Best Ecommerce Platforms For Restaurants

Ecommerce platforms for restaurants and food delivery services have become a necessity, especially after the COVID-19 outbreak. These days, consumers prefer ordering food online rather than dining out. 

A survey done in March 2020, suggests that around  41.7% of consumers in the United States said that if they had to be confined to their homes due to COVID19, they would prefer ordering food online. Moreover, global ecommerce sales will reach $4.9 trillion by the end of 2021.

According to another report, more than one-third of US adults and half of the millennials prefer ordering food for delivery compared to two years ago.

A third survey says that by 2022, third-party sales will comprise 70% of all delivery, 37% higher than in 2016.

The global online food delivery services market has grown from $107.44 billion in 2019 to $111.32 billion in 2020.

Now, this is high time you choose an ecommerce platform for ecommerce website development where your customers can easily browse your menus, select the items, and pay smoothly for their delivery orders.

As a restaurant business owner or a food delivery start-up, you need to compare the top ecommerce platforms to boost your restaurant/food delivery/hotel business sales.

The best ecommerce platforms for restaurants are: 

Platform #1 – Magento 

Magento is an open-source development platform for different ecommerce industries, including food & beverages. Even though it is a free application, you will have to buy extensions if you want to extend your website’s abilities.

Magento’s open-source is appropriate for small businesses, but if you want an all-in-one cloud solution, you must consider Magento Commerce. It is easy to deploy, includes additional integrated capabilities, and provides enhanced security.  

Magento offers all the ingredients for a great restaurant website, from attractive themes to easy to add features, from managing staff to managing sales, all in one place.

A lot of companies in the food and beverage industry, specialty food stores or global beverage giants, trust Magento for their business. NewCakes, Coca Cola, Monin, and Sugarfina are a few to name. 

Best Features of Magento

• Magento provides social media integration options and built-in themes with mobile-responsive designs.
• With Magento, users can get category insights to effortlessly categorize consumers based on flavor choices, preparation, pairings, occasion, and other preferences.
• Magento facilitates you with integrating different business solutions like ERP, PIM, POS, OMS, CRM, and CMS, using effective web APIs.
• Magento enables you to manage food and beverage order inventory and logistics through its multiple systems and partners.

Related: Start An Influencer Marketing Campaign For Your Food Delivery Business

Pricing

Magento Open Source is a free app. For Magento Commerce, you need to contact the Magento help center.  

Platform #2 – Shopify

Shopify can work brilliantly for your online restaurant store. From adding extra functionality to picking the perfect theme, you can add all the features needed for your website effortlessly. 

Shopify’s free themes are limited in number, but you will get a great selection of themes if you go for paid ones. Moreover, you can get themes customized by Shopify Experts to add a personalized touch to your store.  

Besides, it is an easy to use tool with drag and drop features. It offers access to different apps and allows you to sell in person with Shopify POS. Not to mention, it has over 100,000 users across the world.

Related: Shopify SEO Guide

Best Features of Shopify

• Shopify is an easy to use application with quick edits and drag and drop features.
• It provides access to several fantastic food apps to enhance your store’s functionality.
• Its social integration features connect you with different social media networks, especially visual platforms like Instagram and Facebook. It helps you showcase your product and generate interest around your brand.
• With Shopify POS, you can sell in person. Using a tablet and Bluetooth card reader, you can carry your product catalog and showcase it anywhere.

Pricing

• Basic Shopify: The plan includes an ecommerce website and blog, unlimited products, two staff accounts, sales channels, 24/7 support, discount codes, gift cards, manual order creation, and 2% transaction fee. The plan costs USD 29/month. 
• Shopify: The plan is appropriate for growing businesses. It includes everything in Basic Shopify with five staff accounts, professional reports, and 1% transaction charge. It costs USD 79/month. 
• Advanced Shopify: This plan includes everything in Shopify plus advanced report builder, third-party calculated shipping rate, and 0.5% transaction fee. It costs USD 299/month.

