Wilson Wu
Chief Revenue Officer, Snappy
In Quebec, online ordering and self-order kiosks arrive through four doors: bundled with your payment processor, built into a POS, bought as a standalone app, or rented from a delivery marketplace. Online ordering is a website or app where guests order and pay for pickup or delivery on your own domain. A self-order kiosk is a touchscreen, usually rented, where guests build and pay for their order in person with your menu already loaded on it. If you run one or two locations, what decides it is not the ordering screen. It is unit minimums, French-first checkout, contract structure, and who owns your menu and customer data.
Summary
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Online ordering and kiosks reach Quebec restaurants through four doors: bundled with a payment processor, built into a POS, sold as a standalone app, or rented from a delivery marketplace. Most operators never shop for a platform on purpose; one arrives attached to something they already bought, and knowing which door explains the quote in front of you.
Door one: the payment processor. One of the largest payment processors in the country owns a restaurant ordering and kiosk subsidiary and sells it as one connected ecosystem. The ordering site takes pickup and delivery orders on your own domain, an aggregation layer of the kind these products typically ship pulls marketplace orders from the big three delivery apps into your POS and kitchen screen, and a rental kiosk puts your menu on a large touchscreen. The important detail is that this layer sends orders to a point of sale. It is not the point of sale, and it is sold as a cross-sell into a merchant account.
Door two: the POS vendor. All-in-one restaurant POS platforms, including a well-known one headquartered in Montreal and Snappy with an office in the same city, ship ordering as part of the register. The kiosk, the online menu and the counter screen read one menu file, so a modifier price changes once.
Door three: the standalone ordering app. Montreal has produced its own quick-service POS and ordering products, several of which lead with Revenu Québec certification for the WEB-SRM sales-recording mandate. They tend to be strong on compliance and weaker on guest-facing hardware, offering customer displays rather than true self-order kiosks.
Door four: the delivery marketplace. The big three delivery apps will happily be your only online ordering channel. They bring demand you did not earn and keep the customer relationship, which is why almost every operator eventually adds a direct channel beside them.
Which door you came through matters less than knowing the other three exist. The rest of this guide is the comparison you would run with all four on the table.
Quebec operators shop around for four reasons: pricing that stays private, kiosk fleet tooling that can be gated behind a unit count, processor ownership that is currently in motion, and few independent reviews to check before signing. Bundling ordering with processing is still convenient, and the company doing it at scale in Canada handles “one in every three business transactions” across “about 325,000 merchant locations,” according to Reuters. Nobody switches because the order button stopped working.
Nothing is priced in the open. Processor-bundled ordering and kiosk products are quoted by phone. Most POS vendors quote per restaurant too, Snappy included. The difference is what gets bundled into the quote. When software, hardware rental and processing arrive as one number, you lose the ability to check any one of them against the market.
Ask who the kiosk was built for. Ask whether fleet tooling such as remote monitoring is gated behind a unit count. A gate like that is not hidden and it is not unusual for enterprise hardware. It does mean a two-location Montreal operator and a forty-location franchise can end up buying visibly different products under the same brand name.
Ownership is in motion. In August 2025, Reuters reported that the two bank owners of one of the country’s largest processors were “in the early stages of exploring a potential sale” of a business that “generates nearly $700 million in annual revenue,” in a deal “that may value the business as highly as $2 billion.” An ownership change is not automatically bad for merchants, but it’s one of the signs your restaurant may need a new payment processor worth watching. It is a variable worth pricing in before you sign a multi-year hardware rental tied to that processor.
Ask for references, not reviews. You will not find much independent operator feedback online for products sold through an enterprise channel. Ask the vendor for Quebec references in your own segment, then call them yourself.
The table compares approaches, not price lists, since a single online ordering system for Quebec restaurants can be sold four different ways under four different names. Where a vendor publishes a number, it changes often and you should read it on the vendor’s page the week you buy. Where no number is published, that is the finding.
| Approach | What you get | How it is priced | Self-order kiosk | Watch for | Best fit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ordering layer bundled with a payment processor | Direct ordering site, marketplace aggregation into your POS, rental kiosk | Quote by phone, usually inside the merchant account negotiation | Yes, as rental hardware; ask whether fleet tooling such as remote monitoring is gated behind a unit count | Software, hardware and processing arrive as one number; hard to unbundle later | Multi-unit chains already processing with that bank-owned provider |
| All-in-one POS with ordering built in | Register, online menu and kiosk on one menu file | Monthly software per location; some vendors publish tiers, some quote | Depends on vendor; not every published tier includes one | Currency of the published price; a USD price is not a CAD price | Full-service and counter-service operators who want one support line |
| Standalone Quebec-built ordering or quick-service POS | Counter POS and direct ordering, often WEB-SRM certified out of the box | Monthly per station, hardware bought up front | Usually customer-facing displays rather than a true self-order kiosk | Guest-facing language claims are rarely stated on the site; ask to see a live install | Counter-service operators whose first question is Revenu Québec compliance |
| Delivery marketplace as the only channel | Demand, drivers, a listing | Commission on each order | No | You never own the customer or the order data | A new opening that needs volume before it needs margin |
| Snappy | POS, self-serve kiosk, online ordering, delivery and loyalty on one system (Snappy) | Quoted per restaurant, no published price | Yes: 15, 21 and 27-inch screens, countertop, floor-stand or wall mount, "Multi-language support (English, French, & More)," no unit minimum published (Snappy) | Ask for the platform fee, the per-order fee and the processing rate separately, as you would with anyone | Independents that want one vendor and one menu file, with the French guest screen verified on a live Quebec install |
Two rows deserve a note. The marketplace row is not a straw man; for a new room with no name yet, commission is the cheapest customer acquisition there is. And the Snappy row does not claim the register is cheaper than the bundle, only that the pieces sit on one system and are priced as separate lines you can see.
