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A catering business has unique needs when it comes to a website.
On the one hand, a traditional eCommerce design won’t work well. You need a design much more like a typical restaurant menu.
However, typical restaurant ordering probably won’t cut it. Most people don’t want to place same-day catering orders, and your business may not even be prepared for that tight of a timeline.
The good news is that there are plenty of WooCommerce plugins available that can handle the needs of a catering business.
With the plugins listed below, you’ll be able to:
- Create a beautiful food menu
- Let customers choose a delivery date and time slot
- Show add-ons for each dish (toppings, sides, etc)
- Enter your business hours
- Get notifications as orders come in
And on top of all that, these are all one-time purchases, so you won’t have to pay expensive commissions for each sale like what apps and other platforms charge.
Keep reading to see which plugin topped our list.
Catering plugins for WooCommerce
Only highly rated plugins from reputable developers have made the list. Regardless of which plugin you choose, you’ll find yourself with an awesome new eCommerce solution for your site.
Here are the best WooCommerce catering plugins on the market.
1. Orderable
Plugin Description
If you run a catering business, having a smooth ordering experience is as important as any restaurant. With the Orderable plugin, you can create a gorgeous menu and user-friendly checkout flow in just minutes. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
In addition to the beautiful pre-made menu layouts, Orderable also includes important features like the ability to include product add-ons. This means whenever a customer is picking a dish, a popup will show up with checkboxes for choosing additional toppings, sides, etc. This is great for boosting the value of each order.
Another feature that makes Oderable an excellent catering plugin is its implementation of time slots. Unlike normal restaurant orders, catering orders are often placed days or even weeks in advance. At checkout, customers can pick the date and time of the delivery. And as the business owner, you have total control over which days of the week and hours are available (including holiday scheduling).
Overall, Orderable is an awesome plugin and the best on the market for a catering business using WooCommerce.
2. Restaurant Ordering
Plugin Description
Restaurant Ordering is one of the best plugins around to create a catering menu with a responsive and user-friendly design.
Using this plugin, you can select from one of the pre-made layouts and start adding dishes right away. As you might expect, each dish is its own WooCommerce product with its own pricing, image, and product description. Normally, your dishes would be displayed with a layout more like a clothing store, which doesn’t work well for a restaurant. The Restaurant Ordering plugin outputs them in a list (or grid) more like what you see in the DoorDash and Grubhub apps. And like those apps, when a customer adds a dish to their order, a small popup opens where they can choose add-ons and preferences. For instance, you could offer different spice levels, white versus brown rice, or include a list of extra toppings and their associated costs.
The only way that this plugin might be lacking for your business is the unavailability of time slot scheduling. Orders placed will be paid for delivered right away, so you may want to implement an additional delivery date plugin to allow for scheduled deliveries.
3. Restaurant for WooCommerce
Plugin Description
Restaurant for WooCommerce is another option for adding a restaurant menu to your site. It’s full-featured and highly customizable.
Like other plugins listed here, this plugin can be used to create a food menu using your WooCommerce products. It has a shortcode available for outputting the menu, which means you could keep a more traditional eCommerce design for other products you sell. If you want to include add-ons, it works with the official WooCommerce Product Add-Ons plugin.
This plugin also includes time slots, which allow your customers to decide when they want to receive their orders. It’s limited to the same day, so while it’s nice for scheduling deliveries, it can’t be used to schedule a catering order days or weeks in advance. This also makes it easy to coordinate with delivery drivers on staff.
The one area where Restaurant for WooCommerce struggles is its design. The restaurant menu doesn’t look as nice as the ones created by other plugins, and it comes with a much higher price tag. If you don’t mind the price or are confident you can use CSS to improve the styles, it will be an excellent choice for your business.
4. WooCommerce Food
Plugin Description
WooCommerce Food is a full-featured plugin that will let you create a food menu and sell dishes online. It works equally well for a restaurant as a catering business, and includes a lot of advanced functionality.
Some features that only this plugin offer include: nutrition info for each dish, a tip field at checkout, shipping by zip code, min/max quantities for dishes, and time/date-based menus. You probably won’t need to use all these options, but they’re nice to have.
WooCommerce Food’s biggest selling point is the huge volume of features available at a low cost (it’s the most affordable in this collection). That said, the amount of options it offers does make it more complicated, so be prepared for more of a learning curve if you choose this plugin for your catering business.
Which catering plugin is best for your store?
While every plugin listed here could be an amazing solution for a catering business, there’s one that stood out amongst the rest.
Orderable received top marks for its comprehensive coverage of restaurant eCommerce functionality. Thanks to the delivery dates and time slots, it can work just as well for a catering business as a pizzeria or Chinese restaurant.
If you have questions about these WooCommerce catering plugins, feel free to reach out via our contact form.
Thanks so much for reading!