Platform #3 – Wix

Wix is the most innovative drag and drops restaurant website builder that empowers users to design websites of their choice. The platform has over 500 visually impressive layouts from 70 categories, enough to choose the best ones for restaurant websites. It also allows users to design and build a website from scratch by using their own food images, color shades, and more. 

Within Wix, you get hosting and domain registry service. So, it is an all-in-one solution for creating websites. Wix is also advanced in SEO capabilities to improve the organic visibility of your website when diners look for your restaurant or the food you sell online. The website can be connected to the Google Search Console. Using its mobile editor, you can improve the website’s compatibility as well as search ranking. 

Related: Ecommerce SEO Checklist

Restaurant websites built using WIX are mobile-optimized, and you can further improve its functionality with various apps available in the Wix app market.

Best Features of Wix

• Wix offers over 500 stunning designer-made templates that also includes food templates. Few of them are free, and the rest of them are paid.
• Users can enjoy freedom while designing their website with innovative drag and drop features. 
• Wix has an option of personalized SEO plan to get your site listed in the Google search result.
• The website designed on Wix looks equally good on any device.
• It offers access to powerful apps in the app market to extend your website abilities.
• Users can make their website look lively with animation, backgrounds, and scroll effects.
• Wix has over 100 fonts to choose from, or you can upload your own.
• It also has other features like parallax, reveal, zoom-in or fade-in scrolling to add dimensions to your sites.
• Besides readymade templates, a blank template is also there to design and build a site from scratch.

Pricing

• Business Basic: The basic plan offers unlimited bandwidth, 20GB storage, domain connection, free domain for one year, no commission at all, site booster app, visitor analytics app, and five video hours. It costs $20/month when billed annually.
• Business Unlimited: The plan includes every feature of business basic plus 35 GB storage, ten video hours, a professional logo. You can always prefer to create your own logo using a restaurant logo maker.
• Business VIP: The top plan includes every feature of Business Unlimited plus unlimited video hour, priority response, and VIP support. It costs $35/month when billed annually.

Platform #4 – Squarespace

Squarespace is another useful restaurant website builder for creating an enticing website. Working with Squarespace might not seem to be very easy at first, but it yields an impressive result once you learn to use it.

With an array of several beautiful, customizable templates, it allows incredible designing facilities. All the templates are optimized for desktop, tablet, and mobile devices. Plus, it also provides ChowNow and OpenTable integrations to manage orders.

Related: Learn How to Fix a Bad Google Review For Your Restaurant

Squarespace has other enticing features like email marketing, event calendars, and ecommerce functionality to power restaurant website templates. You can edit pages and ecommerce functions on-the-go using its mobile app. To upgrade the website abilities, you also get extensions from Squarespace third-party extension store.   

Related: Best Google Ad Extensions For Online Stores

Best Features of Squarespace

• Squarespace provides beautiful, customizable templates, specially designed for restaurants.
• It allows users to connect with their customers on social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more. 
• It has built-in SEO to ensure search engines find the user’s website. 
• It provides users real-time analytics to study and know more about their customers.
• It allows users to create and manage beautiful menus, OpenTable reservations, and event calendars, all within a single interface.
• The software also offers marketing tools to promote your restaurant online.
• It has 24/7 reliable and dedicated customer support.

Related: Complete Guide to Voice Search Optimization

Pricing

• Personal: The plan is best suited for a start-up business. You get a free custom domain, SSL certificate, unlimited bandwidth and storage, SEO features, templates, two contributors, mobile-optimized websites, basic website metrics, and Squarespace extensions. It costs $12/month when paid annually.
• Business: The plan is best for growing businesses. You get every feature of Personal plan plus unlimited contributors, professional email from Google, premium integrations, and all marketing features. It costs $18/month when paid annually. 
• Basic Commerce: This plan is designed for companies and small-scale businesses. You get every feature of the Business plan plus little more of commerce features like point of sale, custom account, products on Instagram, etc. It costs $26/month when paid annually. 
• Advance Commerce: This is the plan for the enterprises looking for advanced features. You get entire features, including commerce APIs, advanced shipping, advanced discounts, and more. It costs $40/month when paid annually.

