Restaurants have been amongst the hardest hit industries during the Coronavirus outbreak. Nationwide orders to shut down dining rooms and force restaurants to allow delivery and carry-out only has been a monumental task. Some restaurants that already had online ordering systems in place likely fared better than others who had to rely on taking orders by phone and tying up workers that could be prepping food.
There are a couple different ways you can add online ordering to your website. The easiest is probably third party software and apps that have turnkey software that is pre-built and allow you to easily take orders through their system. The downside is that like popular delivery services such as bite squad, grubhub and uber eats, they charge a commission for each order placed.
ChowNow for example, allows you to take unlimited online orders without any commissions, for a $399 setup fee, plus $149/month, plus credit card transaction charges around 3% per order.
Another option would be to leverage WooCommerce, the wildly-popular and free eCommerce software that runs on WordPress (Also Free). There’s even a good chance your site is already running on wordpress, meaning you can install Woocommerce easily and start allowing people to place online orders – and even pay for them if you add your merchant account without paying anyone any commissions.
There’s a great plugin called Woocommerce Product Tables, which isn’t free, but would make the ordering process super easy by putting your entire menu on a single page and letting people check out right from there, but you could still make it work without it.
The basis of what you’d need is below.
- WordPress Content Management System (Free)
- Woocommerce Ecommerce plugin (Free)
- Woocommerce Product Table plugin ($99/year)
There’s a full-length tutorial on how to put together a Woocommerce-based ordering system available here.
If you’re not the DIY type, or don’t have the time or expertise to put together such a solution, we’ve got immediate availability and could put together a system like this in as little as 48 hours. Shoot us a message for more information.
