Shopify for Restaurants: What It Runs, Where It Stops

Every point-of-sale vendor selling to restaurants answers the same question from its own side of the counter, and Shopify is no exception. What none of them says plainly is where one system ends and the next has to begin. That boundary, not a feature list, is the decision a restaurant owner is actually making when they ask whether Shopify can run the place.

This page draws the boundary, from Shopify's own documentation and the vendors' published pricing read on September 1, 2026. The answer is not one word, because the platform genuinely runs one half of a restaurant well and does not attempt the other half at all.

The Quick Verdict

Find your format in the first column; everything after it is the evidence underneath.

What Shopify Runs for a Restaurant Today

Shopify publishes a page specifically about moving a restaurant online, and it is worth reading as a scope statement rather than as marketing. It names three outcomes, and those three are a precise description of what the platform actually does for food service.

Underneath those three outcomes sit six capabilities that a restaurant will use daily. They come from different parts of the platform, which is why no single settings screen contains them all.

Gift cards deserve one clarification, because restaurants buy them for a reason other retailers do not: a voucher sold in November is a meal that has to be served in March. That makes it money you owe rather than money you have earned, and the accounting differs accordingly — our guide to gift cards as a liability works through what that does to your books.

The counter is the other half worth naming early. Shopify POS sells from the same catalogue as the online menu, and its current pricing page names only two configurations rather than the three tier names merchants often remember: the free level is described as casual in-person selling, included in every paid plan, with POS Pro as the upgrade.

The name "POS Lite" does not appear in that text as read on September 1, 2026, which is worth knowing when you cross-check anything against Shopify's live pages. Our walkthrough of the POS app covers what the till does in daily use.

How a Menu Becomes a Product Catalogue

Shopify's instruction for building a restaurant menu online is to add products and prices to the online store. That is not a simplification for beginners; it is the actual data model, and everything a menu can and cannot do on this platform follows from it.

The limits are published and they are generous in one direction and tight in the other. A product can have up to 2,048 variants, but it can have a maximum of three options — and it is the second number that a menu runs into. The variant ceiling is also not universally usable: Shopify warns that some third-party themes, theme app extensions, public apps and sales channels might not support more than 100 variants, names Stocky and the legacy Order Printer as two that stop there, and tells you to contact the app developer about any other app.

Option and variant limits from Shopify's variant documentation, read September 1, 2026.

Where Tipping Works, and Where It Does Not

Shopify's restaurant guidance states that you can activate the option for customers to leave tips when they place an order, and the checkout settings behind that are more specific than most merchants expect. The caps in particular are worth knowing before a large catering order goes through.

There is one absence worth stating rather than skipping. The documentation we read describes a checkout tipping flow and nothing more — no tip splitting between staff, no post-order tipping once the meal has been served. If your operation depends on distributing tips across a team, that happens outside Shopify.

Where Shopify Stops: Tables, Tickets and Modifiers

This is the section most vendor comparisons leave out, and it is the one a restaurant owner needs first. The honest way to state it is to say what we checked and what those pages contain, rather than to make a claim about every page Shopify has ever published.

What we can say is specific. Shopify's own restaurant guidance describes pickup, delivery and gift cards, and the only place that guidance acknowledges a dining room is the clause offering those three in addition to, or instead of, dining in your restaurant. Our own coverage of the POS app states that restaurant-style tabs — split bills, course timing, table management — are absent from the till.

Shopify capabilities read on help.shopify.com and the Simmer listing, September 1, 2026; coursing wording from Square's own restaurant page, which is the vendor's marketing description of its own product.

Our own POS Pro guide states the conclusion in one line: POS Pro is a retail point of sale, restaurants need table service, kitchen printing and modifiers, and Toast and Square for Restaurants are built for that. We are not going to rebuild that argument here — what the paid till tier still does not give you sets out the full list of limits, restaurants among them.

What an App Closes, and What It Does Not

Simmer, an App Store app built for food service, is the closest route we found to the gaps above. The listing states that modifiers can be created as standard products, which keeps discounting, inventory management and reporting working normally, and that the app creates kitchen displays and prints tickets for your kitchen or prep areas. The same listing names ticket and table management with pre and post-pay tickets.

Simmer's Appetizer plan was $30 a month plus $30 per additional store location, read on September 1, 2026, and the listing names Shopify POS among the products it works with.

Where the listing stops matters as much as what it names: it says nothing about split bills or coursing, so a full dining room is still outside what this route covers.

Four Ways Restaurants Actually Use Shopify

The useful question is not whether Shopify is good for restaurants, but which of these four shapes your business is. The verdict at the top named the pick for each format; this table adds the column that decides the budget — what each shape still has to buy somewhere else.