Note: You can use a Squarespace coupon when availing any of these pricing packages to save more money.

Related: Best Ways To Reduce Shopping Cart Abandonment

Platform #5 – nopCommerce

nopCommerce is an open-source ecommerce platform based on ASP.NET technologies. Thanks to its flexibility and scalability, it’s a ‘weapon of choice’ for both growing businesses and established enterprises. At the moment, there are over 65,000 live stores running on nopCommerce in various spheres, including food and beverage, catering and restaurant delivery services.

As an on-premise shopping cart, nopCommerce has all the features food business might need: unlimited customization, responsive mobile commerce, multi-store & multi-vendor options, PCI DSS compliance, omnichannel support, SEO optimization, tax automation, and much more.

Besides rich out-of-the-box functionality, nopCommerce supports 1,500+ integrations (plugins, themes, and language packs) with major services, like PayPal, Fedex, Amazon, Stripe, MailChimp, etc.

Best Features of nopCommerce

• nopCommerce offers the smart product suggestions feature for cross-selling and up-selling, as well as promoting seasonal, festive or specialty food and meals
• nopCommerce is compatible with any eCommerce POS, ERP, CRM, WMS, PIM systems and headless approach through Web API
• Using nopCommerce, you can enjoy instant order formation and inventory tracking
• nopCommerce utilizes international payment & shipping methods which are best suited for selling perishable products
• Free technical support from 250,000+ community members

Pricing

nopCommerce is an open-source project, which means that it’s absolutely free to deploy. More complex custom solutions or premium services come at additional cost.  

Platform #6 – 3dcart

3dcart is a versatile online store builder that works great for restaurants. It’s packed with features that work for all sizes of business and will help you grow your brand and reach more customers. It is a SaaS platform with everything included for getting your restaurant online and taking orders.

3dcart gives you several options for a POS system. It has a built-in POS module included with all plans, or you can use Square or other POS solutions through the integrations that are in place. A variety of reporting tools help you refine your sales methods.

While 3dcart is suitable for all types of online businesses, it has many features that are especially helpful for restaurants. The checkout settings can be customized and you can add automatic tipping through the Checkout Additional Fees add-on, which is also included in higher plans. Plus, you can set up local delivery, and pickup either within the custom shipping settings or using the dedicated In-Store Pickup module.

3dcart also has 99.94% guaranteed uptime (even higher with higher plans) and 24/7/365 support.

Best Features of 3dcart

• It is easy to set up and customize a website.
• 3dcart has tons of features and over 160 payment processors to choose from.
• You can have unlimited products and categories, so you can even sell merchandise alongside your restaurant menu.
• 3dcart excels at SEO and marketing so more customers can discover your business.

Pricing

• Startup: This is the starter plan with the essentials for a small business website. It costs $19/month.
• Basic: This plan adds a bit more functionality for helping businesses grow and to manage more customers. It costs $29/month.
• Plus: This plan delves into more marketing features for businesses that want to grow, for $79/month.
• Power: This plan puts a heavy emphasis on growth with even more available tools. It costs $129/month.
• Pro: This plan is a real all-in-one solution, including eCommerce automation and all the advanced features, for $229/month.
• Enterprise I: This is a high-powered plan for larger restaurants, with the highest level of service and features. It costs less than other platforms’ enterprise plans, at $499.99/month.
• Enterprise II: This is an upgrade to Enterprise I for the largest businesses, with even more features rolled in, for $999.99/month.
• Enterprise Custom: This is a quoted-pricing plan for businesses that outgrow Enterprise II and need the most powerful eCommerce plan available.

Platform #7 – GoDaddy

GoDaddy is a free website builder for those restaurateurs who want their website ready in no time and with minimum effort. So, with the least complicated process, you get your website launched in a few  steps. 

GoDaddy has a pool of beautiful templates designed to support all platforms. The templates are customizable and enable you to add high-definition images to make the templates even more tempting. 

