Add online ordering to your restaurant website

There are three ways to take orders online, and they differ far more in what they cost per order than in what the customer sees. Do the arithmetic on your own numbers before anyone shows you a demo.

1. Route one is a marketplace button — DoorDash, Uber Eats and their peers. You get their customers and their drivers; they keep a commission on every order and the customer’s contact details. On their US pricing pages the delivery-order commission runs from 15% to 30% depending on the plan tier (checked September 2026).
2. Route two is an ordering widget plugged into a site you already have. Expect a monthly fee, often a per-order fee on top, and a checkout that lives on the vendor’s domain rather than yours.
3. Route three is a website builder with ordering built in. On Naratake that is the Storefront Pro plan, $79 a month or $758 a year: orders are paid through your own Stripe account, Naratake takes 0% of sales, and only Stripe’s normal card fee applies.
4. Now the math. A restaurant doing $40,000 a year in online orders pays $8,000 at a 20% commission. Route three costs $948 a year at the monthly price plus Stripe’s card fees — at the published US rate of 2.9% plus 30¢, about $1,550 on 1,300 orders. Roughly $2,500 against $8,000; write both numbers down.

Every route asks for the same thing: a menu a checkout can read. An hour in a spreadsheet first saves that hour three times over, whichever system ends up holding it.

1. List every item with a short name, a one-line description and a price. Group them the way customers scan — mains, sides, drinks — not the order the kitchen cooks them.
2. Write the modifiers as data: size, protein, spice level, “no onions”. Each option needs a name and a price difference, even when that difference is zero.
3. Check the margins before the prices go online. The free food cost calculator in Naratake’s tools takes ingredient costs in and gives the cost per portion and the menu price that hits your target food-cost percentage — online is where a thin margin meets a card fee.
4. Photograph the ten items that sell most, in daylight, on one background. A checkout with photos on the best sellers and none on the rest still looks deliberate.

Naratake ships ordering as a module of the site itself: menu, cart, checkout and back office run on your own website, and the money goes to the restaurant’s Stripe account. Turning it on is mostly a matter of reading the Modules panel correctly.

1. Open Modules in the editor’s left rail and turn on Online ordering. It requires Catalog and Payments, which Naratake turns on alongside it, and suggests Customers — keep that if you want a customer record built from each order.
2. In Catalog, enter the categories, items, prices and options from your spreadsheet, then set tax behavior, pickup or delivery rules, and the hours when orders are accepted. Delivery here runs on your own driver or courier — which is exactly why the customer, the contact details and the whole ticket stay with the restaurant.
3. Connect Payments to your Stripe account by pasting two keys from your Stripe dashboard. Each charge settles straight into your account: Naratake never holds the money and takes 0% of it, and only Stripe's own card fee applies.
4. Place the ordering block on a page with Components, then open Preview → Storefront, place a test order, and switch to Backoffice to find it under Orders. Clear any Launch guide warning about an empty catalog or missing hours before you publish.

An ordering page nobody can find takes no orders. Three doors cover most of the traffic: the site header, the tables, and the Google listing.

1. Add an “Order” button to the site header and to the phone menu, pointing at the ordering page. On a phone it should be visible without scrolling — that is where most first orders start.
2. Print a QR code for the menu and put it on tables, the takeout counter and the window. The free menu QR code generator in Naratake’s tools makes one in the browser — point it at the ordering page, not at a PDF.
3. Add the ordering page’s address to your Google Business Profile. Google shows order links on the listing itself, so someone who searched your name does not have to open a delivery app.
4. Tell people. A line on receipts, a sign at the counter, one post on whichever channel your regulars follow — “order on our site, same prices, no app”.

The first week decides whether the order button becomes part of the kitchen’s routine or an ignored screen. Most of the trouble is routine, not technical.

1. After publishing, place a real order with a real card from your own phone, then refund it from Stripe. You have now seen what the customer sees, what the back office shows, that the money landed, and where refunds live — before a customer needs any of it.
2. Decide who watches the Orders screen during service and on which device — a tablet at the pass beats a phone in a pocket. An order nobody sees is worse than no order button.
3. Set the ordering hours a little shorter than the door hours, so the last online order lands before the kitchen closes rather than as it does.
4. At the end of the week, count orders from your site against orders from the marketplace, and run the step 1 math on both. That number tells you whether the marketplace stays as a discovery channel or goes.