What's actually inside your bundled ordering quote?
Bring the quote in front of you and we'll walk through your own numbers: the platform fee, the kiosk rental and the card rate, line by line.
Show me my own numbersFor a single location, the deciding factor is unit minimums: the best tooling, such as fleet monitoring, is often switched on only above a certain unit count. You can still buy the kiosk or the POS itself; you may just not see the full fleet features until you scale.
If you want a published self-order kiosk price for your Quebec restaurant today, very few vendors in Canada print one, and the ones that do tend to be payment-first platforms charging per device on top of a card rate. Run the math on your own volume before calling any of them cheap. A low software fee attached to a high processing rate is a high price.
If WEB-SRM is your first question, the Montreal-built quick-service products lead with Revenu Québec certification and a low entry price. Accept the tradeoff: most offer a customer-facing display, not a self-order kiosk. Our MEV-Web explainer covers what the sales-recording mandate actually requires and what to ask any vendor about it.
If you want one vendor instead of a stack, the all-in-one platforms are quoted per restaurant. Less transparent than a rate card, but the real comparison is total cost. A separate ordering subscription, a separate kiosk rental and a separate processing agreement means three renewal dates and three support numbers. Snappy’s POS page lists “Integrated online ordering (commission-free)” inside the register rather than beside it, and the kiosk page states it “Integrates with Snappy Pay/POS/KDS/Loyalty” with an offline mode.
The diligence question costs nothing to ask: which features turn off below your unit minimum? Get the answer in writing before you sign, not after your second location opens.
Quebec law requires restaurants to serve customers in French, to write commercial documents such as receipts and order forms in French regardless of medium, and to offer software in French where a French version exists. This is where Quebec differs from every other Canadian market, and “we support French” is not a sufficient answer.
The obligation is not a feature request. The Office québécois de la langue française puts it in one line: “Au Québec, servir la clientèle en français est obligatoire.” The same guide adds that if you also serve in another language, “assurez-vous que le service en français est accessible au moins dans les mêmes conditions,” and that businesses “doivent offrir un service en français en tout temps” since the reform of the Charter.
Commercial documents are covered regardless of the medium. The OQLF guide states that “la documentation commerciale doit être rédigée au moins en français, et ce, peu importe le type de support,” and that this “inclut donc les sites Web et les réseaux sociaux.” Your online ordering menu is commercial documentation on a screen.
Receipts and order forms are explicitly named. Éducaloi’s plain-language summary reads: “Les catalogues et brochures, les bons de commande, les reçus et les garanties, qu’ils soient en ligne ou hors ligne, doivent être rédigés en français.” The same page states that a business with a Quebec address selling products or services to the Quebec public “doit diffuser une version française de son site Web.”
Software itself is in scope. A business guide produced by the Chambre de commerce et d’industrie Thérèse-De Blainville with OQLF support quotes the rule as “Tout logiciel, y compris tout ludiciel ou système d’exploitation, qu’il soit installé ou non, doit être disponible en français, à moins qu’il n’en existe aucune version française.” The guide frames it as an obligation to make the French version available where one exists. A kiosk is software a guest touches.
The penalties are not symbolic. Éducaloi describes a fine that applies when a business fails to comply within the deadline set after an OQLF warning: “une amende se situant entre 3 000 $ à 30 000 $ pour chaque jour que la violation se poursuit,” doubled on a first repeat offence and tripled after that.
That is a reading of published government and legal-information guidance, not legal advice. The specific question of what a self-order kiosk must show before a guest touches it is not spelled out in those sources in kiosk terms. Confirm your own obligations with counsel or with the OQLF before you rely on any vendor’s checkbox.
Now apply it as a buying test.
A vendor maintaining genuine French product pages is a reasonable signal that the guest-facing product has been localized rather than translated after the fact. Check whether the processor-bundled kiosk, the Montreal POS vendor and the standalone app each publish a French product page, not just a French toggle on the homepage.
Montreal-built quick-service products market hard on Revenu Québec compliance, but their pages often make no explicit claim about the language of the guest-facing interface. Ask.
Snappy’s kiosk page lists “Multi-language support (English, French, & More)” as a product capability rather than a site translation. Snappy has not published a Quebec-specific compliance statement for its guest screens, so treat that line as a capability to verify on a live install, exactly as you would with anyone else.
