Introduction to Shopify
Today, many restaurant vendors are exclusively choosing Shopify as their e-commerce platform. This is because Shopify has powerful integrations to kick-start online food ordering and delivery business.
Add to that the rising market demand for online food delivery services. According to Statista, the global restaurant food delivery market will grow to $192.16 billion by 2025. As a result, food entrepreneurs are extensively investing in setting up their online restaurants on Shopify.
But is Shopify really the best platform for restaurant vendors who want to switch to online ordering and delivery?
Stay tuned as this blog unveils why Deonde is the Best Shopify Alternative for Restaurants.
We take a deep dive and look at the pros and cons of Shopify. Additionally, we also inspect Shopify Alternatives for online restaurant food ordering.
What is Shopify?
Shopify has become a household name today.
Restaurant business owners are increasingly opting for Shopify. This is because Shopify is one of the most popular e-commerce platforms for online sales. Shopify empowers restaurant owners and entrepreneurs to boost their online marketplace with myriad tools and features like account management, revenue analysis, P&L reports, and customer acquisition funnels.
Shopify came to market in 2006 when founder and CEO Tobi Lütke launched it as an e-commerce platform for big brands. Since then, brands of all sizes and forms have extensively used the e-commerce platform across multiple industries.
Some notable brands on Shopify are PepsiCo, Staples, Allbirds, and Gymshark. Today, Shopify is present in over 170 countries and empowers millions of merchants worldwide.
Shopify for Restaurants and Food Businesses
As a restaurant owner, you must be wondering how you can leverage Shopify to set up shop and boost sales. Selling online not only gives an added advantage to your brand but also offers a lot of convenience to the customers.
With Shopify, your customers can select and customize their restaurant meals through the websites and deliver them to their doorsteps.
So, if you’re eager to get started with Shopify, here’s how you do it:
Create your Online Store on Shopify
Shopify has tools like a brand name generator, a logo maker, and multiple online themes to help you brand and set up your online restaurant business. Shopify allows you to maintain your unique brand identity as you create an online ordering website for your restaurant.
Create and Manage Menus
With Shopify, you can list all your services and food dishes. Manage prices and menu items seamlessly using Shopify. You can also add images/pictures of mouth-watering food dishes to entice customers.
App Integrations
To boost your business operations, Shopify offers a variety of apps that can be integrated into your e-commerce restaurant platform. Some of the popular apps include Shopify Email, PayWhirl, Promo.com, Easyship, Shopify Local Delivery, Printful, Smart SEO, and Stocky.
Set a Payment Gateway
Shopify enables multiple payment gateways to facilitate reliable and secure online transactions.
Set Pickup or Delivery
If you have a delivery team in place, then you can enable the delivery option on your Shopify account. If you have multiple restaurants, Shopify enables your customers to place orders from the restaurant that’s closest to them for quicker deliveries.
Market and Promote your Online Restaurant Store
Shopify helps you spread the word about your online restaurant through social media integrations, email marketing, and messaging.
Is There a Shopify Alternative for Online Restaurant Businesses?
If you’ve used Shopify, you already know that it isn’t the best interface for online restaurant businesses. There are many tools and online ordering websites that are way superior and more affordable than Shopify, and today, we’ll be discussing one of them—Deonde Ressto!
Deonde Ressto
Deonde Ressto is a comprehensive food delivery solution designed to cater especially to the restaurant food businesses, with a white-label approach.
It can streamline all workflows, from online ordering to menu management, delivery management, inventory updates, and analytical reports. Deonde Ressto is a powerful solution that allows restaurant vendors to scale effortlessly with powerful, AI-based features.
Deonde offers a customer ordering app/website, delivery partner app, restaurant vendor app, and admin app for seamless functioning. Its design is intuitive and requires no training. You can start with Deonde’s restaurant ordering and delivery platform in less than a day.
When all’s said and done, Deonde is a much more affordable and easy-to-use online food delivery platform.
It can potentially be one of the top Shopify Alternatives for restaurant businesses.
Shopify vs. Deonde: What’s Best for Your Online Restaurant Business?
Shopify Features:
Shopify is an online e-commerce platform that enables ordering, customer acquisition, and sales. Here are some of its most exciting features:
- It has a drag-and-drop website builder that allows you to create customized web pages. Maintain your brand identity by choosing the color, font, and logo of your brand. It is also compatible with mobile commerce.
- It facilitates secure transitions. With about 100+ payment gateways, Shopify’s payment methods aim to maximize consumer convenience. Additionally, it also ensures safe and secure transactions and is Level-1 PCI compliant.
