How to set up online ordering for your restaurant

What you need before you start

Less than most owners expect. You don't need POS logins, a menu export, a developer, or storefront copy. The launch waits on none of them. A first location can go live in minutes once the items below are in.

• Your logo, the same file you use on your sign or your socials.
• A clear photo of your menu. A long menu can take a few photos, and a PDF works too.
• The address and opening hours of your first location.
• A card to save. It verifies the account, and nothing is charged until direct orders come in.

Step 1: sign up and save a card

Signup is one screen with your name, a phone number, and the restaurant's name. Save a card, pick a plan, and the console opens. The card step trips people up. It verifies the account and authorizes the monthly fee for later, but it moves no money today, and a month with no direct orders is never charged. See pricing for both plans side by side.

• Growth takes no commission. A location pays nothing under $500 of direct sales, $29 up to $1,000, $79 up to $2,000, and $129 up to $3,000. Above that, it's $199.
• Tax, tips, and delivery fees don't count toward the fee. Catering orders do.
• Enterprise is $399 a month per location, with a 30-day free trial.

Step 2: upload your logo and a menu photo

Both go in through the console. Appetier reads the dishes, sections, and prices off the menu photo and builds a draft menu. It also takes the colors from your logo and styles the storefront and the apps with them. A PDF menu brings each item's photo along. Appetier never invents a food photo, so an item without one stays without one until you add it.

• Upload the sharpest menu photo you have. Glare on a laminated menu hides prices.
• If the read fails, add a few items by hand and publish. You can import again later.
• Change any color the logo picked. A dark logo can make buttons hard to read on a phone.

Step 3: check the draft menu against your printed one

Nothing goes live until you apply the draft. Read it line by line against the menu your staff uses. A wrong price on a busy dish costs more than the ten minutes this takes. Then add what the photo couldn't give you.

• Fix any price or item name in place. The draft is yours to edit.
• Add photos to your best sellers first. Guests order what they can see.
• Aim for at least four food photos on the menu page. That is the bar the free audit uses for its photo check.
• Mark allergens from the nine major ones as "contains" or "may contain". Guests only see the allergens you confirm.
• Leave empty descriptions if you're short on time. Appetier writes the missing ones for you.

Step 4: choose what your home page leads with, place a test order, and publish

Every storefront has a home page and one ordering menu, both built for a phone first. Choose whether the home page leads with ordering or with booking an event. Most guests order from a phone, so open the storefront on your own phone before anyone else sees it. See what the storefront includes on online ordering.

• Place a test order from the first item to checkout.
• Check pickup times and the hours for every day of the week.
• Publish when it looks right. Nobody at Appetier reviews a brand before it goes live.
• A published change reaches open storefronts within about a minute.
• Hours and sold-out items update without publishing again.

What counts as ready depends on what you sell

The checklist first asks what you sell, with Restaurant already chosen. What it asks next follows your answer, and the console, the API, and the deploy apply the same rules.

• Menu: at least one category holding an item priced above zero. A zero price doesn't count.
• Location: an address, opening hours, one way to hand over the order such as pickup, and one way to pay such as cash. The checklist names whatever is missing.
• A home page that leads with booking an event needs no menu, only an address and hours.
• A mobile bar says where it travels from, and guests never see that address. It also needs one mobile unit and a travel radius.

How long each step took when we timed it

Setup times on a sales page are usually a guess. These come from our own logged runs in 2026, on test restaurants and on royal.appetier.com. The slow part is your own check of the draft, and it should be.

• Reading a menu: we built a preview from one restaurant's marketplace listing on October 6. All 60 items came in, with every option and price matching the listing, in 281 seconds.
• Reading it twice: two reads of one restaurant's own menu page gave 25 items, then 12. That's why Step 3 has you count the draft against your printed menu.
• Publishing a change: on October 6 the console confirmed a menu publish 13.2 seconds after the button was pressed.
• Launching: on October 5 a test restaurant went from ready to a live storefront in 5 minutes 54 seconds. All 18 of its menu items showed. Its first attempt had failed, and we started it again.

What a new storefront passes on day one

We wanted a plain answer to one question: what does a restaurant get the moment it publishes? So on September 25, 2026 we scanned royal.appetier.com with the same checks our free website audit runs on any restaurant's site. Royal is a live Appetier storefront, not a demo. It passed 15 of the 16 checks the audit runs on the website itself. The other four read the Google listing, and a new storefront doesn't control that.