The question to put to every vendor is narrow and testable. Not do you support French, but: when a guest walks up to the kiosk, what language is on the screen before they touch anything, and can you show me a live Quebec install?
Ask five things in writing: the contract term and exit cost, whether the ordering fee is separate from the processing rate, what commission-free actually covers, who owns your customer list and menu, and what changes below the unit minimum. Quote-based pricing is not the problem; unasked questions are.
1. What is the term, and what does it cost to leave early? A “zero down” kiosk rental is financed hardware, not free hardware, and the term is where the cost lives. Ask for the number of months and the early termination figure.
2. Is the ordering fee separate from the processing rate? When ordering software and card processing come from the same vendor, ask whether you can keep one and replace the other. If the answer is no, you are signing one agreement, not two. This is the single question that most cleanly separates a processor bundle from a POS platform.
3. What exactly does commission-free mean here? Nearly every direct ordering product advertises commission-free online ordering. Snappy’s page says “0% commission fee on every online order”. That is a claim about marketplace commission, not payment processing. Ask for the platform fee, any per-order fee, the processing rate and any delivery dispatch fee as four separate numbers.
4. Who owns the customer list and the menu, and in what format do I get them back? Snappy’s ordering page lists “Own all customer data” as a product benefit. Whoever you choose, get the export format named in the agreement. “You can request your data” is not an export path.
5. What changes below the unit minimum? The same question as above, in contract language.
Most of the risk in switching ordering platforms is not the menu. It is the links pointing at the old one: inventory every published ordering URL, rebuild the menu once, redirect the old domain to the new one, and run both systems in parallel for a full week before cutting over.
Inventory every ordering URL you have published. Your website order button, your Google Business Profile ordering link, Instagram and Facebook, printed QR codes on tables and takeout bags, and any listing site carrying your old ordering domain.
Build the new menu once and let it fan out. Aggregation products in this category are built around the same principle: create the menu once and sync it to every channel. It is the right pattern regardless of vendor. Rebuilding the same menu three times is how modifier prices drift apart between the kiosk, the website and the marketplace listing.
Set 301 redirects from the old ordering domain, if you control it, to the matching pages on the new one. Old links stay alive and the search equity follows.
Update the Google Business Profile ordering link the day you launch. A Google order link puts the order button where the guest is already looking. Snappy’s ordering page describes an Order with Google integration that lets guests order from Google Search and Maps.
Run both systems live for one full week, including a Friday and a Saturday, and reconcile order counts and totals daily.
Confirm WEB-SRM continuity before you cut over. Any change to how a Quebec restaurant records sales has to keep you compliant on day one. Our MEV-Web explainer covers what the mandate requires, and the POS systems with kiosk and online ordering guide covers what changes when ordering and kiosks live inside the register instead of beside it.
Most vendors selling to Quebec restaurants, Snappy included, quote per restaurant rather than publishing a price, and processor-bundled products quote the software, the kiosk rental and the card rate as one negotiation. Ask for the platform fee, any per-order fee, the hardware rental and the processing rate as separate numbers so you can check each one against the market.
Usually not to buy the hardware, but enterprise kiosk programs sold through processors may reserve fleet features such as remote monitoring for operators above a unit minimum; ask the vendor directly. A single location can often rent the kiosk without that tooling. Ask which features turn off below the threshold and get the answer in writing. Snappy publishes no unit minimum for its self-serve kiosk.
The Office québécois de la langue française states that serving customers in French is mandatory and that commercial documentation must be at least in French regardless of the medium, including websites. Éducaloi adds that order forms and receipts, online or offline, must be written in French, and a business guide supported by the OQLF states that all software must be available in French where a French version exists. Confirm your specific obligations with counsel or the OQLF rather than relying on a vendor feature list.
Not inherently, but you should know what you are signing. In August 2025, Reuters reported the two banks behind one of the country’s largest processors were exploring a sale of the business, which handles one in every three business transactions in Canada. An ownership change is a variable to price in before committing to a multi-year rental tied to that processor, and the key contract question is whether you can replace the ordering layer without replacing the card processing.
For a Quebec chain already processing with one of the country’s largest providers, the processor’s own ordering and kiosk layer is a coherent choice, and a unit gate on fleet tooling is a threshold you already clear. For an independent with one or two locations, the same stack asks you to accept quote-only pricing, a possible unit gate on the kiosk features you would actually use, and a bundled processing relationship you cannot unbundle later.
The alternatives split cleanly. Payment-first platforms give you a published per-device number, attached to their card rate. Montreal-built quick-service products give you Revenu Québec credentials at a low entry price, usually without a true kiosk. The all-in-one POS vendors give you depth, and you should check the currency on the price. Snappy gives you the register, the kiosk, ordering and loyalty on one system, with multi-language support listed on the kiosk, to verify on a live Quebec install, and no published unit minimum.
Decide on the three things that are hard to change later: the contract term, who owns your data, and what your guest sees in French before they touch the screen.
Want a straight answer on what this would cost for your restaurant? Talk to Snappy. Offices in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal.
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