- It offers automated calculations of shipping and tax charges. It also has store management features like customer profile management, account management, vendor management, fulfillment centers, and Sales/Marketing modules.
- It also has tools to boost website visibility and sales. Shopify facilitates SEO practices and also has social media integration to foster marketing and social media sales.
- It offers abandoned cart reminders to bring back customers who quit their ordering session before payment could be made. This feature has immense success rates, and it increases sales by sharing the link of the abandoned item in the cart.
- Shopify offers several analytical tools to help restaurant vendors generate detailed insights into sales, revenue, average online ordering, repeat orders, and marketing campaigns. You can also integrate Shopify with Google Analytics and generate reports like P&L, CPC, and CAQ.
Deonde Ressto Features:
Combined with some of the most advanced and powerful software features, Deonde’s restaurant ordering system will set you up for success, even in competitive markets.
Online Order Management
Customers can use Deonde to place online orders. Designed to heighten customer satisfaction, Deonde is intuitive and easy to use and offers quick search filters like pricing, area, cuisine, veg/non-veg, and more.
Inventory Management
Deonde keeps your kitchen running smoothly with its revolutionary inventory management system. Synced with order management tools, this inventory management module updates stock levels after each order.
Real-time Order Status
Customers can keep an eye on the status of their ordered means. Deonde notifies them when their order is accepted, prepared, dispatched, or delivered.
Trending Push Notification Templates for your Food Delivery App
Make Payments Easy
Deonde also has multiple payment gateways and facilitates 100% safe and secure transactions online for maximum user convenience.
Multi-Language Servicing
Deonde Ressto believes in speaking the language of the consumers. Hence, it offers customer service in multiple languages. So, restaurant business owners can facilitate sales in the language of their choice.
Delivery Management & Zoning
Deonde Ressto supports businesses with multiple outlets that need to define delivery zones. This is done to simplify delivery zone management and process delivery orders faster. Delivery zoning also streamlines driver management and task assignment.
Dispatch Team Management
Deonde Ressto helps with dispatch team or driver management. It records driver earnings, ratings, efficiency, and zone. It also has a driver wallet where drivers can review their earnings and withdraw or cash out when needed.
Ratings and Reviews
Deonde Ressto has an Online Review Management System for Restaurants to collect feedback from your clientele and leverage it for future improvements and service expansion.
Analytics & KPIs
Drive your business on nothing but data. Deonde Ressto provides real-time analytics on sales, revenue, repeat orders, customer preferences, delivery times, and more. It gives you a comprehensive, data-driven view of your business. This form of data at your fingertips can drive impact and efficiency to your business.
Deonde also has a 360-degree dashboard that makes data interpretation easy. With the least effort, you can gauge the P&L numbers of your restaurant business with Deonde.
Limitations of Shopify for Restaurants
Although Shopify has become a very popular e-commerce platform, it’s not for everyone. An online restaurant business is very different from a retail clothing or fashion business. Restaurant vendors need an online platform that simplifies their day-to-day and proves to be a cost-effective investment.
Sadly, Shopify fails miserably on both fronts. Here are some of the most painstaking limitations of Shopify. Please go through these before you decide to launch your restaurant business on Shopify:
Platform Pricing
Shopify falls on the higher end of e-commerce platforms when we talk about pricing plans. Shopify’s plans for small teams start at $132 per month and its advanced version for small to mid-sized teams is priced at $517. In addition to these pricing plans, be prepared to pay heavy transactional fees, and additional app fees (if you’ve bought any apps from the Shopify store). These charges will only surge as you grow and scale your business. Hence, from the pricing point-of-view, Shopify is not a sustainable option for small to mid-sized restaurant businesses. It’s just a very heavy overhead!
Time-Consuming
The reason why people think Shopify is feature-rich is because it has tonnes of apps, both paid and unpaid, on its Shopify Store. Each app with its function and features. Now, for you to build a robust online restaurant business platform, you need to understand the ins and outs of these myriad apps and set workflows that work for you. Doing this is time-consuming and also needs a certain level of technical understanding.
But more important than that, Shopify doesn’t integrate with all POS systems and may not integrate with your restaurant’s existing POS. Also, if you’ve multiple restaurants, you’ll need to choose Shopify POS Pro—which is an added expense to your operations.
Tech Support
While Shopify does offer help to businesses via a help center, discussion forums, and video tutorials—its overall customer service experience is very choppy. When dealing with round-the-clock assistance, you may or may not get access to a customer service representative. The type of service you receive also depends on the plan you’ve chosen.
