Online Food Ordering provides many benefits to both the Customers and Restaurants.

• It saves the restaurants a lot time and labor for taking orders
• It gives customers the instant access to the most up-to-date menus
• It reduces the communication errors between human beings
• It gives the customers and restaurants access to order histories for better customer relationship management
• It provides more channels of ordering for customers
• It can support many more concurrent customers than the traditional phone lines.
• It is far cheaper and more accurate than the traditional approaches of ordering either by phone or in person

Online Food Ordering is not easy to implement. Here are the challenges:

• Online Food Ordering process is much more complex than ordinary web based E-commence, so called "E-tailers".
• Each Restaurant has its own business rules, processes, special food requirements, discount and coupon structures, which make customization of Online Food Ordering Engine extremely difficult. 
• Online Food Ordering requires much faster execution and delivery of goods than normal online transactions.
• Customers have less tolerance and higher expectations for their food than most of the other products, which makes them feel "uncomfortable" to use computers for ordering the food without talking to a human server.