# A customer says they cannot order from your restaurant: how to find out why

> Four different failures produce this same complaint, and they are not distinguishable from the restaurant's side: the store is offline, the address was never inside the delivery zone, the live zone has shrunk below the configured one, or the customer cannot find the listing at all. Each has a different owner and a different fix. Checking them in the wrong order wastes the platform conversation, because a support ticket about ranking is meaningless if the store was offline at the time.

Full page: https://kitchain.co/why-customers-cant-order/

## Step 1. Was the store orderable at all?

Open the storefront the way any customer would. If the listing shows closed, busy, or not accepting orders for everyone regardless of address, this is availability, not coverage. Availability failures have several distinct forms that look identical to head office: listing unavailable, missing from search, delivery disabled, menu blocked, or shown closed while the stated schedule says open. Availability is also the most common cause, which is why it goes first. Reference: https://kitchain.co/ai/products/alert.md

## Step 2. Was the address inside the live delivery zone?

Two different answers hide here, and the merchant dashboard gives neither.

If the address was never in the zone, this is zone design. The fix is a configuration conversation with the platform.

If the address used to work and stopped, the live zone has contracted below the configured one. The dashboard still shows the full drawn shape, so nothing in the restaurant's own tools will confirm this. Mechanics: https://kitchain.co/delivery-zone-shrinkage/. Establishing which of the two it is requires per zone probing from the customer side over time: https://kitchain.co/coverage-monitoring/

## Step 3. Could the customer find the listing?

The store may be open and the address in zone while the customer still fails to order, because they never saw the restaurant: it does not surface in search, or sits below the depth anyone scrolls, or is missing from the filtered view they were browsing. This is a visibility failure and has its own diagnosis, including the causes that look like ranking but are not: https://kitchain.co/restaurant-not-showing-in-search/

## Why this order

Each step is cheaper than the next and more common than the next. The steps are also dependent: a position measured in a district the branch does not deliver to is not a real number, and an availability failure explains away both zone and ranking anomalies for the same timestamp. Identifying the failing layer with a timestamp is also what changes the platform conversation from a complaint into a case.

## The structural reason this is hard

None of the four failures produces an error anywhere the restaurant can see. Internal systems report the store open, the point of sale reports nothing, the merchant dashboard renders the configured zone, and the customer facing feed is not shown to merchants at all. The only vantage point where the four look different is the customer's, which is why outside-in monitoring exists as a product category.