To accept orders online, you need to set up your online menu. You can create and manage all your menus under the “Menus” section in the restaurant dashboard.
Setup Process
Menus are organized in a tree structure. Menus contain categories and categories contain dishes. The general setup process is as follows.
- Create a menu
- Create all the categories under the menu
- Create dishes under the categories
- Create option-sets to add customization to dishes
- Create dish tags to highlight attributes of particular dishes
You will likely only need one menu. Multiple menus are useful if certain items are restricted in particular ways. You may need to create a “Breakfast” menu or a “Delivery” menu depending on your requirements
Menu: Main menu
-- Category: Pizzas
---- Dish: Ham & Cheese
---- Dish: Margrita
---- Dish: Veggie Supreme
-- Category: Sides
---- Dish: Chicken Wings
---- Dish: Fries-- Category: Drinks
---- Dish: Iced Tea
---- Dish: Cola
---- Dish: Water
Menus
These represent your actual real-life menus. Many stores have just one main menu that’s always available. Others may have a lunch & dinner menu or a pickup only menu. You will need at least one menu for your online store to work.
Menu availability can depend on certain conditions such as order types (pickups or deliveries), order timings (e.g. pre-order only). They can also be restricted to certain days and timings.
If you only have one menu available, there is no need to place restrictions on it. You can restrict the system globally to your business rules and the menu will work according to that. Restricting a menu to certain conditions is only needed if you have multiple menus
Categories
Categories represent a sub-section of a menu and consist of dishes. For example, if you have one standard menu, your categories might include:
- Starters
- Mains
- Sides
- Drinks
- Deserts
In some instances, you may need to create a separate menu instead of using a category. For example, If you have many different categories of drinks, such as spirits, wines, beers, sodas, etc. You might want to create a separate drinks menu for all those categories instead of adding it to your food menu.
Dishes
Dishes represent actual items that can be purchased. There are 2 types of dishes.
Standard Dishes
A standard dish works as you would expect. You would use it to create items such:
- Ham sandwich
- Veggie pizza
- Vanilla ice-cream
Dish Ingredients
Standard dishes can contain a list of ingredients. The purpose of this is to allow customers to easily remove certain ingredients. A customer can remove the desired ingredients when they select the dish.
Combo Dishes
Combos are a special type of dish that contain other dishes. It allows you to create a list of choices for customers to select various standard dishes. For example, you can create:
- Choose 3 pizzas, 2 sides and 2 drinks
- Choose a burger, side and drink
To do this you will first need to have created some standard dishes. Then when creating your combo, you can create 4 choices, 3 pizza choices and one drink choice. You can then assign dish choices to the pizzas and drinks for customers to choose from.
Combo dishes cannot contain option sets or ingredients directly. Instead when a customer chooses a standard dish within a combo, if the chosen standard dish has any option sets assigned to it, a user can customize it accordingly.
Dish Availability & Status
There are 3 statuses available for a dish. They are:
- Hidden – hides dish from the menu
- Not available – prevents ordering and shows not available on the dish
- Out of stock – prevents ordering and shows out of stock on the dish
In the admin dashboard, you can edit the status of a dish by checking the tickbox on the left of it. Then select the desired status from the popup menu.
Option Sets
All dish customization is done using option sets. Option sets are a configurable set of options that can be assigned to any number of dishes. With option sets, you are able to create requirements such as:
- Select your pizza crust
- Select one or more sauces
- Select at least 4 toppings
To learn how to create an option set that meets your requirements, read the descriptions of each of the settings available when creating an option set. Each setting is explained in detail.
Dish Tags
Tags allow you to highly particular attributes about a dish with a fully customizable visual indicator. You can create tags for attributes such as:
- Spicy
- Vegan
- Gluten-free
Common Menu Problems
No menu or categories showing under the store
For your menu to display in your online store, make sure to add at least one category and one dish to it.
Dish images to large
We highly recommend that you use the website https://www.birme.net or https://tinypng.com/ to optimize all your images. Given that the maximum image width is only around 600 pixels, it’s best to make sure all your images are no wider than that. This is going to help significantly with your page load time, especially for mobile customers.
