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.

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:

1. Create one or more product categories for each restaurant (Products → Categories).
2. Add 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. Do this to create a food ordering page for each restaurant.
3. If you like, then you can add some extra plugins to customize the food ordering system for each restaurant:
   • Use the Conditional Shipping and Payments plugin to show different shipping and payment options based on category.
   • Use the Advanced Notifications plugin to send new orders to a different email address for each category. For example, when each restaurant receive an order, you can automatically send the order information directly to them.

Option 3 – Use a multivendor plugin to allow food vendors to register and add products

A WooCommerce multivendor plugin allows food vendors 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 WooCommerce Product Vendors, Dokan Multi-vendor Marketplace, WC Marketplace, or YITH WooCommerce Multi Vendor. 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 vendor as follows:

1. Add one or more product categories for the vendor, and structure their food products into these categories.
2. Create a page (Pages → Add New) and use the WooCommerce Restaurant Ordering shortcode to insert a food order form listing the foods from the vendor’s categories.
3. Use a free WordPress plugin such as Redirection to automatically direct each of the vendor’s shop and category pages to their food order page.

Adding separate opening times for each restaurant

Many restaurant chains have different opening times and delivery options for each restaurant. You can do this by installing the WooCommerce Opening Hours & Chosen Times plugin.

This plugin lets you set different opening times for each category. We recommend that you create one or more categories for each restaurant in the chain, and set their opening times on the Edit Category page.