5% through-conversion against a 0.9% average, ROAS 14.75x → 34.57x. Zaytun Ubud — GoFood ads from a loss-making 0.25x ROAS to 15.52x, rating 4.67 → 4.8.
Frequently asked
How soon will it show?
First movement in 2–4 weeks, full ramp-up in 3–6 months. Availability and bidding respond fastest. Listing conversion and rating take longer because the algorithm needs history.
My restaurant is new and has never had orders. Is the order the same?
The same, but for a new restaurant step one is not offline time — it is the absence of history: the algorithm has nothing to show. So for new places what matters most is how fast the first reviews come in and how stable the first weeks are.
Can I do this myself?
You can. The task list is open, there is nothing secret in it. The question is that this is daily work, not a weekend project — and what your own time costs.
What if I just raise the ad budget?
If the listing does not convert, a bigger budget buys more views without orders. It is the fastest way to waste money.
Keep reading
Two ways to go from here
Both work. The first costs nothing and does not require us.
The method and the norms — open and free
The five stages we run on every account, published in full. Alongside them, market norms from 96 restaurants so you have something to compare your numbers against.
An audit of your listing
Paste your restaurant’s Grab link and the report comes back in a couple of minutes: menu and search, photo coverage, reviews, prices against the neighbours. Free, no strings; after that it is 10% of delivery revenue with no upfront payment.
Diagnose my listingor message us directly →