Related: Best B2B Ecommerce Platforms

GoDaddy supports ChowNow and OpenTable integration for online orders and reservations, respectively. 

Best Features of GoDaddy

• GoDaddy provides the easiest way to develop a restaurant website. 
• It has an array of customizable templates.
• It allows users to manage their social media and email marketing through one dashboard.
• GoDaddy websites are SEO friendly so that people can find you on Google, Instagram, Facebook, and their inbox. 
• GoDaddy also provides business insights tailored to your business.
• A 24/7 support system is offered to assist the restaurant owners.

Related: How to Optimize For Alexa SEO

Pricing

Basic: The plan offers custom domain connection, mobile friendly site, on-the-go editing, PayPay button, SSL, all analytics features, and limited social media & email marketing. It costs $10/month when billed annually. 

Standard: The plan includes all features of Basic plan plus three social media listing platform, 20 social media posts &n responses, and 500 email marketing sends. It costs $15/month when billed annually.

Premium: The plan includes every feature of Standard plan plus unlimited social media listing platforms, social posts & responses, and 25000 email marketing sends. It costs $20/month when billed annually.

Ecommerce: The topmost plan offers all features of the Premium plan plus all ecommerce features. It costs $25/month when billed annually.

Platform #8 – Flavor Plate

Flavor Plate is programmed explicitly for restaurateurs with the least technical knowledge. It is, therefore, designed with simple yet effective features. The templates provided are extremely simple and clean. Plus, the website created is made to support any device.

Flavor Plate has amazing built-in features for conversions, like generating gift cards, making special announcements, promoting events, and much more. Besides, it also accepts reservations.

Related: Top Indian Ecommerce Platforms

All websites built on Flavor Plate are SEO optimized, which means your restaurant will be easily visible on social media websites and search engines. Also, the sites are mobile optimized to extend your visibility.  

Related: Ice Cream Formula to Rank Your Eatery For Seed Keywords

Best Features of Flavor Plate

• Flavor Plate is an easy to use Website builder.
• It offers a beautiful and massive selection of customizable templates to design an irresistible website.
• If requested, you can get an experienced design team to assist with your setup.
• It offers several built-in and ready to use revenue-generating features.
• Flavor Plate provides mobile-friendly templates with ongoing ADA compliance testing.
• It is extremely budget-friendly and has dedicated customer support.

Pricing

Flavor Plate has a single plan to fit all. You can pay $39/month or pay by the year and save 10%. The plan includes templates supporting ADA compliance, custom domain name, website hosting with unlimited bandwidth, Instagram feeds, and more. You get 14 days free trial, and if you wish, you can extend the services with the paid plan. 

Related: Brilliant Instagram Marketing Tips For Your Food Business

Platform #9 – Let’s Eat

Let’s Eat is an innovative restaurant website builder. You get 40 professional restaurant website templates to choose from. You can then use its design editor to add your business logo for branding.

Let’s Eat has a very powerful marketplace that provides both free and paid extensions for coupon generators, email newsletters, menu designs, online reservations, and social media integration. 

Related: Learn What Are Augmented Reality Ads

Presently, there are over thousands of restaurants using Let’s Eat.

Best Features of Let’s Eat

• Let’s Eat provides over 40 professional restaurant website templates to choose from.
• It allows you to customize your website’s background, logo, and colors.
• There are dozens of modern and old school fonts to choose from.
• Website designs are responsive and hence the site looks attractive on all screens.
• A huge marketplace is available to extend the abilities of your website.
• Let’s Eat is the most affordable website builder.

Pricing

Let’s Eat has a single plan for all. It costs just $10/month or $99/year. A 14 days free trial is also offered. 

Platform #10 – ChowNow

ChowNow is a leader as an online food ordering and marketing platform for local restaurants. With best-in-class online ordering technology, the platform allows the restaurateur to take control of their online business. 

Most importantly, ChowNow operates commission-free. There is no involvement of any third-party delivery app. It can be integrated directly on the restaurant website and can get a custom mobile app for Android and iPhone. 

