best ecommerce platforms for restaurants under $10 a month

Square Online

Square's free plan is the closest thing to a default answer for a restaurant with no budget: you get a hosted ordering page or a full site, pickup, local delivery and shipping, and it shares one menu and one dashboard with Square's restaurant POS if you already run one. Nothing is charged monthly, so the real cost is the card rate, and that is where the free tier is expensive: 3.3% + 30 cents per online order against 2.9% + 30 cents on the paid plans, which is roughly a dollar more on a $25 order. Paid tiers buy back the lower rate plus custom site design and QR-code ordering. The trade-off worth knowing: your ordering page lives on Square's platform and its design controls are modest compared with a general store builder.

GloriaFood

GloriaFood gives away the ordering system itself: unlimited orders, unlimited locations, an order button for your existing site, Facebook ordering links and a table-reservation widget, with no monthly fee and no commission. The catch is payments. Connecting your own payment gateway so customers can pay by card online is a US$29 a month add-on, so a restaurant that wants card-on-order and not cash-on-delivery is over this question's budget the moment it switches that on. Other extras are priced the same way: US$19 a month for advanced promotions, US$49 a month per location for the POS. Used as designed, though, it is the most complete free ordering setup here for a single independent restaurant.

DoorDash Online Ordering (Storefront)

This is DoorDash's answer to restaurants who resent its marketplace commission: orders placed on your own website, Google listing or a QR code carry no commission at all, and there is no monthly fee, so you pay only card processing. Your menu stays in sync with the DoorDash app, and you can hand deliveries to DoorDash's driver network while the customer pays the delivery fee. It is the cheapest way to get commission-free ordering with delivery attached. The reason to think twice is dependence: the storefront, the customer data and the delivery all sit inside the company whose marketplace fees you are trying to avoid.

Grubhub Direct

Grubhub's version of the same idea: a branded ordering site of your own, with hosting, commission and delivery fees waived, so the only cost is order processing. It comes with a site styler, automatic menu updates, access to your own customer data for email and social marketing, and it can be bolted onto a website you already have. The condition is the important part: it is offered to restaurants that are already Grubhub Marketplace customers, so it is free in the sense that it comes with a relationship you are already paying commission on elsewhere. If you are not on the marketplace, this is not the free option it looks like.

Payhip

Payhip is a store builder for people who do not want a store platform: you get a free page, unlimited products and unlimited revenue, and it takes 5% of each sale instead of a monthly fee. For a restaurant that means gift cards, sauces, merch or a ticketed supper club can go on sale today at no fixed cost, with Stripe or PayPal charging their own rate on top. What it is not is an ordering system, so there is no pickup time, no delivery zone and no kitchen ticket. The 5% is also worth doing the maths on: past roughly $600 a month in sales, the $29 plan's 2% cut is cheaper.

Big Cartel

Big Cartel was built for artists selling a handful of things, which is a surprisingly good fit for a restaurant's merch table: a small shop, physical and digital products, shipping labels, and a design you control. There is still a free Gold plan, though the pricing page now leads with a seven-day trial of the $15 Platinum plan and says only that Gold is limited, without publishing its ceiling. Platinum is the plan that adds a custom domain and print-on-demand apps, and at $15 a month it sits just over this question's budget. Like the other store builders here, it has no concept of a food order.

Odoo eCommerce

Odoo's One App Free plan is the most generous offer in this table if you read the small print: one app, unlimited users, hosted by Odoo, free forever, and because eCommerce depends on the Website and Invoicing apps you get those too. So a restaurant can run a real site with a store and issue invoices without paying anything. The wall arrives the moment you install a second app you actually want, such as the restaurant POS or inventory: the plan flips to Standard at US$31.10 per user per month. It is also the most business-software-shaped option here, which is either the appeal or the reason to skip it.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce is the store half of WordPress, free to download and free to keep, and it is the option that costs nothing in licence terms while costing something in effort: you need WordPress hosting, a domain, and someone willing to update plugins. For a restaurant already running a WordPress site it is the cheapest way to add a shop, and food-ordering extensions exist for pickup times and delivery zones, most of them paid. Nothing is taken from your sales by WooCommerce itself; your payment gateway sets that rate. Budget for hosting and treat the maintenance as the real price.

