Taking orders online sounds like a single decision and turns out to be four: where the order comes in, how you get paid, how the kitchen finds out, and who absorbs the fees. A bakery taking cake deposits has almost nothing in common with a cafe selling a lunch rush, even though both would say they want online ordering. Here is how the pieces fit together, and where a San Antonio shop usually loses money without noticing.
Pickup orders and delivery orders are different problems
Pickup ordering means a customer pays on your site and collects the order themselves, and pickup is the simpler of the two by a wide margin. Pickup has no driver to dispatch, no delivery radius to define, no handoff where food sits in a bag going cold, and no third party standing between you and the customer. For a bakery, a butcher, a coffee roaster, or a taco shop with a counter, pickup covers most of the demand.
Delivery adds a logistics business on top of your food business. Either you hire and schedule drivers, with the insurance and payroll that implies, or you hand delivery to a marketplace and accept its commission and its control of the customer relationship. First decide whether you actually need delivery. Many shops find that pickup plus clear parking instructions solves the real problem, which was usually a phone nobody could answer during a rush.
Your own site versus a third-party marketplace
A third-party marketplace is an app that lists your menu alongside your competitors and charges a commission on every order it sends you. Commission on those platforms commonly runs between 15 and 30 percent of the order total, depending on whether the platform also delivers. Marketplaces bring volume and demand nothing technical from you, which is a genuine advantage when you are starting out.
Ordering on your own site inverts the trade. You pay card processing rather than commission, you keep the customer’s email address, and you decide what the experience looks like. The catch is that nobody discovers your ordering page the way they browse an app, so traffic has to come from your own channels: your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio, a sign at the register. In practice, the shops that do best run both, and push regulars toward the site where the margin is better.
What WooCommerce handles well, and what it does not
WooCommerce is the e-commerce system that runs on WordPress, and WooCommerce handles scheduled pickup ordering well once it is set up properly. Out of the box WooCommerce gives you a product catalog, variations for size and flavor, inventory counts, coupons, order emails, and a checkout that takes cards. Add-on plugins cover pickup time slots, order lead times, and local-pickup-only shipping.
What WooCommerce does not do well is act as a live kitchen display during a rush. WooCommerce was built for shipped goods, so its default assumption is that an order can wait. A cafe needing tickets printed in the kitchen within seconds of payment is usually better served by a restaurant point-of-sale system with ordering built in, such as the ordering module attached to a modern register. For scheduled pickup, which is most bakery and catering work, WooCommerce fits cleanly.
Lead times, cutoffs, and capacity are the real build
Capacity rules are the part of online ordering that owners underestimate and that breaks shops when it is missing. A bakery that accepts a custom cake order for tomorrow morning at eleven at night has a problem the software created. So the ordering system needs to encode the same rules the person on the phone would apply: a minimum lead time per product, a daily cutoff, a cap on how many of an item can be sold per day, and blackout dates.
Those rules differ by product, which is what makes them fiddly. A dozen conchas might need four hours of notice while a tiered cake needs five days. Thanksgiving week needs a cap no other week needs. First write the rules down as you already apply them by phone. Then build them in. Skipping that step is how a shop ends up refunding orders and apologizing, which costs more than the build would have.
Payments, fees, and who pays them
Card processing on your own site runs a little under three percent of the order plus a small fixed fee per transaction, which is the standard published rate for mainstream processors like Stripe, Square, and PayPal. Compared with marketplace commission, that difference is the entire financial argument for owning your ordering page. On a thousand dollars of weekly pickup orders, the gap between processing fees and a marketplace cut is real money.
Two choices follow. First, decide whether to absorb the fee or add a small service charge, and if you add one, show it plainly at checkout rather than burying it. Second, decide whether to take payment up front or on collection. Paying up front cuts no-shows sharply, which matters most for custom orders where you have already bought the ingredients. For low-value coffee orders, paying at the counter is often friendlier.
What the build actually costs
A pickup ordering setup on WordPress and WooCommerce sits at the lower end of the project range, because most of the work is configuration rather than custom development. Satxly projects run from five thousand to twenty thousand dollars and take six to ten weeks, and an ordering build lands toward the lower end of that band unless the capacity rules are unusual. Our guide to website costs in San Antonio breaks down what moves the number.
The ongoing costs are smaller but real: hosting that can handle a checkout, a payment gateway, a handful of paid plugins renewed yearly, and someone keeping the whole stack updated. Budget for maintenance from the start rather than discovering it in month four. An abandoned WooCommerce install with eleven outdated plugins is a security problem attached to your card payments, which is a worse position than having no online ordering at all.
Start with one product and one pickup window
A narrow launch beats a complete menu, because the first version of online ordering always reveals rules nobody thought to write down. Pick your single most-ordered item, offer it for pickup in one time window, and run it for two weeks. Then watch what actually goes wrong: orders at odd hours, customers asking for substitutions the form does not allow, a staff member who never checks the order inbox.
Fix those, then widen the menu. For example, a cafe might launch with whole-bean coffee for afternoon pickup only, learn that half its customers want to add a pastry, and add exactly that. Each step stays small enough to recover from. Building the full menu with delivery and gift cards on day one means debugging all of it at once, in front of customers, which is the slowest path to a working system. Good web design for ordering is mostly deciding what to leave out.
Thinking about taking orders online?
Tell us what you sell and how far ahead you need orders, and we will tell you honestly whether WooCommerce is the right tool or whether your register already does it. Satxly builds only for San Antonio small businesses, projects run on video calls, and we write back within one business day. Get in touch.
