Best WooCommerce Plugins for Restaurant Online Ordering (2026)
A restaurant doing $10,000 a month through DoorDash hands over somewhere between $1,500 and $3,000 of it, and once promotions and paid visibility are included the effective rate commonly lands between 30% and 40%. That is not a software problem you are solving when you build direct ordering. It is a margin problem, and it is the reason this comparison is worth reading properly rather than skimming for the cheapest plugin.
Against those numbers, the entire plugin market is a rounding error. The most capable option here costs $149 a year with no per-order fee, which a moderately busy restaurant recovers in roughly a day and a half of commission. So the interesting question is not which plugin is cheapest. It is which one your kitchen will actually operate at 7pm on a Friday, because a direct ordering system nobody trusts sends everyone back to the marketplace app.
Pricing and commission rates verified August 2026. Marketplace rates changed during the year and vary by tier and region, so treat them as indicative of the scale rather than exact for your contract.
What the marketplaces actually charge
| Platform | Delivery commission | Pickup commission | Effective all-in |
|---|---|---|---|
| DoorDash | 15%, 25%, or 30% by tier | 6% | Often 30% plus with promotions |
| Uber Eats | Lite 20%, Plus 25%, Premium 30% | 7% with validated pricing, else 10% | 30% for Uber One orders on Plus |
| Grubhub | 5% to 20% plus advertising | Varies | Reported 15% to 40% with stacked fees |
| Direct ordering, this article | 0% | 0% | $0 to $149 a year plus card fees |
Run it on real numbers. At $10,000 a month in delivery orders, a 25% commission is $2,500 a month, or $30,000 a year. Orderable Pro is $149 a year and takes nothing per order; you still pay your card processor around 2.9% plus 30 cents, which on $10,000 is roughly $370 a month. Direct ordering therefore costs about $4,600 a year against $30,000. The saving is not marginal, it is most of a kitchen porter’s wages.
The honest counterweight is discovery. Marketplaces bring customers who have never heard of you, and that acquisition has real value for a new restaurant. The strategy that works for most independents is not abandoning the apps but shifting repeat customers to direct: the app finds them once, and your insert in the delivery bag, your loyalty offer, and your slightly cheaper direct price keep them. Every order you move across is worth 25% more to you than the one before it.
What a restaurant needs that a normal store does not
- Opening hours that actually close the shop. The store must refuse orders when the kitchen is shut, and handle the awkward cases: last orders before closing, a lead time so nobody orders for five minutes from now, and different hours per day.
- Order throttling. The single most valuable feature nobody thinks about. A maximum number of orders per time slot stops a Friday rush arriving as forty simultaneous tickets that the kitchen cannot possibly produce.
- Modifiers, not variations. “No onions, extra cheese, medium spice” is a modifier set, and WooCommerce’s variation system is the wrong shape for it. How a plugin models this determines whether adding a menu item takes two minutes or twenty.
- Delivery zones with rules. Postcode or radius-based zones, each with their own minimum order and delivery fee, because delivering three miles is not the same business as delivering half a mile.
- Kitchen printing. A ticket that prints automatically on a thermal printer in the kitchen. Staff reading orders off a laptop is how orders get missed.
- Audible new-order alerts. Trivial, and the difference between a system that works and one where an order sits unnoticed for twenty minutes.
The 6 options compared
1. Orderable
The strongest option here and the one that most clearly understands restaurant operations rather than treating food as a product category. The free version runs on unlimited sites and covers date slots, lead times, preorder days, and receipt printing, which is already a workable takeaway system at no cost.
Pro at $149 a year for one site adds the things that matter once you are busy: date and time slots, maximum orders per day and per slot, a customisable receipt layout builder, product add-ons, order bumps, timed products so the breakfast menu disappears at 11, multiple store locations, custom checkout with tipping, a pause and resume switch for when the kitchen is overwhelmed, automated SMS, WhatsApp and email notifications, and QR code table ordering. Every plan carries zero transaction fees regardless of volume. That order-throttling and the pause switch are worth the licence on their own, because they are what stop a good Friday becoming a bad one.
- Pricing: Free on unlimited sites; Pro $149 a year per site; zero transaction fees
- Standout: Max orders per slot, pause and resume, QR table ordering
- Best for: Most independent restaurants and takeaways
- Watch out for: Time slots and throttling need Pro, not Free
2. WPCafe
The broadest feature set, covering online ordering alongside table reservations, menu display, and delivery management in one plugin. For a sit-down restaurant that needs bookings as well as takeaway, that combination avoids running two systems that do not know about each other, which is a genuine operational advantage.