So, as a restaurant business owner, you must take caution while choosing Shopify as you may not receive immediate solutions to your problems.
Why You Should Migrate from Shopify to Deonde Ressto!
Indeed, food businesses today are increasingly opting for Shopify. But only to face severe operational limitations and fee surges. To combat this, we’re proposing a comprehensive comparison of Shopify vs. Deonde. The inference of this comparison is self-evident—and you’ll be more convinced than ever to choose Deonde as your Shopify Alternative:
Ease of Setup and Utility
Deonde provides a seamless setup experience and the users can launch their very own online food delivery restaurant business in less than a day—without having to depend on a tech team. You can align Deonde Ressto with your brand as it is a white-label solution. Hence, it’s a much more flexible solution when compared to Shopify.
On the other hand, getting started with Shopify is not as easy as it sounds. It involves complex tech and API integrations that need the expertise of a developer. Needless to say, the setup alone can be time-consuming and expensive.
Features and Add-Ons
Deonde Ressto has built-in tools that support all restaurant business operations, including inventory management, customer data management, driver and delivery management, automated delivery scheduling, live updates, real-time analytics, and more.
Shopify, on the other hand, relies heavily on third-party apps to provide the same features. Third-party apps heavily contribute to Shopify’s functionalities, which are dispersed and not consolidated. Hence, accessing basic features requires spending a lot more. Hence, the cost of adding additional features or consolidating existing ones is simply too high on Shopify.
How DeOnDe Works: A Comprehensive Overview of Features, Pricing, and Process
Customizable Workflows
Deonde Ressto can be customized to fit your workflows. You can add features or remove the ones that don’t serve your purpose. You can also build and explore the perfect menu designs, order management tools, service zones, and delivery zones—and change them on the go for a seamless experience. Deonde Ressto truly does the work for you.
While Shopify makes you work for it. Shopify has built-in workflows which you must follow to yield optimum results. Shopify is not easy to customize and you’re forced to use the features and modules in a specific manner.
Deonde Ressto is Specially Built for Restaurants
Shopify is built for local commerce and hyper-local fulfillment. As a result, Shopify doesn’t have the built-in support to facilitate meal pickup and on-demand delivery.
With Deonde Ressto, you can monitor multiple restaurant chains and create as many pickup and delivery locations as needed. You can also monitor deliveries based on geofences and enable scheduled deliveries or bulk ordering.
As you can see, Deonde Ressto is fairly superior in terms of both pricing and functionality. Hence, pricing is the best Shopify alternative for restaurant vendors globally.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Deonde has a leg up on Shopify for online restaurant businesses. With better utility, pricing, and seamless workflows, Deonde is truly the best Shopify Alternative for your restaurant business.
Shopify, while great for e-commerce businesses, has still not perfected the nuances of online restaurant businesses. Shopify needs to mend its price point for younger restaurants and provide comprehensive round-the-clock customer and tech support.
While Shopify works on that, choose Deonde Ressto, the best Shopify alternative for your online restaurant business. Make Deonde your go-to platform today!
FAQs
1. Why is Deonde Ressto Better for Restaurants than Shopify?
Deonde Ressto is customizable and can be customized to match your unique brand identity. It has customized workflows and offers a much more competitive pricing than Shopify. It also ensures seamless customer experiences through in-app chat, a consumer feedback center, and 8/5 tech support. With Deonde Ressto, restaurant vendors have more control over their sales and revenue than Shopify.
2. How can Deonde help me increase my Online Orders?
Deonde Ressto can help you take your business online. With online on-demand delivery, you can boost restaurant sales as you’re tapping into a whole new market. You also have opportunities to upsell and cross-sell your meals online. Plus, with push notifications, abandoned cart reminders, and in-app marketing—your customers will be engaging with your restaurant brand more than ever.
3. What is Better, Shopify or Deonde?
While both platforms support online sales, Shopify is built for general e-commerce. Whereas Deonde is built for restaurant businesses only. Deonde Ressto understands the pain points of restaurant owners globally and has designed this online ordering app and website to address these pain points. Hence, Deonde’s features and price points are infinitely better suited for restaurant businesses than Shopify.
4. What are the Limitations of using Shopify for My Restaurant Business?
Shopify has multiple features, but all of these are dependent on third-party apps available on the Shopify store. While some of these apps are free, most of them have a monthly fee, which adds to the total cost of operation. Thus making Shopify more expensive than Deonde Ressto. Also, these apps aren’t well consolidated and can be a hassle to set up. Also, Shopify doesn’t integrate with all POS systems and you need to check if Shopify is compatible with your existing POS system.