The pattern behind the table is simple enough to state directly: the less the guest sits down, the more of the stack Shopify can carry. A dining room is the one format where the platform is a supporting player rather than the main system.

Local Delivery and Pickup: The Radius, the Zones and Who Drives

Two questions get merged here constantly, and merging them produces a bad plan. There is the question of which addresses you will serve and what you will charge them, which Shopify answers natively. Then there is the entirely separate question of who physically carries the food.

What Shopify's Own Local Delivery Gives You

Local delivery is configured per location, which matters for anyone running more than one venue: each site draws its own zones and the order routes to the site that serves the address. The three published limits below are the ones that shape a real delivery map.

Source: Shopify Help Center, local delivery, read September 1, 2026

Two conditions sit alongside those numbers and both catch merchants out. A radius zone requires your business location to be verified before it will work, which postal-code zones do not; and the radius does not cross a country border, so a restaurant near one cannot serve the town on the other side of it through this feature.

Pickup is the simpler half, and the readiness time is a setting rather than a promise you improvise: in the Expected pickup date section you select a processing time for in-store pickup from a drop-down menu, and Shopify displays that time to the customer at checkout. What number you choose is a kitchen judgement.

Three Ways the Order Reaches the Guest

These three routes are not variations on one feature. They differ in where the customer places the order, whose customer that person then is, and what you have to qualify for before you can offer the option at all.

Plan requirement and pricing model from the Uber Direct listing and the DoorDash listing, read September 1, 2026.

The distinction that matters most is the one between dispatch and marketplace, because the two are routinely described with the same word. DoorDash's own announcement of the Shopify integration is precise about which of the two it is.

The other half of DoorDash — Drive, the service that dispatches a courier behind someone else's checkout — is a different product, and we could not connect it to Shopify.

Its own product page names Square, Toast and Olo as the kind of online-ordering and POS providers it partners with, and Shopify is not among the names listed; the page words that list as examples rather than as a complete set, so this is what the page says rather than a statement about every partner Drive has. No separate Shopify integration for Drive appeared on the App Store pages we read, which are the ones named in the box above.

What Does Your Restaurant Stack Actually Need?

The table at the top answers by format. This answers by combination — how the food reaches the guest, crossed with how much a single order gets customised and who is going to drive it.

Five questions, and the result is a short plan rather than a verdict: whichever apps, settings and policy lines your answers call for before the first order arrives.

Booking a Table: What the App Store Actually Offers

Reservations are the feature restaurant owners assume must exist, because every hospitality platform has them. On Shopify the answer we found is that they exist, but not from the companies whose names are on the reservation you made last week.

What is available instead is a small set of third-party connectors, and their pricing is modest enough that the decision is about fit rather than cost. Both of the ones we checked put the booking widget on your storefront and keep the reservation data in the app rather than in Shopify.

If bookings are central to how the business works rather than a convenience on the side, the mechanics of deposits, no-show fees and appointment scheduling are a topic of their own — our guide to services and bookings on Shopify covers how that model behaves on the platform generally.

Themes Built for Food and Drink Stores

Theme choice is the question restaurant owners search for most, and it is worth answering concretely rather than with a category link. The six below were read individually on the Shopify Theme Store on September 1, 2026, and each one describes itself in terms of food and drink pages.

Prices and descriptions read individually on themes.shopify.com on September 1, 2026. Theme Store prices change, so treat these as a dated reading rather than a standing price list.

Two boundaries belong with that table. The first is what a theme is for: none of these six describes itself as an online ordering system with pickup and delivery logic, because that logic is a platform setting rather than a theme feature. A theme decides how the menu looks; the delivery zone decides whether the order can be placed at all.

The second is a limit on our own reading. The Theme Store renders its food and drink filter with client-side JavaScript that our tools do not execute, so we publish no count of what that filter returns: these six are a named sample read on one day, not the whole of the category.

For how theme pricing and licensing work in general, our explainer on Shopify themes covers the ground.

Three Restaurants Running on Shopify, and What Each One Shows

Examples are more useful than feature lists here, because what you want to see is where each business drew the line. All three below returned a Shopify signal in their own page headers when we checked them on September 1, 2026.

Mikkelson's Market, a delicatessen in Atlanta, runs its hot deli menu as an ordinary product grid with online ordering and a plain promise that food will be ready for pickup in about fifteen to twenty minutes during deli hours. It is the cleanest illustration of the pattern this article keeps returning to: hot food sold as a catalogue, with no dining room in the transaction at all.