Annual plans run Standard $89, Premium $209, and Agency $419, with lifetime licences at $149, $419, $699, and Enterprise at $1,049. Note that pricing has moved during 2026, with older sources listing $59, $139, and $279, so confirm current figures before budgeting. The Standard lifetime at $149 is the interesting one: the same one-off cost as a single year of Orderable Pro, for a restaurant planning to run this for years. The tradeoff is that a plugin doing reservations, menus, and ordering is necessarily less focused than one doing ordering alone, and the admin reflects that.
- Pricing: Standard $89, Premium $209, Agency $419 a year; lifetime from $149
- Standout: Ordering plus reservations plus menus in one plugin
- Best for: Sit-down restaurants needing bookings too
- Watch out for: Pricing has changed recently; confirm before buying
3. RestroPress
A dedicated food ordering system with a free core on WordPress.org, built specifically around takeaway and delivery rather than adapted from general ecommerce. Its positioning is explicitly commission-free with no per-order fees and no forced subscription to take orders, which is exactly the pitch an independent restaurant leaving a marketplace wants to hear.
The free version handles the core job of taking food orders, which makes it a reasonable no-cost starting point alongside Orderable Free. Where it fits best is a restaurant that wants a purpose-built food ordering interface rather than a WooCommerce store dressed as a menu, since the ordering flow is designed around food from the start. Confirm current pro pricing directly with the vendor, since published figures were not consistently available at the time of writing. Judge it on whether the ordering experience suits your menu, and test the modifier handling with your most complicated dish before committing.
- Pricing: Free core; pro pricing to confirm with the vendor
- Standout: Purpose-built food ordering flow, commission-free by design
- Best for: Takeaways wanting a food-first interface
- Watch out for: Test modifiers with your most complex menu item first
4. GloriaFood
Not a WordPress plugin in the usual sense but a hosted ordering system with a WordPress menu plugin, and it belongs here because the core online ordering is genuinely free and commission-free, with no trial period. Orders arrive from your website, your Facebook page, and a mobile app, and a restaurant can be taking orders within hours rather than days.
Two things to weigh. Premium features are paid, and they include the ones most restaurants actually need: online payments, promotions, a sales-optimised website, and branded mobile apps. Free ordering with cash on delivery is genuinely free; taking card payments online is not. And GloriaFood is now part of Oracle, which cuts both ways: greater stability and resources, and the strategic direction of a large vendor whose priorities may not centre on independent restaurants. As a way to start taking commission-free orders this week with no budget, it remains hard to beat.
- Pricing: Free commission-free ordering; paid premium features including online payments
- Standout: Live within hours, across site, Facebook, and app
- Best for: Starting immediately with no budget
- Watch out for: Card payments are a paid feature; now Oracle-owned
5. WooCommerce core plus Orderable Free
The zero-cost route, and genuinely viable for a small takeaway. WooCommerce handles the catalogue, the cart, tax, and payments; Orderable Free supplies the restaurant layer of date slots, lead times, preorder days, and receipt printing. Total software cost is nothing beyond hosting and card processing.
What you give up is precisely the busy-service features: no time slots, no maximum orders per slot, no pause switch, no QR table ordering. For a restaurant taking fifteen orders on a Friday that is fine. For one taking sixty it is not, and the upgrade to Pro at $149 will pay for itself the first time the kitchen is spared a simultaneous rush. Start here regardless, because a month of real orders will tell you which limitations actually bite rather than which ones sound important on a feature page.
- Pricing: Free, plus card processing
- Standout: A working commission-free system at no software cost
- Best for: Validating direct ordering before spending
- Watch out for: No throttling or time slots; struggles under a real rush
6. Staying on the marketplaces
Listed deliberately, because for some restaurants it remains the right answer and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub bring demand you do not have to generate, handle the drivers, absorb the delivery logistics, and put you in front of people searching for food rather than for your restaurant.
What that costs is 15% to 30% at the headline and frequently 30% to 40% effective once promotions and paid visibility are added, on every order forever. The right posture for most independents is both: stay on the apps for discovery, build direct ordering for repeat business, and work deliberately to move customers across. Price direct slightly below the app, put a card in every delivery bag, and treat marketplace orders as paid acquisition rather than as your business. If you are a new restaurant with no audience, start on the apps and build direct in parallel; if you have regulars ordering weekly through an app, you are paying a 25% tax on customers you already earned.
