Hello,
I am writing this thread to request guidance from fellow Shopify users, developers, and the community in general. I hope this thread will help thousands of restaurant owners like me to setup their delivery system using Shopify.
We operate a fine-dining restaurant in India and the COVID pandemic created a lot of troubles for us (dine-in was closed for ~6 months last year). In order to deliver food to the homes, we were dependent on some famous food delivery aggregator/apps (not naming them). But the problem with them was that they would cut 30-40% commission (incl their own delivery) and refuse to share contact details of customers which were crucial for us to collect feedback and fine-tune our service. To make the matters worse, their payment settlement duration is inconsistent (at least T+7).
So we decided to build our own system for accepting orders and we started working on a Shopify-powered platform with our limited technical knowledge.
As we progressed, we encountered the following issues and we used some apps to overcome some of them. But not all issues could be addressed and we are wasting a lot of time every day on manual tasks (we make close to 500 dishes incl variants).
- Our restaurant operates for a limited duration every day. It is not a cloud kitchen that can operate 24*7. Some categories of dishes (say breakfast) are available from 7 AM in the morning to 12 PM in the noon. Lunch service is available from 12 PM in the noon to 3.30 PM in the afternoon. In addition to this, some niche dishes are available on particular days only (say only weekends). Due to the limited kitchen space and manpower, we can not make every dish available throughout the day. So if someone orders a breakfast dish at 2 PM in the afternoon, we won't be able to serve them. We are manually disabling/archiving & activating every collection and home page sliders/banners based on the time of the day as suggested by the Shopify Support team. This is consuming a ton of time. Is there any way to automate the whole process so that SKUs & Collections are enabled and disabled based on the day and time without manual intervention?. Searched in the Shopify App store, but could not find any results.
- In our country India, the address system is not scientific/organized like in the USA/Europe. Even though we have enabled the Google Maps address auto-suggestion option in the checkout, people are not entering accurate addresses which can be searched in Maps. This is making us call each and every customer > request them to share their accurate address on Maps through WhatsApp > edit order address > push it to the Shopify Local Delivery app > make deliveries. Is there any way to include Google Maps widget anywhere in the customer account page/checkout page so that customers can drop the pin on their accurate address which will help us to do quick and smooth deliveries?.
- Most restaurants would accept pre-orders couple of hours in advance too. We need the ability to pre-order couple of hours in advance and specify at what time the delivery has to be done. I am not sure how to do this.
If Shopify or any app developers could give solutions for the above basic requirements, thousands of restaurants from India itself can start shifting to Shopify!.
Thank you.
I am looking forward for response from the community.
