Enable food ordering for multiple restaurant chains or vendors
With a few tweaks, you can use our WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering plugin to allow food ordering for entire restaurant chains or multiple vendors. There are 3 ways to do this:
- Option 1 - WordPress multisiteA WordPress multisite allows you to manage multiple websites under a single WordPress installation. Do this if you want to keep the food ordering system for each website completely separate. You will need to use this option if you offer different opening hours or delivery slots for each restaurant.
- Option 2 - Create one website with an ordering page for each restaurantWith this option, you would create separate categories for each restaurant and list them on different pages of your WordPress website. You can't physically prevent customers from ordering from one restaurant at once, but you can discourage this using clear navigation and customer information.
- Option 3 - Use a multivendor plugin to allow food vendors to register and add productsIf you don't want to use WordPress multisite and need each restaurant to be able to manage their foods and orders separately, then you can do this with a multivendor plugin.
Learn more about each option in our tutorial Build a WordPress multi vendor food ordering system for restaurant delivery.
Option 1 - WordPress multisite
A WordPress multisite allows you to create a separate website for each restaurant's ordering system, all combined behind the scenes under a single WordPress installation. For setup instructions, check out this Complete Guide To WordPress Multisite.
Please note that with WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering, each site in the multisite counts towards the activation limit for your license key. Read more about how to use our plugins on a multisite.
Option 2 - Create one website with an ordering page for each restaurant
Alternatively, you can create a single website with an ordering section for each individual restaurant:
- Enable the Category pages option in the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering settings.
- Create one or more product categories for each restaurant (Products → Categories).
- If each restaurant offers different shipping and payment options then you can use the Conditional Shipping and Payments plugin to show different shipping and payment options based on category.
Note: The restaurant details and opening hours features in WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering only apply to a single restaurant. If you want to display different information and set different opening hours to each restaurant, then we therefore recommend not using these features. Instead, you can add the restaurant data to the relevant pages manually; and use the WooCommerce Opening Hours & Chosen Times plugin to set different opening times per category.
Option 3 - Use a multivendor plugin to allow food vendors to register and add products
A WooCommerce multivendor plugin allows restaurants or food outlets to register, upload their own foods, and manage their orders - all from a single WordPress site.
You can use WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering with any multivendor plugin, such as YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor (our recommendation), WooCommerce Product Vendors, Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace, or MultiVendorX,. The food order form won't appear on the shop pages that are created by the multivendor plugin, so you can add an ordering area for each location as follows:
- Add one or more product categories for the restaurant, and structure their food products into these categories.
- Create a page (Pages → Add New) and use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering shortcode to insert a food order form listing the foods from the restaurant's categories.
- Use a free WordPress plugin such as Redirection to automatically direct each of the restaurnt's shop and category pages to their food order page.
Note: As with option 2, the restaurant details and opening hours features in WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering only apply to a single restaurant. If you want to display different information and set different opening hours to each restaurant, then we therefore recommend not using these features. Instead, you can add the restaurant data to the relevant pages manually; and use the WooCommerce Opening Hours & Chosen Times plugin to set different opening times per category.