Food is the most common thing Indians sell online, and the hardest to sell well from a chat window alone. Menus change, stock runs out, orders arrive at midnight for a breakfast you cannot make, and half the thread is spent re-sending the same price list. A simple website fixes all four — and for a food business it is free to start on Storzu.
Which kind of food business are you?
The setup differs more than people expect. Find yourself below — the rest of this guide assumes you know which column you are in.
- Restaurants and cafés — a browsable menu with categories, veg and non-veg marking, and dine-in, takeaway or delivery as separate choices. Your menu is stable; your daily specials are not, so keep specials as their own category you can switch on and off.
- Cloud kitchens — no walk-ins, so your link is your shopfront. Delivery radius and slot control matter more than décor photos. Many cloud kitchens run several brands from one kitchen; give each brand its own store rather than mixing cuisines in one confusing menu.
- Bakeries and cake shops — the order is the hard part, not the catalogue. Flavour, weight, tier, eggless or not, message on the cake, and the delivery date all have to arrive together or you are back in a twenty-message thread.
- Sweet shops and mithai — weight-based pricing and festival spikes. Set up 250g / 500g / 1kg as variants once and you stop re-quoting during Diwali, which is exactly when you have no time to.
- Ice cream and dessert parlours — cold-chain limits your delivery radius and your slots. Bricks, tubs, cones and party packs price very differently, so they belong as variants, not separate items.
- Juice and smoothie bars — small ticket, high repeat. The win is a standing subscription-style order rather than a fresh negotiation each morning.
- Caterers— you are quoting, not selling off a shelf. Publish per-plate menus and minimum headcounts so enquiries arrive qualified instead of starting at "how much for a party?".
- Home cooks and tiffin services— a rotating weekly menu and a hard daily cut-off. Your constraint is tomorrow's headcount, so publish the cut-off prominently and hold to it.
- Meat, fish and poultry— cut, weight and cleaning preference are the whole order. Same-day slots only, and be explicit about what "1kg" means before or after cleaning, because that is where disputes come from.
- Dairy and milk delivery— recurring rather than one-off. Your customers order the same thing daily, so the site's job is a standing list and a monthly total, not discovery.
- Chocolate, confectionery and hampers — gifting drives this, so festival and corporate hampers deserve their own category with clear lead times.
The four things every food business needs online
Whatever you sell, the same four things separate a store that takes orders from a page that just sits there.
- Photographs with prices next to them. Indian buyers do not enquire for prices on food; they move on. Natural daylight, plain surface, one dish per photo.
- Variants instead of separate items. Half and full, 500g and 1kg, eggless and regular. Listing these as separate products doubles your catalogue and still gets the billing wrong.
- An availability switch. Sold out by 2pm is normal in food. Mark items unavailable rather than deleting them — deleting loses the photo and the description you will want again tomorrow.
- A cut-off time and slots. This is the single biggest source of bad reviews in food delivery, and it is entirely preventable.
Taking the order where the customer already is
Every item on a Storzu store has an Order on WhatsAppbutton. The customer taps it and WhatsApp opens with the item, the variant and the price already filled in — they just press send. You get a complete order in your normal WhatsApp inbox instead of "bhaiya rate kya hai". There is no app to install and no marketplace in between.
For a fuller walkthrough of selling this way, see how to sell on WhatsApp in India.
Getting paid without losing a cut
Most Indian food sellers take direct UPI. Share your UPI ID or QR, the customer pays from PhonePe, GPay or Paytm, and the money is in your bank in seconds with no per-order commission. That difference is not small: aggregator commissions on food routinely run 18–30% of the order value, which for most kitchens is the entire margin.
For bulk and party orders, take an advance on UPI and the balance on delivery. On paid plans you can connect your own payment gateway and collect the full amount online. The details are in accepting UPI payments without commission.
Cut-offs, slots and the perishable problem
Food is the one category where taking an order you cannot fulfil is worse than taking no order. Three settings prevent almost every such case: an order cut-off time(custom cakes close at 6pm for next-day; tomorrow's tiffin count closes at 9pm tonight), pickup and delivery slots so orders spread across the day instead of landing at once, and a delivery radius you actually honour — which for ice cream and fresh fish is much smaller than for packaged sweets.
FSSAI and what you must display
Nearly every food business in India needs at least an FSSAI Basic Registration, home kitchens and tiffin services included. This is independent of where you sell. Display your FSSAI number on your site and your packaging — customers look for it, and it costs nothing to show. If you cross the turnover thresholds you will need a State or Central licence instead; check your current category rather than assuming registration is enough forever.
What it costs
Start on the Free forever plan at ₹0 with COD or direct UPI and no per-order commission. Upgrade when you want your own domain, an online payment gateway, or a larger catalogue — see the pricing page for current limits.
Start with ten items, not your whole menu
The most common mistake is trying to photograph everything before launching. Put up your ten best-selling items with good photos and correct prices, share the link on WhatsApp status tonight, and add the rest over the following week. A live store with ten items earns more than a perfect one that never goes up.