A restaurateur can also take orders from a wide array of customer acquisition channels across the internet. It includes Google, Yelp, OpenTable, and TripAdvisor.

Related: Best SEO Hacks to Increase Customer Engagement

Best Features of ChowNow

• ChowNow empowers customers to order directly from your website. Plus, iPhone and Android users get customized ordering experience with your logo, menu, and food.
• ChowNow facilitates its users with in-store pickup and curbside. Also, offers their nationwide network of commission-free delivery partners.
• With this ordering system, you can take orders straight from your Instagram profile and Yelp integration. Customers can also order via Google Search, Maps, and Assistant.
• ChowNow creates push notifications, offers email marketing, and other promotional tools in their in-house studio.
• It allows you to find loyal customers through their ordering system and to reward them.
• It has a centralized dashboard for all your website management work, like view top spenders, pull reports, and sync menus across channels.
• Using Square integration, you can send tickets straight to the kitchen through a custom printer or directly to the POS.

Related: Best Email Marketing Tricks For Restaurants

Pricing

• Monthly Plan: Costs $149/month with a $399 fee for setup per location.
• Annual Plan: Costs $199/month with a $199 fee for setup per location.
• Two-Year Plan: Costs $99/month with a $199 fee for setup per location.

Platform #11 – RestoLabs

RestoLabs is a cloud-based online ordering software for restaurants. It is an excellent alternative to companies that take a hefty commission on every order. With this software, a restaurateur can experience unique automation, flexibility, and a wide array of powerful features at an affordable price.

Related: Email Automation Guide + Best Tools

RestoLabs helps restaurateurs with a custom web portal and mobile ordering app, giving them a branded experience. Presently, the company is working with several restaurants in different countries, including India, U.S., UK, Israel, etc.  

Best Features of RestoLabs

• Restolabs offers multilingual support for your customers.
• You can use your customer’s data to find the most loyal customers and reward them.
• With Restolabs inbuilt Marketing Tools, you can engage with the new customers and turn them into regular customers.
• Manage incoming orders, update customers on their orders, or make changes to your menu anywhere, anytime from a single dashboard.
• It offers inbuilt marketing modules, such as Loyalty and Coupons to attract customers. 
• RestoLabs provides a dedicated support system to its customers. 

Pricing

• Basic: The plan costs INR 2500/month per store.
• Premium: The plan costs INR 5400/month per store.
• Enterprise: This plan is customized as per the customer’s requirements. 

Platform #12 – Menu Drive

Menu Drive is a unique online ordering system that combines marketing tools, delivery, and analytics for restaurants. It differentiates itself from the rest in terms that it can transform a generic food menu into an interactive website. 

MenuDrive provides restaurateurs and caterers an experience of their own branded online and mobile food ordering systems. It comprises unique features like fast-ordering and reordering options, customized rewards, coupon builder, etc. 

Related: Get Started With Video Marketing

MenuDrive works with restaurants of all sizes, like independent restaurants, to large multi-location food chains. The company is working in over 90 countries and is associated with thousands of restaurants so far.

Best Features of MenuDrive

• Get on board in no time.
• Customize your online store to match your brand.
• Get commission-free delivery and enjoy flexible payments.
• Receive orders in any mode, including text, email, or online dashboard.
• Attract customers with coupons and loyalty programs. 
• Promote your online store through marketing campaigns.
• Get actionable data to analyze your growth.
• Use the MenuDrive Control Panel to manage everything from one place.

Pricing

The Restaurant plan costs $99/month per location, $99 one-time setup fee, and 3.5%+15¢ per transaction for credit card processing. You get all features of store management and online ordering and delivery.

Platform #13 – Toast POS

Toast POS is an efficient point of sale system for restaurants with a seamless online ordering system. The application is designed to operate entire functionalities from one platform at an amazingly fast pace. 

The application is Android-based and provides advanced reporting tools and analytics suite to allow restaurateur to manage and identify the best opportunities for boosting sales. 

