CloudWaitress
  • Overview
  • Getting Started
    • Hardware Requirements
    • 10-Minute Quickstart
    • Setup Your Menus
    • Configure Your Services
    • Customize Your Design
      • Hide Store Header Section (header image)
    • Managing Orders & Bookings
    • Promoting Your Store
  • How to Guides
    • Accepting Payments
      • 🔐Stripe+ Integrated Payments
        • Setup Integrated Stripe Payments
        • Using Stripe Integrated
        • Changing Bank Account / Debit Card Details Associated with an Express Account
      • Setup PayPal Payments
      • Setup Apple Pay with Checkout.com
      • Setup Stripe Payments
      • Set up Bancontact Payments
    • Adding Closed Hours
    • Adding Delivery Zones
    • Adding Staff Account
    • Bump Screen Technology
      • Mastering the Bump Screen
    • Cloudwaitress and Walletly
    • Design Customization - Advanced
      • Hide Store Header Section (image)
    • Examples of Dates & Times and their corresponding formats
    • Export/Import Menu Feature
    • How To Add Driver Tracking
    • How To Add SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
    • How To Change Weekly Reporting View
    • How to Create & Import a Menu Using a Spreadsheet
    • How to Enable Pre-Orders in CloudWaitress
    • How To Integrate Postmates with CloudWaitress
    • How To Integrate Walletly with CloudWaitress
    • How To Opt-Out of Google Hosted Fonts
    • How to Set Up Conditional Fees in CloudWaitress
    • How To Set Up Google Analytics Integration
    • How to Show/Hide Header Function
    • Link Directly to menu
    • Managing the Order Dashboard
    • Order Acknowledgement Feature
    • Pause Ordering Feature
    • Purchase A Domain Name
    • Set Maximum Orders Per Time Interval
    • Setup A Custom Domain
    • Setup An iOS & Android App
    • Setup Custom Checkout Fields
    • Setup Facebook Login
    • Setup Facebook Ordering
    • Setup Google OAuth Client ID
    • Uber Direct Setup Manual
    • Understanding Languages
      • How users can change languages on frontend
    • Understanding Printing
      • How to Set Up a Printer on Android
      • Printing - Windows Network Printing
      • Printing - Windows Shared Printing
      • Printing - API Key
      • Add a USB printer to Windows
      • Setup Split Printing
      • How to copy the printer API key
      • Setup Printing For Windows
  • Platform Information
    • Customer Accounts
    • Your Subscription & Billing
    • Special & New Features
      • Public Holiday Surcharge
      • Make Service Pop-Up Required
      • COVID-19 Discount for United Kingdom
      • Delayed Order Email Notification
  • Resellers
    • Overview
    • Getting Started
    • Documentation
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On this page
  • Setup Process
  • Example Menu Structure
  • Menus
  • Categories
  • Dishes
  • Option Sets
  • Dish Tags
  • Common Menu Problems
  • No menu or categories showing under the store
  • Dish images to large
  1. Getting Started

Setup Your Menus

To accept orders online, you need to set up your online menu. You can create and manage all your menus under the "Menus" section in the restaurant dashboard.

Previous10-Minute QuickstartNextConfigure Your Services

Last updated 2 months ago

Setup Process

Menus are organized in a tree structure. Menus contain categories and categories contain dishes. The general setup process is as follows.

  1. Create a menu

  2. Create all the categories under the menu

  3. Create dishes under the categories

  4. Create option-sets to add customization to dishes

  5. Create dish tags to highlight attributes of particular dishes

You will likely only need one menu. Multiple menus are useful if certain items are restricted in particular ways. You may need to create a "Breakfast" menu or a "Delivery" menu depending on your requirements

Example Menu Structure

- Menu: Main menu
-- Category: Pizzas
---- Dish: Ham & Cheese
---- Dish: Margrita
---- Dish: Veggie Supreme
-- Category: Sides
---- Dish: Chicken Wings
---- Dish: Fries
-- Category: Drinks
---- Dish: Iced Tea
---- Dish: Cola
---- Dish: Water

Menus

These represent your actual real-life menus. Many stores have just one main menu that's always available. Others may have a lunch & dinner menu or a pickup only menu. You will need at least one menu for your online store to work.

Menu availability can depend on certain conditions such as order types (pickups, deliveries or dine-ins), order timings (now, later or pre-order only). They can also be restricted to certain days and timings.

If you only have one menu available, there is no need to place restrictions on it. You can restrict the system globally to your business rules and the menu will work according to that. Restricting a menu to certain conditions is only needed if you have multiple menus

Categories

Categories represent a sub-section of a menu and consist of dishes. For example, if you have one standard menu, your categories might include:

  • Starters

  • Mains

  • Sides

  • Drinks

  • Desserts

In some instances, you may need to create a separate menu instead of using a category. For example, If you have many different categories of drinks, such as spirits, wines, beers, sodas, etc. You might want to create a separate drinks menu for all those categories instead of adding it to your food menu.

Dishes

Dishes represent actual items that can be purchased. There are 2 types of dishes.

Standard Dishes

A standard dish works as you would expect. You would use it to create items such:

  • Ham sandwich

  • Veggie pizza

  • Vanilla ice-cream

Dish Ingredients

Standard dishes can contain a list of ingredients. The purpose of this is to allow customers to easily remove certain ingredients. A customer can remove the desired ingredients when they select the dish.

Combo Dishes

Combos are a special type of dish that contain other dishes. It allows you to create a list of choices for customers to select various standard dishes. For example, you can create:

  • Choose 3 pizzas, 2 sides and 2 drinks

  • Choose a burger, side and drink

To do this you will first need to have created some standard dishes. Then when creating your combo, you can create 4 choices, 3 pizza choices and one drink choice. You can then assign dish choices to the pizzas and drinks for customers to choose from.

Combo dishes cannot contain option sets or ingredients directly. Instead when a customer chooses a standard dish within a combo, if the chosen standard dish has any option sets assigned to it, a user can customize it accordingly.

Dish Availability & Status

There are 3 statuses available for a dish. They are:

  • Hidden - hides dish from the menu

  • Available - shows dish from the menu and allows ordering

  • Out of stock - prevents ordering and shows out of stock on the dish

In the admin dashboard, you can edit the status of a dish by checking the tickbox on the left of it. Then select the desired status from the popup menu.

Option Sets

All dish customization is done using option sets. Option sets are a configurable set of options that can be assigned to any number of dishes. With option sets, you are able to create requirements such as:

  • Select your pizza crust

  • Select one or more sauces

  • Select at least 4 toppings

To learn how to create an option set that meets your requirements, read the descriptions of each of the settings available when creating an option set. Each setting is explained in detail. Alternatively, watch our menu setup video above to see us create the above examples.

Dish Tags

Tags allow you to highly particular attributes about a dish with a fully customizable visual indicator. You can create tags for attributes such as:

  • Spicy

  • Vegan

  • Gluten free

  • Popular

  • Chef's Recommendation

  • Limited Time

Common Menu Problems

No menu or categories showing under the store

For your menu to display in your online store, make sure to add at least one category and one dish to it.

Dish images to large

We highly recommend that you use the website or to optimize all your images. Given that the maximum image width is only around 600 pixels, it's best to make sure all your images are no wider than that. This is going to help significantly with your page load time especially for mobile customers.

Please email or use the chat support feature to get any assistance.

https://www.birme.net
https://tinypng.com/
support@cloudwaitress.com
Menu setup video tutorial