Payment processing
ezCater continues to act as the payment processor for all integrated orders. The billing and commission structure is unchanged. There is, however, one additional cost to be aware of.
Integration fee
The Olo Rails integration carries a per-order integration fee. This fee is taken from the weekly payments ezCater remits to your stores. The fee covers the cost of the API connection and Olo’s role in routing the order.
What’s not passed through
Several ezCater-side adjustments don’t flow into Olo:
Promotions
Preferred Partner Program adjustments
Rewards
Commissions
You’ll see the value of the order to the guest in Olo, not the post-adjustment value. ezCater handles the adjustments on its end; the Olo-visible total is the gross figure.
Tax-exempt orders
Olo does not currently support tax exemption. Tax-exempt ezCater orders will not fail to transmit, but tax will be calculated on the Olo side. Make sure your accounting team reconciles using the Partner Portal and Olo Rails reconciliation reports rather than relying on the Olo-visible totals.
Order failures
Even with a working integration, individual orders can fail to transmit. The order doesn’t disappear — it remains active in Partner Portal and you are still expected to fulfill it. But your team needs to know it didn’t reach Olo so they can take action.
How you’re notified of a failure
When an order fails to transmit, ezCater sends a failure notification via email and/or SMS to everyone who receives new-order notifications. The notification calls out that the order was not able to be passed into Olo and will need to be manually entered.
The order itself remains visible in Partner Portal, fulfillment is still expected — there is no cancellation triggered by a transmission failure.
Common failure reasons
A non-exhaustive list of reasons an order might fail to transmit:
The store is closed in Olo at the order’s requested time
Olo or the POS times out before responding
The order was updated or canceled after lock (locked/past-event orders cannot be revised through the integration)
The basket fails validation in Olo
A required selection is missing on a menu item
Online ordering is unavailable for the store in Olo
Lead time settings differ between ezCater and Olo
Olo or POS configuration is incorrect for one or more items
Order throttling has temporarily blocked new orders
The POS is offline at the moment of transmission
The order has incomplete details (rare; usually caught upstream)
For the specific error codes and what to do about each, see Error Reference.
Unscheduled outages
Olo can become unreachable for a few reasons — internet connectivity issues at the location, planned or unplanned Olo downtime, or POS-side problems. The integration handles these failure modes the same way it handles any other transmission failure.
What happens when Olo is unreachable
ezCater attempts to transmit the order at the moment of acceptance.
If Olo doesn’t respond, ezCater treats the order as a transmission failure.
A failure notification goes out by email and SMS to everyone on your new-order notification list.
The order remains active in Partner Portal and is still expected to be fulfilled — manually entered into your POS or fulfilled through your usual catering process.
There is no cancellation triggered by an Olo outage. The order details are available in Partner Portal regardless of whether Olo received them.
Where to go when something’s wrong
Problem | Start here |
Order didn’t transmit, you received a failure notification | Error Reference — find the specific error code |
Lead times in Olo don’t match expectations | Your Olo rep — lead times are an Olo configuration |
Order throttling is blocking orders | [email protected] — throttling is Olo-side |
POS is offline | Your POS specialist, then [email protected] |
Menu items aren’t appearing or mapping incorrectly | [email protected] for ezCater-side menu issues, [email protected] for Olo-POS mapping |
Integration fee question | |
You don’t yet have the integration and want to onboard | See Menu Integration Overview for the entry point to both APIs |