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is the other free, self-hosted route: download the source, install it on hosting you choose, and own the store and its data outright. Its module marketplace is where the money goes, and most of what a restaurant would want, such as delivery slots or a menu layout, is a paid module. Compared with WooCommerce it is a standalone application rather than a plugin, which suits a restaurant group with an in-house developer and suits nobody who wants to be selling by Friday. Nothing is deducted per order by PrestaShop itself.

Hostinger Website Builder

If you want your own site with a store attached and will not accept a platform's ordering page, Hostinger is the cheapest honest way in: the plan that includes ecommerce is $3.99 a month, and it bundles hosting, a domain for the first year, email and SEO tools, with nothing taken from your sales. The price has a string attached that the table cannot show in one figure: it is a 48-month prepayment of $191.52, and the renewal is $16.99 a month. Treat it as roughly $8 a month averaged over eight years, or as $3.99 if you are confident about four. It is a site builder, not a restaurant system, so pickup times and kitchen tickets are not part of it.

Ecwid by Lightspeed

Ecwid's trick is that it drops into a website you already have, whether that is WordPress, Wix or Squarespace, so a restaurant with a site it likes can add a shop without rebuilding anything. The Starter plan is $5 a month and caps you at ten products, which is enough for gift cards, a few jars of sauce and a t-shirt, and Ecwid takes nothing per sale on any plan. Note that the free plan Ecwid was known for is no longer on its pricing page, so roundups still calling it free are out of date. Selling on Instagram and Facebook, and a custom domain, start at the $29 Venture plan.

Shopify

Shopify is in this table as the benchmark that no longer has a cheap door. The $5 Starter plan that made it a sensible place to sell gift cards is closed to new merchants, so Basic at $39 a month, or $29 billed yearly, is the entry point, plus 2.9% + 30 cents on online cards and a further 2% if you use a gateway other than Shopify Payments. What you get for it is the strongest checkout and app ecosystem here, including third-party restaurant ordering apps. For a restaurant whose online sales are a few gift cards a month, that is a lot of platform to rent.

UpMenu

UpMenu sells restaurant ordering as modules you assemble, and the one you cannot do without, Web Ordering, is $49 a month for up to 75 orders, rising to $89 for 210 and $169 for unlimited. Everything else is priced separately: your own branded app is another $49 a location, pulling Uber Eats and DoorDash tickets into one panel is $9, a driver app is $14 per driver. Orders themselves carry no commission, and plans are monthly with no contract, which suits a seasonal restaurant. It is the clearest illustration in this table of why commission-free is not the same as cheap: at 75 orders a month, $49 works out around 65 cents an order before card fees.

ChowNow

ChowNow is the full-service end of commission-free ordering: its Launch plan bundles a direct ordering tool, an SEO-built website and a branded mobile app, and orders through any of them carry no commission. That arrives at $229 to $249 a month before a $119 to $499 setup fee, 2.95% + 29 cents per transaction, and a $99 Apple developer fee if you want the app in the App Store. The pitch is that this is cheaper than paying a marketplace roughly a fifth of every order, which is true at volume and expensive at ten orders a week. It is in this table to mark the ceiling, not the budget.

Owner.com

Owner.com sells one bundle rather than modules: a website built to rank on Google, online ordering, a branded app, loyalty and automated marketing, month to month with no contract. Pricing is a choice between $249 a month plus 5% of each order, or $499 a month with no per-order cut, which means the flat plan only makes sense past roughly $5,000 a month in online sales, as Owner itself says. Its own caveat is unusually direct: partnering with Owner means giving up some control over how your digital presence looks. Like ChowNow, it is here to show what the far end of the market costs, not as an answer to a $10 budget.