- Cost: 15% to 30% headline, often 30% to 40% effective
- Standout: Genuine customer discovery and driver logistics
- Best for: New restaurants with no existing audience
- Watch out for: Regulars ordering through an app are your most expensive customers
Comparison table
| Option | Cost | Per-order fee | Time slots | Order throttling | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Orderable Pro | $149/yr | None | Yes | Yes, per day and slot | Most restaurants |
| Orderable Free | Free, unlimited sites | None | Date only | No | Low volume takeaways |
| WPCafe | $89 to $419/yr; lifetime from $149 | None | Yes | Varies by tier | Restaurants needing reservations |
| RestroPress | Free core; pro to confirm | None | Yes | Varies | Food-first ordering flow |
| GloriaFood | Free; payments are paid | None | Yes | Varies | Live within hours |
| Marketplace apps | 15% to 30% plus | Every order | Yes | Yes | Discovery for new restaurants |
Getting orders into the kitchen
The most common reason direct ordering fails is not the website. It is that an order arrives and nobody notices for fifteen minutes, the customer rings, and the restaurant concludes the system does not work.
- Put a thermal printer in the kitchen and print automatically. Not email, not a tablet someone checks. A ticket that appears without human action, in the place food is made.
- Add an audible alert. A tablet at the pass with sound on, loud enough to hear over extraction. This single change fixes most missed orders.
- Set a lead time you can actually hit. Twenty to thirty minutes minimum for takeaway. Letting customers order for “now” guarantees late food and a bad review in your first week.
- Cap orders per slot from day one. Work out how many orders your kitchen produces in fifteen minutes, set that as the ceiling, and let the system refuse the rest rather than accepting work you cannot do.
- Test the whole flow yourself on a Friday. Place a real order at your busiest hour, with modifiers, and watch what happens. Every failure you find is one a customer will not.
- Keep a manual override. A pause switch for when a fryer dies or two staff call in sick. Refusing orders for an hour is survivable; taking orders you cannot cook is not.
Related guides
Frequently asked questions
Should I leave the delivery apps entirely?
Usually not at first. Run both, price direct slightly lower, and put a flyer in every marketplace delivery bag. The apps are worth their commission for finding new customers and worth nothing for keeping ones you already have.
Who delivers if I take orders directly?
You do, or you use a delivery-only service that charges for the driver rather than a percentage of the order. Many independents offer collection only on direct orders and keep delivery on the apps, which captures most of the saving with none of the logistics.
How do I handle modifiers like “no onions”?
Through product add-ons rather than WooCommerce variations, which are designed for size and colour, not for a checklist of exclusions. Test this specifically with your most complicated dish before you buy, because it is the single fiddliest part of setting up a food menu.
What about card fees on direct orders?
Roughly 2.9% plus 30 cents through Stripe, which is unavoidable and around a tenth of what a marketplace takes. Some restaurants offer cash on collection to avoid it entirely, though card is what most customers now expect.
Will people actually order from my site?
If they already know you, yes, given a small incentive. Regulars are the ones worth moving, and a modest discount for direct ordering costs you far less than the commission you save. Customers who found you on an app will mostly keep using it.
Do I need a separate app?
No. A fast mobile site does the job, and getting customers to install a restaurant app is far harder than getting them to bookmark a page. Spend the app budget on making your ordering page load quickly on a phone.
The verdict
For most restaurants: Orderable Pro at $149 a year. Time slots, maximum orders per slot, a pause switch, kitchen printing, and QR table ordering, with no per-order fee ever. A restaurant doing $10,000 a month recovers the licence in about a day and a half of avoided commission.
If you take reservations too: WPCafe, ideally the $149 lifetime Standard licence. Ordering, bookings, and menus in one plugin beats running two systems that do not know when your tables are full.
To start this week with nothing: GloriaFood for hosted commission-free ordering, or WooCommerce with Orderable Free if you want it on your own site. Both get you taking orders at zero software cost; both will show you within a month whether direct ordering works for your customers.
And keep the apps for now. Treat marketplace commission as an acquisition cost, then work steadily to move your regulars to direct. Every order you shift is worth roughly a quarter more to you, and that is the whole business case.
