How to set up online ordering for your restaurant, step by step

What online ordering is, and what it asks of you

Online ordering means a guest builds a pickup or delivery order on your own site or in your own app, pays, and gets a confirmation with a time. That is different from a listing on a delivery platform, where the guest orders from the platform's list. Here the guest orders from you, on a menu and a checkout that are yours to control.

For the guest the route is short: button, menu, basket, checkout, confirmation. There is work behind that simplicity. The button has to be easy to find, checkout must not stall, and the second order should be quicker than the first. On your side the job breaks into seven steps, and this article takes them in order.

1. You decide what you offer: pickup, delivery or both.
2. You choose a set-up: ordering on a site you already have, a new site, or one system that supplies both.
3. You build your online menu, with choices, extras and allergens.
4. You connect payments and sort out what the law asks of a distance order.
5. You set times and capacity and decide how orders reach your kitchen.
6. You test everything, switch it on and tell your guests.
7. You measure the first months and adjust.

The platform stays, your own channel joins it

This is not a choice between Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats and your own ordering site. A platform shows you to people who do not know your name yet, and that is what it is good at. Your own channel is where guests order who already know you. Their name, phone number and order history stay with you, and with their consent you can invite them back. The phone does not go away either. After a few months your own numbers will show how the two balance out.

How long it takes

A simple set-up on a site you already have can be live within a week, as long as your menu and payment account are ready. A new site with its own app takes several weeks. The delay is rarely technical. It comes from your menu, which still needs tidying up, and from your payment account, because a provider vets your business before it activates payments. Apply for that first. With a supplier it usually runs in three steps: agreeing price and scope, setting up the site, menu and till link, and training your team.

Choose first: pickup, delivery or both

This choice shapes the rest of the set-up. Make it from your kitchen, your premises and your neighbourhood, not from what a system can do.

Pickup is the simplest form. No ride, no courier, no food sitting in a bag for twenty minutes. The guest comes to you, so you see them, you can slip something extra into the bag, and you have a natural moment to say they can order the same way next time. Delivery reaches more people, including the guest who does not want to leave the house. It is different work, though: planning rides and packing for the journey.

For most places the safest route is pickup first, with delivery added once pickup runs smoothly. If you already deliver through a platform, start with both, but keep the delivery area small and widen it later.

Three questions before you switch on delivery

1. Which dishes still arrive well after a twenty-minute ride? Order one yourself, have it driven round and eat it somewhere as far away as your furthest guest.
2. Who drives? If you employ couriers, they fall under the same agreements as the rest of your team, such as the hospitality collective agreement (cao Horeca) where it applies to your business. If you work with freelancers, ask your accountant whether it could be read as disguised employment. If you deliver yourself, ask your insurer whether the rides are covered.
3. What does one ride cost? Work that out before you pick a fee. The delivery section below shows where.

Choose your set-up and work out what it costs

There are roughly four starting points. Which one fits depends on what you already have.

Most places recognise themselves in more than one row. How the types of system compare is in the comparison of ordering systems, and we do not repeat it here. Also order from three places near you. You feel straight away what is quick and logical and where you give up, and the footer or the web address often shows which system sits underneath.

What a good system should do

Whatever the supplier promises, check that these parts are included. They only work well when they talk to each other: a change to your menu shows on your site and on your kitchen screen at the same moment.

More on upselling is in the article on your average order.

What it costs

Costs come in a handful of lines. Look at each one separately, because suppliers split them differently.

• Subscription: a fixed monthly amount for the system, the site or both, sometimes with a one-off fee for the set-up.
• Cost per order: sometimes a small amount per order, sometimes it sits inside the subscription. A low subscription with fees per order can come out more expensive at high volume.
• Payment costs: with iDEAL usually a fixed amount per transaction, with cards often a percentage.
• Platform commission: if you also sell through delivery platforms, it comes per order and separately from everything above.
• Hardware: a tablet, receipt printer or kitchen screen, if you do not have one yet.
• Packaging and hours: the box, the bag and the time of whoever maintains the menu.

A worked example shows why the number of orders matters. Say a system costs €79 a month, charges €0.25 per order and each payment costs €0.30. These are figures to calculate with, not a supplier's rates.

Fill this in with the figures from a quote and your own count from last month. That way you compare quotes on what they cost per order and not on the price of the subscription. The cheapest is rarely the best: count what is included and what it costs if you want to switch later. Be critical of add-ons such as marketing, delivery modules and an app of your own: they should save work, not add it. If online orders are a small part of your business, a simpler set-up may be enough.

