Shopify for Restaurants: How to Take Online Orders Without the Platforms
Restaurants paying 25-35% commission to Deliveroo and Uber Eats are exploring Shopify as a direct ordering channel. Here is how restaurants use Shopify for commission-free online orders.
Restaurant delivery platforms take 25–35% commission from every order. A £20 order generates £5–7 in commission for Deliveroo or Uber Eats. For many restaurants, this eliminates margin entirely. Shopify-based direct ordering is an increasingly viable alternative.
Why Shopify Works for Restaurant Online Ordering
Shopify was built for commerce, not specifically for food service. But for restaurants that want to take online orders — collection, local delivery, or nationwide food shipping — it functions effectively. The core product catalogue, payment processing, and customer management infrastructure all transfer to food service contexts.
Setting Up Menu Items as Products
Each menu item becomes a Shopify product. Variants handle customisation (size, sauce choices). Product descriptions carry allergen information. Collections organise the menu (starters, mains, desserts, specials).
Managing Delivery Logic
Shopify's shipping and fulfilment settings, combined with local delivery apps, handle delivery radius, delivery slot management, and minimum order values.
Marketing the Direct Channel
The commission saving on a £10,000/month Deliveroo operation is £2,500–3,500 per month. A fraction of that invested in promoting the direct ordering channel — email to existing customers, social media, a direct ordering incentive — makes economic sense immediately.
The Hybrid Approach
Most restaurants do not immediately abandon platforms entirely. Using platforms for customer discovery and direct ordering for repeat customers is the most realistic transition.
Choosing the Right Shopify Theme for Food Service
The visual presentation of an online restaurant menu matters more than most operators initially assume. Customers browsing a restaurant website are making appetite-driven decisions, and a theme that renders food photography well, loads quickly on mobile, and presents pricing without confusion will convert meaningfully better than a generic storefront. Shopify's theme store includes several options that work well for food service, and third-party themes like Foodie and Symmetry have layout patterns built for menu-style browsing.
When evaluating themes, prioritise mobile rendering above everything else. The majority of restaurant online orders are placed on smartphones, often within minutes of a customer deciding what they want to eat. A theme that requires excessive scrolling to find a category, buries the add-to-cart button below the fold, or loads product images slowly will lose orders at the point of decision. Test your theme on the actual devices your customers use, not just in a desktop browser preview.
Collection page layout is particularly important for menu navigation. Restaurants typically have structured menus — starters, mains, sides, drinks, desserts — and customers expect to browse by category the same way they would read a physical menu. Configure your Shopify collections to mirror that structure, use clear collection images or icons, and consider a sticky navigation bar that keeps category links accessible as customers scroll. A well-structured collection hierarchy reduces the cognitive load of ordering and increases average basket size.
Handling Order Timing, Cut-offs, and Kitchen Capacity
One of the most practical challenges in Shopify restaurant ordering is managing when orders should arrive relative to when your kitchen can fulfil them. Unlike a retail product that ships from a warehouse, food has hard preparation windows, and overselling time slots creates operational chaos and poor customer experience. Shopify's native functionality does not handle this automatically, but a combination of apps and fulfilment settings can replicate most of what purpose-built ordering platforms provide.
Apps like Zapiet Store Pickup and Local Delivery are widely used by Shopify restaurants to manage collection slots, delivery windows, and cut-off times. These tools allow you to define available time slots, cap the number of orders per slot, and block out dates when you are closed or operating reduced hours. Setting this up correctly before launch is essential — a restaurant that goes live without slot management will quickly find itself with more orders than the kitchen can handle during peak periods, which damages the customer relationships you are working to build.
Consider also how you handle last-minute orders and same-day capacity. Some restaurants set a hard cut-off — no orders accepted within two hours of the requested collection or delivery time. Others operate on a rolling basis and manage capacity manually during service. Neither approach is universally correct, but it needs to be a deliberate policy rather than an afterthought. Communicate your cut-off times clearly on the product pages and in the checkout, so customers are not surprised when their preferred slot is unavailable.
