Otter Reviews

Summary: We need more functions to integrate to put really the store on automatic optimization. But we are on a good path :)
Yes full automatic optimization is what we look for :)

Positive: Usually we miss 2 to 3 orders. We lost money but more important it was a bad experience for our customers and damage our brand. With Otter we are able to fill all the order properly.
When the store is busy in summer, the employee didn't have the time to update our menu. Now with the app, we only have to update the menu one time. and we don't to stop the delivery to avoid confusion.
With marketing promotions, we can increase our volume during low season.

Negative: Some menu are not well connected to the platform due to partner policy (ChowNow, Square)
We are missing a tool to manage and monitor social network campaigns (Facebook and Instagram) and to compare the ROI with platform promotions.
It's difficult to evaluate the real cost of the campaign, it will be good to have a global tool making a limit to be sure that all fee (platform, otter, promotion) won't exceed a % of the sales price (40 or 50%).
It will be good to have some market intelligence to help price efficiently our products in function of competition and demand.

Summary: Great system overall, Otter is continuously improving and we are excited to see all the updates and improvements that are to come.

Positive: Easy to use and guide through.
Allows all delivery and pick up menu items to be accessible.
Allows us to control our delivery platforms in one tablet.

Negative: The Otter application itself actually fails and shuts down and crashes from time to time.

When we turn off certain menu items, we would experience an error message.

Summary: Been with them 3 months now, at first I was sceptical reading the reviews although they delivered more sales than I expected.

Positive: Their tool called Boost has increased my sales by £2000 per month. Automates my promotions easily.

Negative: The customer support could be quicker but not too bad.

Summary: Otter is extremely useful for busy restaurants that have a large third party delivery footprint. Having orders auto inject into your POS and auto-print helps cut on labor costs; you aren't forced to have one employee having to enter in orders.

Positive: If I need to make any immediate updates to my menu, it takes me about 5 minutes at most to do so. With multiple restaurants, having one login to access all of them at once helps me optimize efficiency.

Negative: When there is an issue that I need to contact support, it is via chat. I wish there was a phone option as I feel sometimes communication is better translated over phone than via text.

Summary: Overall, it does make it easier for the staff but there are many things that need to be changed. The features can be improved to make integration easier and the support would be better if there is a phone number to call when we need immediate assistance.

Positive: It helps link all of our TPOs in one spot which makes it a lot more convenient for our staff and allows less time going through to accept orders while being on the line.

Negative: The support. It is almost impossible to reach out to support and there is only one option using the chat option which takes away time when a manager needs to be in the kitchen.

Summary: I’m doing this for 35 years.
If you just think of your numbers and don’t care about your customers you won't survive.

Positive: I’m giving them 3 because the idea is good.
The equipment is good and when everything is working it’s worth the money.
But the customer service is not there no phone number only email support and they don’t get back to you for days.

Negative: Losing orders and money because your support doesn’t feel like answering.

Summary: If in last year I would recommend it, but now, avoid it. The service is so bad now. They cancel your service immediately even you have paid the invoice until the end of this month.

Positive: It was ok in 2022 and 2023, when there were problems they were able to solve it in a reasonable timeframe.

Negative: Terrible customer service now, there is almost certain you will never get the problem solved in one go and they don’t follow up your case unless you contact them again and again.

Summary: Horrible. Nightmare We had to call all the providers ourselves and have lost thousands for fees and lack of progress that we have to all do ourselves now.

Positive: Nothing. They scammed us.
Won’t help fix the problem.
Thinking that there isn’t really a company there.

Negative: Company promises you everything and doesn’t actually get any of these things done.
They were supposed to set us up on multiple platforms and have it all come to one iPad and none of this happened.
We had to call all the providers ourselves and have lost thousands for fees and lack of progress that we have to all do ourselves now.
They won’t call back and help at all. Scammers.

Summary: I have nothing good to say about Otter, I wish I did, but I could go on and on about the headaches Otter has caused me. Those are just a couple out of hundreds (not joking).
I cannot stress enough that unless you don’t have a choice, do not consider Otter

Positive: Analytics is OK, When everything is working, which is rare then it’s pretty cool. But that’s not very often at all

Negative: I have been using it for over a year now (because I don’t have a choice with cloud kitchens). The software is riddled with problems that cause connection errors to 3rd party delivery platforms. Otter support is terrible. It takes them on average 20 minutes just to get the information about what store and brand is being inquired about, even after I have typed all of the information they need, they ask all the same questions over again. Can’t they just re-read the information I just spent 15 minutes typing in the first place? Then they usually have to escalate the problem to someone else who does not respond and the whole process has to start over. I have had 187 tickets submitted only in one year, that is how many problems I have had that required Otter support to fix an issue. I cannot complete simple functions like re-connecting my credentials to a delivery brand without contacting support, Which is always a pain. When connecting to Uber they require a 2FA code and the spend about an hour repeatedly asking for the code over and over and over again. I’ve done this at least 20 times with all my brands. They never proactively reach out if there is a connection error, so if there is something wrong, the only way to know is if you catch it yourself and then reach out to them. There is a glitch in the Otter Order manager if I log in on a web browser I can see other restaurants live orders, and could potentially cancel them or mark them as ready. They are aware of the problem and have done nothing to correct it. Recently, Otter support connected one of my branda to the wrong location, so customers would order in Salt Lake, and they would print in Denver. It was 2 days to get it corrected because Otter support so that bad. I tried to connect with Toast POS a while back and it took 2 months of daily communication to get one of my 7 brands connected. They kept changing the onboarding “specialist” and wouldn’t tell me. The. I would be ghosted, and would have to start the process all over again. 4 times that happened. I finally pulled the plug and went with itsacheckmate and everything was connected ,by myself, within 3 days, no support needed, no 2FA codes needed from Uber. There was a single connection error and they reached out to me about it and then fixed it within a few minutes. With otter they always blame the 3PD provider and make you reach out to them yourself instead of handling it for you. Terrible service.