To see how Portano approaches online ordering, read the ordering page.

Build your online menu

Your online menu is not your paper menu. It is read on a phone by someone who cannot ask what is in the sauce, and what they order must still be good half an hour later. Build it as its own menu.

Choose what comes along

Go through your menu with one question: does this dish arrive well? Fried food that goes limp in a box, a salad with a warm topping or a dessert that melts does not belong on it, or only for pickup. Also drop dishes that take a lot of hand work for little margin. Alcohol needs extra care: the Alcoholwet (Alcohol Act) sets age-check requirements and restricts delivering alcohol to people's homes. Ask your municipality what applies to your business before you put beer and wine on a delivery menu.

Categories and order

Group the menu the way your guest thinks: starters, mains, sides, drinks, desserts. Put the dishes that sell most and earn most at the top of each category, because what sits at the top is seen first. What else belongs on the menu page is covered in the article on features that pay for an ordering site.

Photos and descriptions

Photograph your bestsellers in daylight, from above or at an angle, on the plate or in the box as it will arrive. One honest photo beats a beautiful one that does not look like what the guest gets. If you do not have a photo for every dish, start with your top ten.

Write one or two sentences per dish: what is in it, how big it is and what comes with it. Leave out superlatives. “Pasta with smoked chicken, cream and spinach, a generous portion with bread” says more than “the best pasta in town”.

Choices and extras

This is where an online menu is won or lost. At the counter the guest asks whether the onion can stay off. Online the menu has to answer that before it is asked, and your kitchen has to see the answer too.

Keep it manageable, because the more choices per dish, the more often someone picks wrongly or gives up. Make the most chosen option the default. Then check on the kitchen ticket that the choices appear legibly under the dish. A choice that does not reach the ticket does not exist for your kitchen.

Allergens: what you have to show online

If you sell food at a distance, you have to give allergen information at a distance too. According to the Dutch food and consumer product safety authority (NVWA), your webshop must state which allergens are in your products. You may instead refer the guest to a phone number where they can ask for that information directly. Put the information on each dish and not in one place at the bottom of a page. There are fourteen allergens.

• Cereals containing gluten
• Crustaceans
• Eggs
• Fish
• Peanuts
• Soya
• Milk, including lactose
• Tree nuts
• Celery
• Mustard
• Sesame seeds
• Sulphur dioxide and sulphites, above a set limit
• Lupin
• Molluscs

That is one-off work. Go through your recipes and mark per dish and per choice what is in it. A different sauce or a different base changes the answer, so allergens belong to the choices and not only to the dish. Where cross-contact is possible in a shared kitchen, say so rather than stay silent.

If a guest mentions an allergy in the comment field, make sure it sits at the top of the ticket and that someone in the kitchen confirms it. If you are unsure whether you comply, the NVWA's website is the place to check, since it supervises these rules.

Prices online

Prices on your menu include VAT (btw), online too. Food and non-alcoholic drinks carry 9 percent, alcohol 21 percent, for pickup and delivery as well. Rates can change, so ask your accountant to confirm.

Do not simply copy your dining-room prices online. Work out per channel what a dish earns, with the packaging included and, on a delivery platform, the commission that comes off the order. If the margin is thinner online, look first at portion and recipe and only then at the price. Do not raise everything at once. Put a combination with a good margin at the top instead, for example a main, a side and a drink.

Paying, and what the law asks of your checkout

Take payment online, and let the kitchen start only once the money is in. That prevents orders nobody collects and deliveries nobody pays for.

Which payment methods

In the Netherlands iDEAL is the method you must have. According to the Dutch Payments Association (Betaalvereniging), around 71 percent of all online purchases go through iDEAL, far ahead of cards and direct debit. Cards and phone wallets come next, for guests who do not pay through their bank.

Meanwhile iDEAL is being replaced by Wero in stages. The Betaalvereniging says the move to Wero starts in 2026 and that every merchant will have switched by the end of 2027 at the latest. For your guest little changes, since they still pay from their own bank. Your payment provider usually handles the technical side. Ask when your switch is due and whether you need to do anything.

What has to be right behind the scenes

• Apply for your payment account before you build the rest. The provider checks your business and that takes time.
• Agree what happens when a dish has run out: a refund, a substitute or a phone call. Make sure a refund can be made from your ordering system.
• Decide until when a guest may cancel. Until the kitchen starts is reasonable, after that you have already made the food.

