Wix Restaurants: Should You Use It for Online Ordering?
- Oct 13, 2022
- 7 min read
Updated: Aug 2
A restaurant website has two jobs: make people want the food and help them buy it.
Wix Restaurants can handle both. It lets food businesses publish menus, accept direct orders and manage table reservations through their Wix website. Orders placed through the site are commission-free, though payment-processing fees, delivery charges and the cost of an eligible Wix plan still apply.
The feature list is long. The more useful question is whether putting these tools on your website would improve the way your restaurant actually runs.
Does your restaurant need online ordering?
Online ordering makes sense when customers already want takeaway, scheduled pickup or local delivery, and the kitchen has the capacity to provide it.
It can also help a restaurant take back control of the customer relationship. An order placed through your own website doesn't begin and end inside a delivery marketplace. The customer encounters your brand, joins your mailing list if they choose, and returns to a channel you own.
That control comes with responsibility. The menu has to be accurate. Preparation times have to be realistic. Someone has to notice incoming orders, update their status and deal with anything that goes wrong.
Before adding the app, work through a few operational questions:
Which dishes can you offer without disrupting normal service?
How many online orders can the kitchen handle at once?
Will you provide pickup, delivery or both?
How far are you prepared to deliver?
How much notice do you need?
Who will manage incoming orders during service?
If the answers are unclear, installing another app won't clear them up.
When we built the brand and website for Kitchen Remedy, we didn't use Wix Restaurants. The café already had an ordering system that fit the way they run service. The website had a different job: communicate a strong brand, present the menu clearly, and help customers find the venue. Wix Restaurants earns its place when direct ordering genuinely belongs on the website. Selling food isn't reason enough on its own.
What does Wix Restaurants include?
Wix Restaurants is a collection of connected tools, held together by a common dashboard. Three main components:
Wix Restaurants Menus for creating and displaying menus
Wix Restaurants Orders for pickup, delivery and dine-in orders
Wix Table Reservations for managing table bookings
A restaurant can use the menu without accepting orders. It can add ordering without offering reservations. The setup follows the business.
How to set up Wix Restaurants online ordering
1. Create the menu
Online ordering starts with Wix Restaurants Menus.
Add the app to your site and create sections such as breakfast, lunch, drinks or specials. Each item can have a description, price and image. You can also add variants and modifiers for choices such as size, milk, toppings or sides.
Keep the structure simple. A customer ordering lunch on a phone shouldn't have to negotiate a taxonomy project.
Use modifiers when the choice affects the item or its price. Use the description for information the customer genuinely needs before ordering. If every dish requires a paragraph of explanation, the menu probably needs editing before the website does.
You can reuse dishes across menus, add dietary labels and control when particular menus or items are available.
2. Add Wix Restaurants Orders
Open the Wix App Market from your editor, search for Wix Restaurants Orders and add it to the site.
The app creates the pages needed for ordering — the customer-facing order page and order tracking — and connects to the menu you built in Wix Restaurants Menus.
The app is free to install. Accepting online orders and payments requires a Wix plan that supports payments.
Once it's added, check the ordering page in the editor. The layout should feel like part of the restaurant website, not an unrelated checkout that appeared overnight. Match the typography, colours and button styles to the rest of the brand.
3. Decide when customers can order
Wix Restaurants supports immediate orders, scheduled orders and preorders.
A takeaway restaurant might accept orders as soon as possible while letting customers choose a later time. A bakery may need several days' notice. A catering business may accept orders only for specific collection windows.
Set preparation times the kitchen can meet on a busy day, not on a quiet one. Customers would rather see an honest collection time than arrive to find an order that hasn't been started. If demand changes throughout the day, review the settings — one preparation estimate can't do all the work.
You can also set how far ahead orders may be scheduled, and block orders on holidays, private-event dates or days when capacity has been reached.
4. Configure pickup, delivery and dine-in
At least one fulfilment method has to be active before the site can accept orders.
Pickup. Set the location, collection hours, minimum order and customer instructions. Instructions should answer practical questions: where to park, which counter to use, what information the customer needs when collecting an order.
Delivery. Create delivery areas and give each area its own fee, hours and minimum order value. Do the maths before offering a large radius. A wider delivery area can look like growth while producing slow food, unhappy customers and expensive journeys.
Dine-in. Dine-in ordering lets customers scan a QR code, view the menu and place an order from their table. The order appears alongside pickup and delivery orders but stays identified as dine-in. You can request a table number and tell customers whether staff will bring the order to their table or whether they should collect it themselves.
