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How to accept pick up and takeaway orders for your restaurant, cafe or food service business with Ecwid for free

How to accept takeaway food orders online with Ecwid Header
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In 2020, the need for restaurants, cafes and other foodservice businesses to participate in the online economy has become more vital than ever. Coronavirus has changed the face of the world, but it doesn’t have to put an end to your restaurant or cafe. Fortunately, it’s also easier and cheaper than ever to accept pick up and takeaway orders through your website, Facebook page and Instagram profile using the Ecwid e-commerce platform.

Ecwid has been around since 2009 and rapidly became the most popular software for social media e-commerce, a title it has held since 2012, not long after Facebook Stores were first introduced (learn more about Ecwid). Today, the process of connecting everything up and selling food and meals to your customers on Facebook or through your website with a single unified ordering platform is easier than ever. You can even deploy your own mobile app, automatically.

If you aren’t sure if Ecwid is the right solution for you, have a read of my review: “Is Ecwid the right e-commerce solution for your small business?

Ready to get started? Alright, let’s go!

Get an Ecwid account and login

So, what do you need to do to get up and running with online ordering for your food business? Well, for this article I’m assuming you already have an Ecwid account that is setup with all your payment information, branding and so on. If you haven’t already got an account setup, sign up for a free Ecwid account.

Once you have your account, login!

Ecwid Login Screen

You might also be interested in: Ecwid vs WooCommerce: Which one is better for small businesses?

Set up a new order delivery method

From your dashboard, have a look down the administration menu on the left. Under the “Configuration” heading, hover over “Shipping & Pickup” and then click “Shipping & Pickup” from the sub-menu that appears.

Ecwid Shipping and Pickup Menu Options

From the “Shipping & Pickup” screen that appears in Ecwid, scroll down to the “Add a new shipping method” section. In the “Self Pickup” box, click the “Add Pickup” button.

Ecwid Shipping - Add A Pickup Option

You will be presented with a form that looks like this, pre-filled with your store address and common business opening hours:

Ecwid Pickup Option Settings

If the pre-defined details work for you, you can skip straight to the end and click the “Add Pickup Option” button.

Otherwise, if you need to change anything…

Define your pickup details

The “Add Pickup Option” form lets you specify all the details that will show up on your store order form.

“Order pickup label at checkout” field

Ecwid Pickup Option Label

This field lets you specify what your pickup option will be called on the front-end for customers as well as in the back-end in the order details. So at the checkout, it will look something like this:

Ecwid Pickup Label on Frontend

“Detailed instructions for customers” field

Ecwid Detailed Instructions for Pickup Field

The “Detailed instructions for customers field” gives you lots of text formatting options to display your address for order collections along with business hours and any other information that might be relevant to customers selecting this pickup method. For example, instruction on where to go to collect their order, if you have special collection requirements related to Coronavirus such as “knock and wait at the door”, or “call on arrival”. You might also specify what timeframe customers should expect their order to be ready in. Perhaps you can prepare most orders in 30 minutes, so you might specify that in these instructions.

You can make this section look just about any way you want with tables, lists, pictures, embedded videos and even direct HTML editing. It will then display at the checkout on the front-end. Our example looks like this on the front-end;

Ecwid Pickup Detailed Instructions on Frontend

“Pickup Charge” field

Ecwid Pickup Charge Field

The “Pickup charge” is a fee that you can charge to customers, similar to a delivery fee. For example, you could charge a fee for pickups within a guaranteed timeframe or from a premium pickup location. In the below example of how this looks at the checkout for customers, I’ve added two pickup options, one is free and the other has a fee for a priority pickup service. You can see this fee shown beside the pickup option and it will add the charge to the total order cost before the customer completes payment:

Ecwid Pickup Option With a Fee

“Ask for pickup date and time at checkout” field

Ecwid Pickup Date and Time Field Disabled

The “Ask for pickup date and time at checkout” toggle allows you to give your customers the option to specify what date and time they would like to pick up their order. This is great for accepting future orders or give customers collection windows. Click the grey toggle to enable it if you would like to use it. It will change to green and say enabled as below:

Ecwid Pickup Date and Time Field Enabled

Once you enable this toggle, two extra sections will appear, “Business hours” and “Order fulfillment time“. The business hours section allows you to enable days and timeframes that customers can select for their pickup. Tick the box beside each day that you want customers to be able to select from. Ecwid will automatically only allow these days to be selected at checkout.

Next, specify what timeframes you want customers to be able to choose from. Ecwid breaks these timeframes into half-hour windows. So for a 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM window, Ecwid will offer customers the choice of 9:00 AM, 9:30 AM, 10:00 AM, 10:30 AM, 11:00 AM and so on. Keep in mind that the last time, 6:00 PM in the example below, will be available for pickups as well. So if you close at 6:00 PM and want last orders by 5:30 PM, select 5:30 PM as the last pickup time in this section.

Ecwid Order Pick Up Date and Time Fields

On the front-end, you will see the pick up selector look like this for your customers:

Ecwid Pickup date and time on the Front-End

You can create multiple pickup windows each day by clicking the + icon shown beside the day you want to add it to. For example, you might have a morning collection window and an afternoon window.

Ecwid Add Extra Collection Windows

The “Order fulfillment time” option gives you the ability to specify how long it takes for you to fulfil an order. You don’t want customers turning up immediately to collect an order that you can’t have ready for at least 30 minutes. Select how long you need from the drop-down box or specify a custom time.

Ecwid Order Fulfilment Time

On the front-end, this means that if you require at least 30 minutes to prepare an order, customers will only be able to select pickup times that are more than 30 minutes away.

Add your pickup option

That’s it, just hit that blue button at the end of the form to add your new pickup option to your Ecwid store!

Ecwid Pickup Option Save Button

You will be redirected back to the “Shipping and Delivery” screen and your pickup option will now be displayed. It should be enabled automatically, but if not, click the grey toggle to enable it. It should look something like this if it is active with the toggle highlighted green and saying “ENABLED”:

Ecwid Pickup Option Enabled

Your new pickup option should now be available on the front-end for your customers to choose at checkout. If you need to edit it or change the order it is shown in, click the “Actions” drop down and you will be given the choice to edit, sort or delete the pickup option.

Ecwid Pickup Actions

How does it look for customers?

If you have a delivery option set, your customers have the choice of either delivery or pickup at the checkout. If they choose “Ship to my address”, they will get the usual address fields. If they choose “I’ll pick it up myself”, then they are just asked for their name and any other fields that you have enabled in your Ecwid settings such as their phone number (and yes, you can make the phone number a required field in your store settings).

Ecwid Shipping and Delivery Front End With Pickup

Once the customer presses the “Continue” button they are taken to their order confirmation and payment screen to process their order payment as normal. The entire process for a customer from this point is the same as delivery except that their order confirmations will show their chosen pickup options instead of delivery options.

If you only enable pickup options, then there is no “Ship to my address” option and it will jump straight to the pickup method selection screen and look something like this:

Ecwid Shipping and Delivery Front End Without Delivery

That’s it, you’re all good to go and start accepting pickup orders! Let me know in the comments below how you are using Ecwid in your business to accept online orders.

If you haven’t tried Ecwid yet, head on over to the Ecwid website and sign up for the free plan to get started.

Not sure if Ecwid is the right choice for you? You might find these related articles helpful:

Need help?

If you are interested in getting Ecwid setup in your cafe, restaurant, butcher, baker or other food service business to process pickup orders online, get in touch with us today by email, on Facebook Messenger, via Twitter, or you can send me a message on my personal Twitter account as well: @stillaslifematt.

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