What the law asks of a distance order

An order through your site is a distance contract with a consumer. Rules come with that, mostly in the Dutch Civil Code. These are the main ones for a restaurant.

The last point is an exception written into the law itself. The fourteen-day cooling-off period that comes with webshops does not apply to goods that spoil quickly, nor to catering on an agreed moment. The law does ask you to tell the guest up front that they have no right of withdrawal.

As soon as you store names and addresses you also deal with the GDPR (in Dutch, the AVG). Keep only what you need for the order, put a privacy statement on your site and ask separate consent for marketing, with a tick box that is not pre-ticked.

This is not legal advice, and rules get adjusted. A good system builds most of this into the checkout, but look at it yourself. Have your terms and your privacy statement checked by someone who knows the trade.

Opening hours, prep times and what your kitchen can handle

Online ordering runs on promises. “Ready at 6.45 pm” is an appointment. If your kitchen falls behind, you break that appointment for every guest at once. Set your times to what your kitchen really can do, not to what you would like.

Opening hours online

Your online hours need not match your dining-room hours. The last order for pickup can be half an hour before closing, and earlier for delivery, since the ride comes on top. Put public holidays and days off into the system in advance and keep your hours identical to those in Google. A guest who sees “open” there and “closed” on your site gives up, or turns up at a closed door.

Prep time

Measure how long an order really takes. Over a week, time ten orders from ticket printed to ready in the bag, some at quiet moments and some at busy ones. Set the prep time at what you manage when busy, plus a few minutes of margin. An honest twenty minutes you hit beats a promise of fifteen you miss.

What your kitchen handles in a quarter of an hour

The most important setting is the number of orders per quarter of an hour. Work it out from your bottleneck: the oven, the fryer, the grill or the number of hands at the pass. Here is an example with numbers to calculate with. A pizzeria has an oven that bakes eight pizzas in ten minutes. That is twelve pizzas per quarter of an hour. On Friday at six, the dining room uses about six per quarter hour. That leaves six for online. An online order averages 1.8 pizzas, so you accept about three orders per quarter.

Enter those numbers in your system as a limit per time slot. When a slot is full, the system shows the next free time instead of accepting an order you cannot make. Also keep a pause button at hand, which closes online ordering for half an hour if your team gets stuck.

When something runs out, and advance orders

Teach your team one rule: when something runs out, it comes off the online menu straight away, not after the shift. Name someone per shift who does it. A confirmed order you cannot make costs you the order, the refund and the guest.

Advance orders need their own rules. How far ahead may a guest order? How many days ahead must a large order be in? When do you let a person approve an order first? For catering and large groups, a separate set-up works better. How to win those jobs is in the article on catering as a second source of income.

How the order reaches your kitchen, and how it leaves the door

An order that sits in the system is not yet an order your kitchen knows about. The last stretch of the route decides whether the guest gets what they ordered.

Printer or screen

A busy pass with many hands is often happy with paper, while a kitchen with one or two cooks gets more from a screen. Choose what your team already knows. Whatever you pick, it has to be clearly audible. An order that sits unnoticed for twenty minutes turns into a guest on the phone. Let the system make a sound until someone has accepted the order, and decide who does that.

What goes on the ticket

• The guest's name and the order number
• Pickup or delivery, and the time
• For delivery, the address and phone number
• Every dish with its choices and extras, legible under the dish
• The guest's comment, clearly marked if an allergy is in it
• Whether the order is already paid

Connect the system to your till where you can. Then the order arrives where your team already works and nobody has to retype it. A kitchen that retypes orders on a Friday night makes mistakes. Without a link, agree who does it. Think also about what you do when things go wrong. If the wifi drops, there has to be a number guests can call and a second device that takes over the orders. Put the procedure on a card next to the printer.

Packaging

Packaging is the last piece of kitchen the guest sees. Choose containers that hold heat, do not leak and stack. Pack sauce and dressing separately, give fried food some air and keep hot apart from cold. Stick the order number on the bag and seal it for delivery, so the guest can see nobody opened it.

Test every container with a real ride: pack an order, have it driven for a quarter of an hour and look at what happened. Count the cost in your margin. Say a pizza box costs €0.40, a bag €0.10 and the sauce €0.15. That is €0.65 per order, €78 a month at 120 orders.

Rules apply in the Netherlands to single-use plastic packaging. Look on rijksoverheid.nl for what that means for your containers and cups before you buy a large stock.