• Order button stays on the restaurant's own site: pass. The audit weighs this at 14 of 100 points, the most of any check.
• Menu is real text on the page, not a PDF or an image: pass (7 points).
• Guest email, phone, or rewards signup on the homepage: pass (7 points).
• Structured data Google reads for name, address, and hours: pass (7 points).
• Mobile PageSpeed score of 90 or more: pass (8 points). The median of three runs scored 95.
• Page can be indexed, has a sitemap, and names the city in its title: pass.
• Core Web Vitals: fail (6 points). The main content took 2.9 seconds to show on a phone, and Google's bar is 2.5.

Run the audit on your current site before you switch

The day-one list means more next to your own numbers. The audit reads your current site and your Google listing, then shows a score out of 100 beside the score the same checks get on Appetier. It takes about a minute, and it reports scores only. PageSpeed varies from run to run, so a single mobile score can move by a lot. On one storefront we saw 77 and 97 within the same hour. Read the speed result as a range, not a verdict.

• Run it on the site guests use to order today, not your marketing homepage if they differ.
• Note which checks fail on your site and pass in the Appetier column. Those are what switching changes.
• From the report, ask to see your own restaurant on Appetier. The preview is private, and we email you when it's ready.

Step 5: work through the launch checklist after you go live

Once you're live, the console keeps one checklist of everything else, in order. A step counts as done when the saved data says so, or when you mark it not needed. Tapping a box doesn't finish anything. Take the steps at your own pace, because none of them takes the storefront offline.

• Card payments: connect the account guest payments land in.
• Google Business: connect the listing so a weekly check can fix hours and links that stop matching.
• POS: connect Square, Shopify POS, Toast, Clover, Revel, or Micros, and prices and sold-out items update on their own.
• Domain: one DNS record puts the storefront on a subdomain such as order.yourplace.com.
• Email: guest email can come from your own domain once it's connected.
• Marketplaces: DoorDash and Uber Eats orders stay in their own tools, with no Appetier fee.
• Apps: after you check the test build, Appetier submits the iPhone and Android apps in minutes.

Skip a channel without losing your place

Once you're live, the checklist lists nine channels in a fixed order: card payments, storefront copy, Google Business, POS, domain, email sending, loyalty, marketplaces, and apps. Mark one not needed and the mark is saved to your account, so it holds on every device.

• Logo, menu, location, and card can't be marked not needed. Only channels can.
• On a new device the checklist rebuilds from saved data, so a saved logo and a priced menu read as done.
• The apps item stays open, even when the checklist is collapsed, until the apps are built or you mark it not needed. It names what's missing: App Store credentials, Google Play credentials, or the first build.

Connect the POS when you're ready

Connecting a POS is optional, and it never holds up the launch. Before you connect one, you edit the menu in the console and publish. Afterward the storefront follows the register, so a price you change at the counter shows online too. Read POS sync for the systems it works with. Marketplace orders stay in the marketplace's own tools with no commission and no Appetier markup, because the fee applies to direct orders only.

• Groups with many locations can ask for a custom integration on Enterprise.
• Keep the marketplaces. They bring new guests, and your site is where regulars reorder.

What to do in the first week

A storefront nobody can find takes no orders. Put the link where regulars already look, and give them a reason to use it. Set up loyalty so a reward is a few visits away. Then let campaigns invite back a regular who drifts, with the biggest discount you allow and no more.

• Put the order link on your Google listing, your socials, and your receipts.
• Watch the billing page. It shows direct sales, the fee so far, and the distance to the cap, updated daily.

Online ordering setup FAQs

• How long does it take to set up online ordering?: A first location can go live in minutes. Our own timed launch took 5 minutes 54 seconds once the menu and logo were ready. Checking the draft against your printed menu takes longer, and it's worth it.
• When do the iPhone and Android apps appear?: Appetier submits both apps in minutes once you connect the App Store and Google Play and check the test build. Review belongs to Apple and Google, so the apps appear when they approve them.
• Can we use our own web address?: Yes. One DNS record puts the storefront on a subdomain such as order.yourplace.com, and the rest of your domain stays as it is.

Next steps

See what the storefront does on online ordering, or check your current site with the free audit. Then start free.