Restaurants that start selling their food online already have the hardest part of building an eCommerce business: a product people have tasted and talked about.
A customer-loved chilli oil or a house hot sauce appears in its online shop with a reputation, and new food brands with no dining room behind them spend a long time and a large slice of their budget trying to create that from nothing.
eCommerce marketing works a little differently than filling tables. The restaurants that successfully make this leap run the online shop as a separate operation with its own customers and habits.
The Dining Room Comes Before Everything Else
Someone who has eaten the braised short rib more times than they can remember will buy the sauce that goes with it, and they’ll often buy another jar for a friend. A small card on each table, or a line on the bill pointing to the online shop, turns that goodwill into an order. QR codes can work their magic here too, as long as the page they open loads fast on a phone and shows the product and the basket button without any scrolling.
Starting with email marketing is a good foundational strategy. Most restaurants already have a list from their booking system and have never sent it anywhere. Those diners agreed to hear from the business when they booked, and they’re warm. A short note when the shop launches, with a photo of the product, will win more early orders than a paid ad aimed at strangers.
Selling to People Who’ve Never Eaten There
This is where it gets much harder. Once the shop has worked through the regulars, growth depends on strangers. The product page has to do the job a good waiter does at the table. That means describing the taste in plain words and saying what to eat it with, with photos of the product on food.
Search is slow to build and then keeps paying. People look up what to put on fried eggs or how to make a quick weeknight curry, and a shop with recipe content written around its own products picks up that traffic for years. Restaurants have the upper hand because they already know the recipes, especially those their customers love most.
Paid Social and the Food Behind the Brand
Food sells well on social media because people buy it on impulse after seeing it. Short video from the kitchen beats polished studio content for restaurant brands. Keep it simple, honest and authentic. A pan of sauce reducing, or someone in chef whites, labelling jars by hand, tells a cold audience that a real kitchen made the product. Building trust with people who’ve never heard of the restaurant is an ongoing project, and it should start from an authentic place.
Marketing is a massive undertaking that requires finesse and expertise to succeed. This is the point where many owners bring in outside help, since running a kitchen and a growing online shop at once stretches anyone. A food marketing agency will have seen how other restaurant brands handled the move online, and it can set up tracking and creative testing so the budget follows the ads that produce orders. That frees the operations manager to focus on operations, the chef to spend more time in the kitchen, and the owner to oversee the entire business.
Keeping the Restaurant and the Shop Connected
It’s worth going back to the dining room for a moment. Once both sides are running, they send customers to each other. Online buyers who live nearby will want to book a table, and diners who’ve cooked with the product at home come in already knowing what to order.
Subscriptions are another great idea. A monthly box of products provides the business with predictable revenue. It also gives the kitchen an excuse to keep developing new products, which, in turn, keeps the business’s offerings interesting.
Where Food Businesses Can Go Next
Moving from restaurant to eCommerce offers owners a way to build on the reputation the dining room has already earned, with product pages and content that explain the food to people who’ve never tasted it.
A safe place to begin is to pick the product that regulars ask about the most and write a page for it that makes sense to someone who has never visited
