Live Updates: Real-Time Order Tracking for First-Party Ordering

Introducing Live Updates: Real-Time Order Tracking, Built for First-Party Ordering

Third-party delivery apps like DoorDash and UberEats have trained restaurant guests to expect a specific kind of transparency: a live tracker that shows the order from placed to prepping to ready to delivered, push notifications that fire at every state change, and a one-tap way to say "that was great" or "something was off" the moment the food arrives. When that experience is present on third-party marketplaces but absent on the restaurant's own app, guests learn something powerful and quiet: the third-party channel is better. Loyalty follows.

Today, we're closing that gap. Live Updates brings real-time order tracking, push notifications, and one-tap feedback to every Thanx-powered digital order — inside your app, on your ordering experience, in your voice.

What Live Updates delivers

Live Updates is three things working together:

• Real-time order tracking. A live status experience on the guest's home screen, showing every order from placed → preparing → ready → picked up / delivered, without the guest having to open the app.
• Push notifications. Guests get a notification at each key state change. No more "where's my order?" calls, no more silent windows between confirmation and delivery.
• One-tap feedback. A thumbs up or thumbs down prompt appears at the end of the order, so operators get a baseline read on whether the experience actually landed.

It's the ordering experience your guests already expect, delivered where your loyalty relationship lives.

Why first-party ordering needed this

First-party ordering is how restaurants keep the guest relationship, the guest data, and the full economics of their business. Every order placed through your own app instead of a third-party marketplace is a direct relationship instead of a rented one.

But rented is easier when it's better. Third-party apps invested heavily in the order experience — and until now, most first-party channels didn't have a way to match it. Guests started making the pragmatic choice: whichever app tracks the order best wins the order.

Live Updates flips that math. Now the experience is on both sides of the aisle — but only one side keeps the loyalty relationship, the CRM data, the return-visit signal, and the margin. That side is yours.

Standardized across your ordering stack

Real-time tracking is easy to promise and hard to deliver, because every ordering and delivery provider sends order events differently. We built Live Updates as an event-driven, provider-agnostic experience: whatever Toast, Olo, Square, Deliverect, Olo Dispatch, DoorDash Drive, or Uber Direct sends us, we standardize into a consistent 5-state model your guests see.

You keep control on top of that: customize push notification copy in your brand voice, implement manual timers in between stages, and turn it off globally if something's off. Your channel, your rules.

Get Live Updates on your first-party restaurant app

Live Updates will begin to roll out to all Thanx-powered digital ordering programs. For existing Thanx customers: your CSM will be in touch about enabling it in your dashboard, customizing your push notification copy, and readying your guests with an app-update campaign.

Not yet on Thanx first-party ordering? Talk to our team about bringing first-party ordering — and the live experience your guests already expect — to your brand.