WooCommerce Food

A menu that changes by time, location and how it is delivered

A restaurant that sells online soon finds out that the in-house menu does not work as it is: the star dish does not survive the trip to the customer's door, the downtown branch closes earlier than the neighborhood one, and the kitchen cannot send out thirty orders at nine. WooCommerce Food is a plugin that builds the menu and the order on top of WooCommerce so those rules live in the shop and not in phone calls.

The bottleneck is not receiving orders, it is the kitchen at peak hour. That is why the most useful thing about the plugin is not showing off the menu, but being able to stop orders in time and decide what is sold, where and when.

WooCommerce Food: extras, conditions and delivery zones

The menu is displayed in more than 20 styles (grid, list, table or carousel), in 2 to 5 columns, and you place it wherever you want with shortcodes. Category filtering, loading more dishes and the dish detail in a modal window all work with Ajax.

What makes the difference in a kitchen is the extra options:

• Field types: select box, radio, checkboxes, text, textarea and quantity, with a minimum and maximum of checked boxes so nobody orders a menu without a side.
• Global extras: they apply to all dishes, to some of them or to whole categories, and they can be cloned to save work.
• Conditional logic: an option appears or hides depending on what the customer chose before. There are also different extras per variation and images on checkboxes and radios.
• Upselling: suggestions after a dish is added to the cart and a tip or donation at checkout.

The limits, before you buy: everything depends on WooCommerce, because the order and the payment go through it. Limiting delivery by radius needs the Google Maps API. Drawing delivery zones by hand requires a separate add-on; without it you can limit by radius or by postal code.

Questions before building the menu

Can I have several locations with different menus?

Yes. Each location can have its own dishes, hours, shipping fees, minimum order and email recipients.

Can I keep the kitchen from getting overwhelmed?

Yes: you limit the number of orders per time slot and you can prevent ordering less than X minutes or days in advance.

Is it useful for dishes offered only on certain days?

Yes, there are menus by date or by date and time range.

Does it work without WooCommerce?

No. It is a layer on top of WooCommerce and uses its orders and its payment gateways.

Delivery, pickup or dine-in: different prices and payments for each

The customer chooses between delivery, pickup or dining in, and from there you can change quite a lot: the menu they see, a surcharge or a discount depending on the method, and which payment methods are allowed. It is useful, for example, if you do not want to take cash on deliveries, or if you want to reward pickup with a discount.

Delivery supports fees by distance, by postal code or by time slot, and an amount above which shipping is free. The minimum order can vary by distance, method or location.

For day-to-day management there is an order calendar with iCal export (to take it to Google Calendar), invoice printing and automatic confirmation emails to you and the customer.

Time slots and the per-slot limit are set before the dishes

If you start by uploading dishes, you will be missing the important part. It is better to set the opening hours first (global or per location) and the time slots, which can differ by day, location and delivery method. Then the limit of orders per slot, and only then the global extras and the dishes.

With that base, each new dish inherits the rules and you do not have to repeat them. Before publishing, test the conditional logic of the extras in the demo and check that a customer cannot finish an order that is incompatible with what the kitchen can handle.