QR ordering suits some service models better than others. In a busy casual venue it can reduce queues. In a restaurant where service is part of the experience, it can feel like work handed to the customer.
5. Set taxes, payments and checkout rules
Connect a payment provider available in your region and review the tax settings before publishing.
Wix lets restaurants create tax groups for items treated differently, such as alcohol. Tax requirements depend on the business and its location, so this is one part of the setup worth checking with an accountant.
You can also configure tips, service fees, gift cards, invoices and checkout fields. Don't ask for customer information you don't need. Every extra field is another reason to abandon an order.
Wix doesn't charge a restaurant commission on orders placed through the website. That doesn't make each transaction free — payment providers charge processing fees, and external delivery services carry their own.
6. Test the entire order
Don't stop at checking whether the ordering page looks good.
Place a real test order from a phone. Choose a modifier, apply a discount, select a delivery area and complete a payment. Then follow the order from customer confirmation through to the restaurant dashboard.
Check that:
The final price is correct
Taxes and fees appear clearly
Confirmation messages make sense
Staff receive the notification
The order includes every selected option
The promised preparation time is realistic
The customer can follow the order's status
Run another test for pickup and one for a scheduled order. Finding an error while standing in the kitchen with a waiting customer is a poor testing method.
Features worth knowing about
Scheduled menus
Menus can be limited to particular times, weekdays or dates. This works for breakfast service, weekend specials, holiday menus and dishes that require advance preparation. Customers can still see a scheduled menu outside its ordering hours; they simply can only order it for an available time.
Multiple ordering pages
A Wix site can have up to five ordering pages, each with its own menu and fulfilment settings. A restaurant could separate everyday orders from catering, events or dine-in service — cleaner than pushing several purchasing situations through one overloaded menu.
Manual and phone orders
Staff can enter phone or in-person orders manually so they appear in the same order system. Manual orders can include existing dishes or custom items, plus tips, fees and discounts. Payment can be arranged through an available point-of-sale option, invoice or payment link.
Live order tracking
Customers can follow the progress of an order through a tracking page. Staff can move it through stages such as pending, accepted, ready and out for delivery. Status updates are only useful when somebody maintains them. Decide whose job that is before the first order arrives.
Discounts and repeat orders
Wix's wider business tools can layer in coupons, automatic discounts, gift cards and a loyalty program. Useful, but discounts aren't a substitute for a clear reason to order directly. Convenience, menu access, exclusive items and a better brand experience will do more work than a permanent percentage off.
Managing orders through the Wix app
With Wix app restaurant operators can use it to receive order notifications, update statuses, change menu availability and manage reservations from a phone. Orders can also be sent to supported thermal printers.
Mobile management is useful, but it shouldn't leave the whole team dependent on one person's phone. Give the right staff access, agree on a process and test notifications before service begins.
What about table reservations?
Wix Table Reservations adds online bookings to the restaurant website.
You can set booking windows, party-size limits and table turnover times. Reservations can be approved automatically or held for manual approval. Restaurants can also record walk-ins, assign tables and use a visual floor plan.
For large groups or services affected by no-shows, prepayment rules add a useful layer of commitment.
As with ordering, the feature should reflect the way the restaurant actually runs. A booking form that accepts tables the team can't provide is worse than no form at all.
How to promote direct ordering
Customers won't automatically switch from a familiar delivery app because the restaurant has installed a new button.
Make Order Online prominent on the homepage and mobile navigation. Link to the ordering page from your Google Business Profile, social accounts and email campaigns. Put a QR code on packaging so customers who first ordered elsewhere know where to order next time.
Give direct customers a reason to return. Access to the complete menu. Better pickup times. Loyalty points. An item that isn't available anywhere else.
The message doesn't need to be complicated: order directly, get the food from the people making it, support the restaurant in the process.
Is Wix Restaurants worth using?
Wix Restaurants does a lot: menus, direct orders, pickup, delivery, dine-in ordering, scheduled orders, discounts and reservations. For a restaurant already running its website on Wix, keeping these tools together simplifies both management and the customer journey.
It isn't compulsory. Kitchen Remedy uses its Wix website to present the brand and route customers to the ordering system that already fits their kitchen workflow. The website does what a website is best at — communicate the brand and get people through the door. The ordering happens elsewhere, on purpose.
Wix Restaurants earns its place when the ordering itself belongs on the website. If the answer isn't obvious, the answer is usually no. Start with how the restaurant actually runs, then decide which tools the website needs to carry.
