Hi Beedlebum,
I had the same thoughts as you and have actually started a company that not only does website ordering but also creates a custom iPhone ordering applications for each restaurant. I, like you, also come from a heavy software engineering background. Here is my experience so far and may answer your question.
I think as software engineers, we tend to undervalue marketing or not understand how difficult it really is. We charge restaurants $50/month for a custom iPhone ordering application for their restaurant + a website which allows online ordering. They can also use our service to gather all sorts of statistics on their customers.
While our restaurants are all very happy and do way more than the $50/month we charge in sales through our service, it just takes a lot of effort to sign up even 1 restaurant. Perhaps as we start to sign up more and more restaurants we will have to do less and less work for each additional sale, but that remains to be seen. Hope this helps.
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