Multi Restaurant Food Store

SimpleCart
#1

For a concept like GrubHub.com or HelloFood.com, can simplecart along with other MODx extra be used to serve food online orders that are paid for on delivery or pickup (no online card payment)? I’m thinking restaurants can serve as brands with their menu list as Product Category, products as product item. Any thoughts? Thanks

#2

In this particular case I’m not sure if can it? is the right question to ask, but should it? might be more appropriate. I’m sure you can bend SimpleCart to do that, and it has a dummy gateway that you can use to skip the payments, but you’re probably looking at a highly customised checkout experience for a project like that, and SimpleCart is not the easiest to extend currently. For a project like this I might be more inclined to recommend waiting a couple of months for Commerce to become ready to use in production, which should be able of adapting much easier.

#3

Thanks mhamstra. Thank you for the great advice.

#4

Hi Mark. Interesting topic. Is there a commerce based restraurant order page in the wild using commerce? How much customization was needed?

#5

Completely missed this post - it just showed up as unread, sorry. Yes, it has been done. I don’t think I immediately have shops we have permission to share as a reference, but it has come up in support tickets a number of times. Commerce wont be as optimised as purpose-built solutions, but there’s very little in the way of using it for that use case.

In terms of the original post asking to take orders without taking online payment, that’s pretty easy in Commerce with the built-in dummy method, though the customer would still need to select their “payment method” - so that’s best done in combination with also offering online payment, otherwise it’s a bit weird.

Once upon a time I also played around with a restaurant shop theme that puts all products on a single long menu page, as you often see for delivery/pickup shops.

Only caveat I’d note is that the cart starts to slow down significantly with around 25+ unique products in the cart. That doesn’t typically affect pickup/delivery type stores, but it may affect things like grocery shopping. (reference)