WooCommerce: How To Sell Restaurant Food Online

The COVID-19 pandemic has made millions of restaurants around the globe shut their doors and adapt to a different and much more convenient way of doing business – accelerating the online restaurant ordering system. 

Several third-party services like Uber Eats and Grubhub can help you get your restaurant menu online and take online food orders. However, their downside is that they come with a huge cost – and cut 20-30% from your earnings. Plus, they also come with a lack of control and access over your listing, user-friendliness, and menu design. 

Enter WooCommerce restaurant plugins. 

While the process of setting up your own online food delivery system may seem taxing – WooCommerce restaurant plugins make it easy and affordable with their quick setup, ease of management, and high versatility and customizability.  

Ciao Italia Ristorante, an Italian restaurant in the US, made the most out of WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering Plugin in the pandemic to let their customers order food from their homes and leverage curbside pickup. The plugin allowed them to design a one-page food ordering form – making food ordering and checkout quick and easy for their customers. 

Adam Tracksler, who developed the website, said they launched on day one, and the plugin allowed them to focus on the design and get their restaurant going and website running quickly amidst the pandemic – boosting revenue and saving infrastructure costs. 

Several other restaurants around the globe today use WooCommerce restaurant plugins to offer a comfortable and fast order and checkout process for customers and eliminate the need to pay a major chunk of their hard-earned money to third-party services

Let’s explore some of the best WooCommerce restaurant plugins to help you get 100% of your revenue straight from the customers and boost your business revenue. 

Orderable

Orderable plugin focuses on three key areas – order optimization, checkout optimization, and revenue optimization. Its one-page, app-like, mobile-friendly design gives your customers a smooth ordering process. 

Its revenue-generating feature is Order Bumps. When a customer adds a food product from the menu, this feature suggests sides or additional menu items to the customers they are most likely to purchase – increasing the average order value and boosting additional revenue. 

As for the checkout – you get full checkout control to incorporate time slot booking, set delivery fees, tips, delivery schedules, and payment methods. You can also charge additional fees for pin code-based delivery. 

You can leverage other critical features from this plugin – flexible menu payouts, product add-ons (revenue-generating feature), and holiday schedules for a feature-packed online restaurant ordering system. 

Top feature: Orderable makes live order management easy – instantly notifying when customers place new orders and change order statuses with ease as you begin processing. 

Pricing: The free plan comes with all the essential tools required to accept pickup or delivery orders. The Pro plan comes at a premium price of $249 with regular updates of new features and a 30-day money-back guarantee. 

YITH Easy Order Page For WooCommerce

YITH’s Easy Order Page is a flexible and highly-customizable plugin that allows you to create a faster and easier purchase process for your customers. It’s an ideal plugin to create a user-friendly and attractive page and offer multi-item purchasing to your customers. 

Using this plugin, you can list specific product categories with tables and grids and display product details on a modal window – so customers never leave the product list. For every list, you can also select the number of products to display on a page with their sorting order – ascending or descending alphabetical order, by publication date, and by price. 

In addition, it also allows you to set up visibility rules and choose which users can view your product lists – guests, registered, or others. Other than these, it also lets you customize the list layout, cart widget, colors, and checkout button per your specific requirements to match your restaurant’s style and look and feel. 

Top feature: It allows you to create unlimited custom product lists to enhance your store’s customer experience and optimize and streamline the purchase process for mobile users. 

Pricing: Costs $89.99/year with a 30-day money-back guarantee and a year of support and updates. 

Restaurant for WooCommerce

The Restaurant for WooCommerce plugin is one of the top contenders that offers a comprehensive solution for creating a user-friendly restaurant menu and online checkout process for your store. 

This plugin comes with several customization options for your order menu (hiding unavailable items), style (theme color, background color), label, and delivery options (free delivery, express delivery). 

One especially critical feature of this plugin is its interactive mini-cart widget – which displays your customers their order summary and makes it easy to add or remove items from the cart. Besides, its simple and clean menu design and secure online payment are other reasons why restaurants prefer this plugin. 

All in all, it’s a highly responsive and easy-to-use plugin that lets you create a smart and customized online food delivery system to keep up with the competition. 

Top feature: It allows you to rearrange food categories and products on the menu – based on the newly introduced or best-selling food items via drag-and-drop functionality. 

Pricing: $149.00 (billed annually) 

WooCommerce Delivery Slots 

Unlike the plugins mentioned above, WooCommerce Delivery Slots is a plugin specifically for takeaway or delivery and pickup on your customer’s schedule. It specifically allows your customers to schedule their order delivery or pickup date and time at checkout per their convenience. 

Thus, using this plugin, you can configure delivery and pickup settings to each shipping process – to significantly improve customer satisfaction and experience.  