Related: Leverage The Power of Social Review to Boost Sales

Toast POS is exclusively designed for restaurants and the foodservice industry. It provides online ordering, mobile app ordering, contactless payments, and e-gift card purchasing. Being a cloud-based application, Toast POS is safe and secure. 

Toast POS is best recommended for franchises and small-sized businesses like cafes, bakeries, etc. 

Best Features of Toast POS

• Toast POS combines point of sale systems and an online ordering system. 
• It enables restaurants to take orders through mobile phones.
• It offers quick access to contactless mobile payments. Customers can scan a QR code on the receipt to pay their bills to the restaurant.
• With advanced reporting tools and analytics suite, restaurateurs can analyze their performance.
• Toast POS is extremely easy to use.

Pricing

• Starter: The plan is ideal for small restaurants. It starts from $69/month. 
• Essential: The plan could be the best option for restaurants looking to expand into off-premise channels. Its cost starts from $99/month. 
• Growth: This plan is designed to use the restaurant’s data to attract new guests and drive repeat visits. It starts from $189/month.

Platform #14 – Upserve

Upserve is a comprehensive cloud-based restaurant management software comprising a lot of time-saving tools. Designed explicitly for restaurateurs, Upserve streamlines all the operations in this business. 

Related: PosterMyWall – Easy Design Tool For Savvy Restaurateurs

Most importantly, the platform is easy to implement and use. It has many unique features like check-splitting, shift notes, integrated logbooks, tip adjustments, and workforce management. 

It also features sales analytics, iOS or Android-based point-of-sale (POS) systems, automated inventory management, and more. 

With zero downtime, Upserve is reliable. Also, it is backed by its 24/7 U.S.-based support experts.

Best Features of Upserve

• Upserve is easy to implement and use.
• It provides payment processing and point of sale to save your time.
• Also, it offers valuable insights to boost margins.
• It has an automated inventory management feature to make your business easy to handle.
• 24/7 support is available with U.S.based support experts.

Pricing

• Core: This is the starter plan for small restaurants. It costs $59/month.
• Pro: The plan is designed for restaurants looking for more features. It costs $199/month.
• Pro Plus: The plan is advanced and includes a lot of features for large restaurants. It costs $359/month. 

Platform #15 – Square

Square for Restaurants is a cloud-based POS for iOS and Android devices. It is an easy-to-use software that saves time, streamlines your business, and builds more customers’ connections.

Related: Best Affiliate Marketing Hacks to Boost Food Delivery Business

Square has several enticing features like online payment processing, inventory tracking, sales reports, digital receipts, ecommerce, insights/analytics, Square marketing campaigns, and much more.

Related: Copywriting Techniques For Content Marketing

Square also allows third-party integration to manage pickup orders. It accepts all types of payments, including tap-cards, Apple Pay, and GooglePay. It can also accept swiped credit card payments in case the internet service is temporarily down.

Best Features of Square

• Square accepts all types of payments quickly and securely.
• It boosts sales by optimizing floor plans.
• It can speed up ordering by using conversational modifiers.
• It uses its kitchen display system to manage everything from a single dashboard. 
• Square allows third-party software integration like QuickBooks, Avero, and Plate IQ. 
• Square offers one-on-one implementation services, plus 24/7 customer support.

Pricing

• Free: The plan is for regular needs and includes unlimited devices and unlimited locations.
• Plus: The plan is designed to streamline operations and improve sales with increasing needs and business complications. The plan costs $60/month per location, and $40/month is extra for each added POS device. It includes a 30 days free trial.
• Premium: The plan can be custom designed as per user requirement, and pricing will be set accordingly. A 30 days free trial is also available.

Final Thoughts

Always remember that your website is as important as your restaurant and the dishes you choose. So, invest some time to decide on the best ecommerce platform for restaurants.

Choosing the right restaurant website builder and online ordering system will empower you to reach more potential diners and simplify your ordering task. The more control you have of your site, the more you can take care of your customers.

All of the above-listed platforms are helpful to efficiently manage the day to day tasks of your food business. Just weigh all your options and get started with the platform that offers the maximum options within your budget.