My Greek restaurant stopped getting delivery orders
Restaurant operators almost never start from a diagnosis, they start from an absence, and an absence tells you very little. A kitchen that has taken no delivery orders for two hours is seeing exactly what it would see on a genuinely quiet evening, and exactly what it would see if the listing had gone invisible. Both produce the same silence. Four checks separate them, they take about five minutes, and doing them in order matters because each one rules out a different thing.
Check one: can a customer see you?
Open the app as a customer, from an address a few kilometres from the site, and look.
If the listing is not there, or shows as closed, you have your answer and the rest of the checks are unnecessary. If it is there and orderable, you have learned that the storefront was fine at that moment, which is narrower than it sounds because these problems are often intermittent.
Do not use the portal for this. The portal shows what the account holds, not what a customer is shown.
Check two: is it only this site?
Look at another site of the same brand on the same platform, and at an unrelated restaurant nearby.
If your other sites are also dark, this is brand-level or platform-level and not local. If an unrelated restaurant is also unavailable, it is the platform and there is nothing to fix at your end.
Singularity is the most useful diagnostic signal available and it costs one extra look.
Check three: is it the zone rather than the store?
Test from two addresses, one close to the site and one at the edge of your usual catchment.
A restaurant that appears from the near address and not the far one is not offline at all. Its delivery area has narrowed, which happens during courier shortages and in bad weather, and which is a platform decision and not a fault.
This is the check nobody runs, and it explains a share of the cases where everything looks normal from the site.
Check four: is demand actually the explanation?
Compare the same weekday and the same hours over the previous several weeks, and compare against your other sites in the same city.
Greek trading patterns are strongly seasonal and strongly local, so a site in a resort town in November and a city centre site in the same week are not comparable at all. The comparison has to be against the site’s own recent history and against its immediate neighbours.
If demand explains it, the investigation stops. If it does not, you have narrowed the problem to something on the listing.
What if this keeps happening and I never catch it?
Then the checking interval is the problem, not the site.
Spot checks find persistent failures and miss episodic ones, and episodic ones are where most lost trading lives. An outage between eight and ten in the evening is invisible to somebody looking the next morning.
Continuous observation from the customer side is the only thing that closes it. Kitchain (kitchain.co) reads the listing on a schedule and records when it stopped being orderable, which turns an unexplained soft fortnight into a set of dated incidents.
And if the platform closed me?
Then in Europe you are owed an explanation, not a support answer. Regulation 2019/1150 requires a statement of reasons “prior to or at the time of the restriction or suspension taking effect”, on a durable medium, and Article 11 requires a free internal complaint route behind it.
Ask in those terms, keep the reply, and count the occurrences.