The online restaurant industry is growing rapidly with no sign of slowing. Statista estimates the online food delivery market will reach $0.9T in 2023 with a growth rate of 12% per year expected into the future. Grocery delivery will see even higher growth of 20.6% per year. There has never been a more important time to expand your restaurant's offering to online ordering.
Choosing to run your restaurant on Shopify, the world's most popular ecommerce platform, opens a world of possibilities. Shopify offers intuitive, powerful software to run your business through an online ecommerce store.
The ever-growing Shopify app marketplace currently holds more than 7,000 apps with more being added every day. These apps allow you to take your business to the next level, almost any functionality you require for an online store can be added with a simple click-to-install. Shopify apps are built by creative, independent developers and integrate seamlessly with your store dashboard.
Below we detail the 8 essential apps that you need in 2023 to drive sales on your restaurant Shopify store.
| Name | Cheapest plan | Free trial |
|---|---|---|
| Live Order Dashboard | Free | 14 days |
| Materials Inventory | Free | 7 days |
| Appointment Booking Cowlender | Free | N/A |
| Nutrition Facts | $10/month | 7 days |
| Restaurant Menu List for Shopify | Free | 7-day money-back guarantee |
| ReConvert Upsell & Cross sell | $4.99/month | 30 days |
| Foodlify | $14.99/month | 10 days |
| We're Closed | Free | 14 days |
Order Management
Live Order Dashboard
Quick info
- Instant order notifications
- Customisable audio and visual alerts
- Progress orders through custom-defined stages
- Filter orders by the store location on different boards
- Simple UI with large buttons designed to work on mobile and touchscreen devices
- Great way to get a quick overview of your orders
- No SMS notifications
- Free plan limited to 5 boards
Live Order Dashboard is an essential app for restaurants. It provides you and your team instant audio and visual notifications for new orders and helps keep track of orders as you prepare and fulfill them.
LOD provides a full screen dashboard with an unlimited number of custom-defined columns, one for each step of your fulfillment process. When you want to progress an order to the next step you can click the touchscreen-friendly, large buttons to quickly move it to the next stage.
This app also works great on all devices and boards can be password-protected so its perfect to share with your team of chefs, delivery drivers, and other staff (you don't need a Shopify account to view the boards, just the URL and password).
If you've got multiple different store locations you're able to filter orders so that only orders for a specific store come to specific boards.
Live Order Dashboard, for free!
Create up to 5 different boards that instantly alert you of new orders in a simple format
Restaurant Management
Materials Inventory
Quick info
- Keep your inventory in sync
- Automatically update your Shopify inventory based on your supplies
- Low inventory alerts
- Packaging/boxes of materials can't be tracked
Materials Inventory helps you keep your raw materials and products inventory in sync for your restaurant. You can define product "recipes" which will tell the system how much of each material your products are using. Materials Inventory then uses this information to calculate how quickly your stock is depleting as new orders come in.
It gives you advanced features like analyzing costs and profit per unit and assists you with ordering materials.
Table Booking
Appointment Booking Cowlender
Quick info
- Email notifications & Reminders for appointments and bookings
- Unlimited appointments on the free plan
- Certain features like cancel and reschedule require the paid plan
Appointment Booking Cowlendar is a general-purpose booking app for Shopify but works great for a restaurant store. It allows your customers to book tables at your restaurant with a simple time- and date-selection interface.
The simple interface allows quick setup and a simple booking process for your customers which helps increase conversion rates.
It's a really great product with a solid 5 star rating - customers love it and you will too.
Store Optimisations
Nutrition Facts
Quick info
- Really simple way to preset nutritional information on your products
- Add schema.org structured data to improve Google ranking
- Export nutritional information to PDF
- Slightly expensive for the functionality it gives
- No free plan
The Nutrition Facts app gives you a simple way of presenting important nutritional information about your product to customers. Consumers are becoming more conscious of the food they are eating, more of your customers will start to expect nutritional information on the food they order and providing this can boost your sales.
Nutrition Facts gives you a quick an easy way to offer this while also improving your Google ranking. The app will automatically format this information in a way that Google can understand which can lead to improvements in your websites ranking.
This app would be particularly well-suited for online takeaways or shops selling products where this specific information is important to customers, such as sports supplements.
Restaurant Menu List for Shopify
Quick info
- Simple drag-and-drop interface to create menus
- Customizable menu layouts
- Option to upload images with each menu item
- Not a Shopify app so integration with your site may take more work
Restaurant Menu List is not strictly a Shopify app - it will actually work with any website platform. Nevertheless, it provides some really useful features that can help show customers your menu and improve sales.
With Restaurant Menu List you can create a high-quality menu that looks great on all devices with a simple drag-and-drop interface. Upload some custom photos with each menu item for even higher conversion rates.
The unbeatable price of $0-4/month makes this a no-brainer for presenting menus to your customers.
ReConvert Upsell & Cross sell
Quick info
- Helps you increase your average order value
- Run surveys, offer upgrades, collect birthday information, and more
- Drag-and-drop editor to customize the checkout flow
- Can get expensive with more orders
- They take 0.75% of extra revenue generated by the app
- No free plan
ReConvert Upsell is a Shopify app that will be sure to provide you a return on investment. It works by prompting your customers to add extra items to their order just before or after they have gone through the checkout.
You can customize all the offerings but by example you could offer an upgrade of a larger pizza for an extra $3, or add some fries for $2. The possibilities are endless.
They boast an excellent 4.9 star rating with over 3,500 reviews so you're sure to be in good hands.
Foodlify
Quick info
- Customizable design panel
- Split your menu into custom sections
- Design is slightly dated
- No free plan
Foodlify is an integrated Shopify app that allows you to build quick restaurant menus with ease.
Customize the designs of your menu to ensure it fits your business branding. They also allow you to create multiple different menus, for example a meat and vegetarian menu.
We're Closed
Quick info
- Cheap and simple solution to prevent orders when you close
- Plans are restricted by number of orders
We're Closed is a very simple but effective app that allows you to prevent orders to your restaurant after you have closed.
In the app you can define the opening hours of your business, with each day being programmable. After you've closed the order buttons on your store will be disabled and your customers won't be able to order.
This will prevent confusion and ensure your customers always receive top quality service. A free plan is offered with the maximum price being $3.99/month for an unlimited number of orders.