Delivery area and delivery fee

Draw your delivery area by travel time and not by distance. Two kilometres through a busy shopping street can take longer than five on a quiet road. Drive the edges of your area yourself, on a busy evening, and see what the order is still worth after that ride.

Show the guest the area at the start, for instance with a postcode check at the top of the ordering page. The law asks that limits on delivery are clear at the start of the ordering process at the latest, and a guest who spends twenty minutes building an order and then hears you do not cover their postcode will not come back.

How many rides you can handle

Delivery costs capacity outside the kitchen. Say a round trip takes twenty minutes. A courier then makes three rides an hour. If twelve delivery orders arrive in your busiest hour and each goes out one at a time, you need four couriers. Combine two orders from the same neighbourhood in one ride and it is two. So decide how many delivery orders you accept per hour and enter that in the same system as your kitchen limit.

Fee, minimum and free above an amount

You set three amounts: a minimum order value, a fee and perhaps an amount above which delivery is free. How to work those out is in the article on delivery fees, including the calculation you do with your own figures from last month. Show the fee early, in the basket and not only on the last screen.

Test everything before you tell guests

An ordering site you have never used yourself is not finished. Test in two rounds. First you order yourself, then you let someone else order while you watch.

The second round matters most. Ask three or four people who do not know your menu, such as family, neighbours or regulars, to place an order without help. Sit beside them and say nothing. Where they hesitate is your problem. Then let them actually eat: pack the order, have it delivered or collected and ask how it arrived.

After that, run one full rehearsal with your team on an ordinary shift. Let a few trial orders come in while the dining room is running. Write down what goes wrong, fix it and order again. Go live only after two orders in a row without any trouble.

Going live, and letting your guests know

Start with a soft launch. In the first week nobody needs to know apart from your team and a few regulars. The first orders show what you missed in testing, and you want to see that at ten orders and not at a hundred. If you want to keep it calm, set a lower limit per quarter hour.

Then you tell people. A regular only orders online once they know they can, and the places they already visit are your best channels.

• In the restaurant: a card on the counter and on tables, and a QR code on the receipt and the menu.
• In the bag: a card with every pickup and delivery order, platform orders included, with your own ordering page and a reason to order there next time.
• In Google: your order link, opening hours and delivery area in your business profile. How to set that up is in [the article on the Google business profile](post:google-profile).
• On social media: a photo of a real order in the bag, with the link in your profile.
• By email or text message, to guests who gave consent.
• On the phone: your team tells the caller they can also order online and sends the link if they like.

The card in the bag deserves attention, because it is the only way a guest who ordered through a platform ends up with you. Add something concrete: a dish that is only on your own site, a free sauce with the first direct order or a place in your loyalty programme. Do not use it to run the platform down. That platform brought the guest to you.

Finally, tell your team what is changing. Ten minutes before a shift is enough: where the orders arrive, who accepts them, how you mark a dish as sold out and what you do when things go wrong. A system that only one person knows works until that person is ill.

The first months: what you measure and what you adjust

The first weeks are about mistakes, after that about numbers. In the first week read back every day what happened: how many orders, which were late, which went wrong, which were refunded and which dishes you had to take off the menu. Write down every complaint. After a week you see the pattern.

After that you look once a week at a fixed set of numbers. A good system collects them for you. If not, ask your supplier where to find them.

Turn what you see into small adjustments. If Friday is the busiest evening, put extra hands there. If a dish does not sell, take it off the menu. If your bestsellers are clear, give them a better photo. If most orders come from regulars, aim your messages at them. If mostly new guests arrive, look at where they find you. Once everything runs smoothly, you can widen your delivery area. How to read such numbers is in the article on reading your numbers.

Why it works for some places and not for others

When online ordering does not take off, one of three things is usually missing. Guests do not find you: then you work on your place in Google and on your own site. Guests drop out at checkout: too many steps, no way to order without an account, confusing choices or a page that loads slowly on a phone. Or guests order once and never return: then there is no reason and no reminder, such as a message, a loyalty programme or an app of your own where the last order is one tap away. See which of the three is weakest and start there.

Asking for feedback

Ask guests after the order how it went, with a short email or text. You already have their details. It is about feedback and not about a rating with a reward attached. Google forbids reviews that are paid for in any way, so asking is fine, rewarding is not.

Look back after three months with three questions. What works? What costs more effort than it returns? What do you add? Change one thing at a time, otherwise you will not know what had the effect.