F&B e-commerce and online ordering in Singapore

Selling food online is constrained by something most e-commerce never has to think about: the product goes off, and the kitchen has a capacity.

3 shipped projects on this page. Every one names the client and links to a live system.

The work

What this work usually involves

Selling food online is constrained by something most e-commerce never has to think about: the product goes off, and the kitchen has a capacity.

That single fact reshapes the store. A checkout that lets a customer pick any delivery date will eventually take fifty orders for a Saturday the kitchen cannot cover, and the failure lands on the chef rather than on the website. Slots need capacity, lead times and cut-offs, and the store has to stop selling when they are reached.

Shelf life shapes the catalogue too. Freshly baked and freshly made goods cannot be treated like packaged stock, so the store often needs two modes: shippable products with a normal cart, and fresh items limited to specific days and areas.

For beverage brands with an unusual product, there is a content problem before there is a commerce problem. A tea brewed from cacao husks or a hand-sewn blooming flower tea has to be explained before anyone will buy, and the product page is doing the explaining.

Repeat purchase is where the margin is. Consumables get rebought, and a store that makes reordering effortless earns considerably more than one optimised only for the first sale.

What we build

Common questions

How do we stop the site taking more orders than the kitchen can fill?

Capacity on each delivery slot, with lead times and cut-offs. Once a slot is full the store stops offering it. Without that, the website creates a problem the kitchen discovers at 6am.

Can we sell both shippable products and fresh local delivery?

Yes, and they usually need different rules. Packaged goods ship normally, while fresh items are limited by date, area and capacity. The store can run both without confusing the customer.

How do we sell a product people have not heard of?

The product page has to teach before it sells: what it is, where it comes from, how to prepare it, and why it is different. For unfamiliar products that content does more for conversion than any pricing change.