Summary: The biggest mistake I've ever made.
After attempting an integration with Otter in Oct 23, we were still not live 6 weeks later. Repeated errors, inability to correctly publish menu items, constant issues with POS, customers coming in to pick up orders that we never received, and the list goes on. Otter refused to refund our subscription cost, and we are currently dealing with attorneys. THE WORST. They cost of thousands of dollars and significant reputation damage. I repeat... THE WORST.

PS - after the cord was cut, another aggregator got us up and running within 3 days.

Positive: Not one single thing. This company is a scam, and they make promises they can not keep. Their POS integrations are faulty and they lack the tech capacity to compete with other aggregators.

Negative: Items unlink from POS for no reason.
Customers came in to pick up orders we had no record of
Otter blames Square, Door Dash for everything.
Expensive.
Refusal to admit their mistakes.
Lack of customer service.

Summary: In my years in hospitality giving otter a go has been the worst and most painful service that I've tried. Stay away, a waste of money and time.

Positive: A good idea, that's where it ends. They have been trying to onboard me for about 18 months and just don't seem to be able to get the system to work. After 12 months they contacted me to apologise that the system wasn't even capable of the promised functionality.

Negative: 18 months onboarding and its still not working. Promised a 3 month free trial but the started charging me inside that period including for services I didn't ask for and haven't received. Have been trying for ages to cancel the subscription and get a refund for fraudulent charges and they just wont resolve the ticket.

Summary: If you’re thinking about signing up for Otter, don’t.

I message them on June 2 saying that I wanted everything shut down in that I want it all integrations to stop, today is July 13 in my account is still active, they’re trying to set up a zoom call with me to cancel my account but there’s no availability until next week, it’s just a ploy to keep my account running. When I signed up for the free trial, they still tried to charge me and their integration system sucks. I had at least 20 items deactivated on GrubHub and 30 new items that did not go through the integration. I also can no longer deactivate items on my end, and GrubHub, which caused me to lose two sales. Even though I told him to stop integration last night, I am still not able to make changes on my end. And when I try to make a changes to my menu on their end, the change still has not reflected and it’s been over 12 hours.

And even after “canceling” my account on June 2, they just tried to bill me for $120. The sales rep to try to sell me otter, specifically told me on zoom and even emphasized that billing would not be auto pay. Which is not true, I had to physically turned it off, and I have a “invoice” that is overdue because I did not enable auto pay.

Whenever I use chat support on their site, they have to send me at least three emails afterwards and none of those emails actually solve my issue.

It’s probably so much more that’s wrong with this platform that I did not include here.

Avoid like plague.

Positive: Nothing, I cannot possibly think of a single nice thing to say about this platform.

I’ve only heard terrible things about Otter.

Negative: Read “overall” session to get an understanding of all the cons.

Summary: If you sign up you will get stuck and you won't be able to get out of it. They will make your customers upset because they will show the business is there but then cancel their orders. I have lost thousands of dollars in sales and awful reviews because customers believe I am not delivering. Customer service is awful as well. The associates on the call only state they can transfer the tickets and you will get a 1 sentence short email response from an agent who didn't even understand your full concern. Just try and find a competitor.

Positive: There are no positives. It is a company that is trying to do something very needed and is absolutely failing at it.

Negative: Worse customer service experience ever. You will never be able to get a hold of anyone that could actually answer your questions.

Summary: I sent at least 6 emails to cancel my partnership with Otter before the 30 day trial period. We never received any equipment (tablet or printer) nor did we receive any phone call from Onboarding so we never got started.
The only calls were from the sales person, Kyla, to get me to sign up and give my credit card information. She told me someone from on boarding would call me because she was having trouble getting Doordash set up. There was no 'customer service " from Otter and I never received any tablet or printer to get started and nobody cared enough to followup with me. I sent emails 2 weeks after signing up and for 2 weeks I sent emails, to cancel and all I got were automated responses saying my email was received and someone would respond within 24-48hrs. I received another email asking to schedule a phone call to discuss or reply with reason for canceling. I replied with N
My reason and never heard back. I sent 4 more emails with my cancelation request and I even called the 24hr support phone number, but nobody was ever available to take my call. I emailed Kyla who signed me up and she responded saying she couldn't help me to cancel that I would have to contact the support email. Today they deducted $129 from my account and I'm furious.

Positive: Never got to try it. Never received any equipment. I received several phone calls to schedule appt to watch demo and sign up and none since.

Negative: Everything.

Summary: Felt like being scammed. Do not try. Do not buy the product. Sales person or technicians are ghosted when problem occurred.

Positive: • Concept is great, but only it is stable.
• Convenient, but with delays.
• Pricing not bad, only if the system works great.

Negative: • Do not try. Do not recommend.

• After sales service is zero. The worst. No call center. They only reply email mentioning we will fix the issue, but take no action.
• DoorDash link is a big trouble. We asked them to remove DoorDash from Otter platform ... next thing we knew, our DoorDash storefront was always closed due to their failure to unlink it.
• No one shows responsibility or take action towards cancellation request.
• We lost many orders through Otter Integration.
• Not worth the try. Not worth the headache they caused.