Five Senses Coffee, an Australian specialty roaster with physical sites, shows the next step up. Its own review on the Simmer listing says the app is great for turning Shopify POS into a functional cafe ordering system, and a separate United States merchant's review on the same listing describes running Simmer at several Shopify POS locations for both the kitchen display system and the modifiers — merchants' own accounts on an app store rather than an independent audit.

Conti's Bakeshop & Restaurant in the Philippines is the largest of the three, running its pickup and delivery on Shopify across a chain. The app vendor Zapiet, whose case study documents the build, says the group has processed more than 100,000 Shopify orders — a figure published by the app vendor about its own customer, not an independently audited number.

Five Senses Coffee and Conti's make the same structural point, and it is the point of this whole page: base Shopify carried the catalogue, the checkout and the till, while an app supplied the cafe ordering system in one case and the multi-location pickup and delivery routing in the other. Neither of those two businesses left the platform, and neither pretended the missing half was not missing.

What Toast and Square for Restaurants Cost, and What They Buy

If part of your stack is going to be a vertical system, it helps to know what that costs before the conversation with a salesperson. Both vendors publish entry pricing, and both publish it in a way that needs reading carefully.

Toast figures read on pos.toasttab.com/pricing and Square figures on squareup.com, both September 1, 2026. The Toast pricing page carries a footnote reading that pricing applies to new customers and single locations only. Vendor pricing pages change; card processing is charged separately by both companies and is not included in any figure above.

Three things in that table are easy to read wrongly.

• Toast's own footnote says the published price includes the first hardware terminal subscription, and that additional charges apply for subsequent devices. The pricing FAQ on the same page adds that Toast's services may only be used on approved Toast hardware.
• The Toast pricing page also carries a separate retail tab whose point of sale starts at $90 a month, and it is easy to read the wrong tab and quote the wrong figure.
• Square's positioning for full service — organising orders and timing dishes with coursing features — is the vendor's description of its own product rather than an independent assessment.

The published entry prices on the Shopify side sit in four different places on this page. Here they are in one, as separate subscriptions rather than as a sum: which of them you actually pay is decided by your format, not by adding them together.

• The plan. Basic settles at $39 a month billed monthly, after the free trial and the introductory rate that most plans carry.
• The till. POS Pro is $89 per location per month on top of the plan, and it buys retail features rather than restaurant ones.
• Modifiers and kitchen tickets. $30 a month plus $30 for each additional location, read September 1, 2026, from an app whose listing names Shopify POS among the products it works with.
• Table booking. Third-party connectors start free and reach $79.99 a month at the top tier we checked, read the same day.

How the two platforms differ once you step outside the restaurant vertical is a larger question, and how Shopify and Square differ at the counter answers it for retail generally.

Food Permits: Why There Is No Single US Answer

Selling prepared food online does not create a new licensing regime; it exposes the one you were already in. The reason no article can hand you a checklist is structural rather than editorial, and the FDA states it plainly on its own page.

What that means in practice is that your requirement comes from a city or county health department, and it can differ from the one two hours away.

One named example makes the shape of the obligation concrete: in Chicago, all food establishments must employ and have present on the premises, at all times that temperature-controlled food is being prepared, held for service or served, a Person In Charge holding a city food-service sanitation certificate. A valid ANSI-accredited Certified Food Protection Manager certification may support an application for reciprocity there — that is Chicago's rule, and no other city's.

One neighbouring case is worth separating out. If you also sell packaged goods made in your own kitchen — jars, bakes, sauces shipped rather than served — that is a different regulatory question with its own answer about home kitchens and licensed facilities, and our breakdown of cottage food against a licensed processor deals with it directly.

Setting Up Online Ordering Without Rebuilding the Kitchen

The general work of opening a Shopify store — picking a theme, building pages, connecting a domain and turning on payments — is the same for a restaurant as for anyone else, and this page does not repeat it. If the question is who will actually assemble the storefront, our guide to the three ways to build a Shopify website lays out the options honestly, including doing it yourself.

What is worth doing before any of that is putting the menu in front of real customers. A Shopify trial starts with 3 days free and then, as of September 2026, most plans run at 1 unit of your store currency a month for the first 3 months before standard pricing applies — Basic settles at $39 a month billed monthly after that. That is enough to run one real pickup order end to end before you commit to a point-of-sale contract.

The sequence below matters more than it looks. Steps one to three apply to every format, and step five is the one that decides whether step four is worth configuring at all — there is no point drawing a delivery zone before you know who is driving.

The Bottom Line

The mistake this page exists to prevent is buying a platform for a job it does not claim to do. Read Shopify's restaurant guidance as the scope statement it is — pickup, delivery, gift cards — and it is remarkably good at that scope, including for businesses with no dining room at all.

Frequently Asked Questions