Building a Customer Database You Actually Own
One of the most significant long-term advantages of direct ordering through Shopify over third-party platforms is data ownership. When a customer orders through Deliveroo or Uber Eats, that customer relationship belongs to the platform. You receive the order, you fulfil it, but you cannot contact that customer directly, cannot build a loyalty programme around them, and cannot market to them outside the platform's paid advertising products. Every order through your own Shopify store adds a customer record to a database you control.
Shopify's built-in customer accounts capture name, email, address, and order history for every registered customer. Even guest checkouts capture email addresses that can be used for transactional communications and, with appropriate consent, marketing. From day one of operating a direct ordering channel, you should be building an email list and sending regular communications — weekly specials, seasonal menu updates, exclusive discount codes for direct orders. The cost of email marketing is negligible compared to the commission saved on even a modest order volume.
The long-term compounding effect of this database is significant. A restaurant that has been operating a direct channel for two years with consistent email marketing has a captured audience it can communicate with at near-zero marginal cost. Promotions that would cost hundreds of pounds in platform advertising fees can be delivered to thousands of opted-in customers for the cost of an email platform subscription. This is the structural advantage that makes the initial investment in building a direct ordering channel worthwhile over any medium-term horizon.
Pricing Strategy for Direct Orders
Restaurants using both third-party platforms and direct Shopify ordering frequently ask whether they should charge the same prices across both channels. The answer depends on your positioning and customer expectations, but there is a clear economic logic to building the commission saving into your direct channel pricing in a way that benefits both you and the customer. If a dish costs £14 on Deliveroo and you are paying 30% commission, you are netting approximately £9.80. If you charge £12.50 for the same dish on direct ordering, you net more while the customer pays less.
Communicating this pricing differential clearly is important. A message like "order direct and save — our direct prices are lower because we cut out the middleman" is honest, straightforward, and gives customers a concrete reason to change their ordering behaviour. Some restaurants go further and offer a percentage discount code exclusively for first direct orders, funded partly from the commission saving, to accelerate the shift from platform ordering to direct ordering among their existing customer base.
Be cautious about creating large price disparities that confuse customers or create perceived inconsistency. The goal is to make direct ordering the obviously better value option without making platform prices look exploitative. A 10–15% price advantage on direct orders, clearly explained, achieves this without undermining the customer's trust in either channel. Price your direct menu thoughtfully, review it alongside platform pricing regularly, and treat the pricing structure as an active part of your marketing rather than an administrative detail.
Allergen and Dietary Information Done Properly
Food businesses in the UK have legal obligations around allergen information that apply equally to online orders as to in-restaurant service. Natasha's Law, which came into force in 2021, extended requirements around allergen labelling, and online ordering menus must provide accurate allergen information for every product before the customer places an order. Getting this wrong is not just a customer experience failure — it carries genuine legal and safety consequences.
On Shopify, allergen information should appear in product descriptions in a consistent, structured format. Using a standardised list of the 14 major allergens and clearly indicating which apply to each dish is the minimum requirement. Many restaurants go further and include a note about kitchen cross-contamination risks and a prompt for customers with severe allergies to contact the restaurant directly before ordering. This level of transparency builds trust and manages liability simultaneously.
Dietary filtering — allowing customers to browse dishes by vegan, vegetarian, gluten-free, dairy-free, and other categories — significantly improves the ordering experience for customers with dietary requirements and can increase conversion among those who would otherwise abandon a menu that requires them to read every description individually. Set up dietary tags consistently across your product catalogue and surface them in your collection and search functionality. Set up dietary filtering and allergen information for your restaurant Shopify store with Smart Shop at saltai.app.
Try SaltAI Agent for Shopify free at saltai.app — no credit card required.
SaltAI Team
SaltAI builds focused Shopify apps for food merchants and general merchants. Every app is tested in production at a real food store — including Vanda's Kitchen — before it ships.