It’s easy to set up, compatible with WPML and other translation tools, and doesn’t affect your store’s speed and performance. In addition, you can also charge additional fees for next-day and same-day deliveries. 

While this plugin doesn’t allow you to create your restaurant menu – it’s a perfect solution to optimize and super-personalize your checkout and delivery processes to maximize order capacities. Most businesses often use this plugin with WooCommerce Product Table – to create a comprehensive online food ordering system. 

Top feature: Besides delivery scheduling, it allows your customers to reserve a delivery slot before browsing or shopping the items. In addition, you can customize order limits, delivery and pickup fees, and define store holidays or close periods. 

Pricing: $129/yr (billed annually). Comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee and 1-year support and updates. 

WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering Plugin

Restaurant Ordering plugin is a feature-packed WooCommerce restaurant plugin that lets you design a smart and fast one-page ordering menu for your online store. This one-page ordering includes instant order forms, adding and customizing orders for customers, and checkout for collection or delivery. 

You can create an easy-to-browse and scroll products list – similar to popular apps like Grubhub. Then, when a customer adds a food item to their order, a window pops up with options to customize the item – allowing them to choose size, spice level, add extra toppings, determine the quantity, or other dietary requirements

As for your menu design – this plugin lets you customize and add buttons, food details, list items in 1-3 columns, and leverage a mobile-friendly and modern design. 

Top feature: You can organize your menu based on product categories, like starters, snacks, or beverages – to get a clean and perfect menu layout. 

Pricing: $99/yr – doesn’t include one-page cart and checkout. To leverage all the features, including one-page fast order and checkout – you can choose the Two Plugin Bundle that costs $149/yr. 

WooCommerce Food 

WooCommerce Food is a feature-rich plugin for an online restaurant ordering system that includes 10+ layouts and food styles support – creating an ordering menu seamless and hassle-free. 

This plugin comes with numerous features and settings and works perfectly for restaurants that serve different locations. For example, it allows you to add an optional popup to your order page – to let customers choose shipping from zip codes, postal with a configured popup opening and closing time. 

You can also use multiple payment gateways and manage menus, orders, and checkout from a handy centralized location. As for the menu – you can display it with either grid, table, list, or carousel. 

Top feature: Unlike other plugins, this plugin includes built-in food options – allowing customers to customize their dishes per their convenience. It also lets you add nutrition information for each food item – to display in the ordering popup. 

Pricing: The Regular License costs $49. 

WooFood 

WooFood is an excellent plugin if you want additional features to run your online food ordering restaurant. This plugin allows you to accept or decline orders in real-time and inform customers of the expected delivery time if you accept the order. 

It comes with several handy features to set delivery hours, maximum delivery distances, delivery costs, and pickup fees with the help of an intuitive dashboard. 

This plugin is the best option if you own multiple restaurant chains as it comes with multi-store compatibility. Moreover, using this plugin, you can add extra options for the entire product category or specific products to save your time if you’re using similar options for multiple products within a category. 

Although it lacks menu styles and design – it’s a flexible restaurant plugin that automates food delivery and stands out with excellent order management tools. 

Top feature: The Automatic Order Printing is compatible with all thermal printers – making it easy for your cooking staff to review the WooCommerce orders and get working right away. 

Pricing: Costs $199 and comes with 6 months of support and updates. 

Conclusion 

Having an online restaurant ordering system is the need of the hour in today’s world of increased digitalization. 23% of restaurants claim that their customer engagement with online food ordering has increased compared to the pre-pandemic period – showing a major shift towards digital food ordering. 

Even though setting it up might seem like a complex task – the WooCommerce restaurant plugins mentioned above make creating a menu, online delivery, and pickup feel like a breeze. 

Their necessary functionalities like high compatibility, stylish design, and product add-ons also help you maximize sales and grow your restaurant revenue. 

So, check out the plugins mentioned above to optimize your WooCommerce restaurant ordering system and choose one that best meets your business requirements and budget. 

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Rodolfo Melogli

Business Bloomer Founder

Author, WooCommerce expert and WordCamp speaker, Rodolfo has worked as an independent WooCommerce freelancer since 2011. His goal is to help entrepreneurs and developers overcome their WooCommerce nightmares. Rodolfo loves travelling, chasing tennis & soccer balls and, of course, wood fired oven pizza. Follow @rmelogli

2 thoughts on “WooCommerce: How To Sell Restaurant Food Online

  1. Interesting. But what I’m missing is information about the delivery part and integration with google maps. Menü pricing and delivery times are depending on customer locatons. Which of these plugins are suppurting a location-based food offering and help drivers to find the location after the order?

    1. I’d start contacting Orderable and see if they have this feature – I’m not able to help you with this unfortunately

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