Building and editing your menu
Categories, products, prices, allergens, choices and meal deals: how your menu fits together and how to change it. Whether you imported your menu or are starting from scratch, this is where you tidy it up.
Start by importing, if you have a menu already
Most shops already have a menu somewhere: a printed card, a board on the wall, a PDF. Pekkish can read a photo or file of it and build a draft for you to check, which is far quicker than typing it all in. Importing your menu walks through it step by step.
Typing it in by hand is quicker if your menu is only a handful of items, or mostly "build your own" with lots of choices. Everything below works the same either way.
Categories
Open Menu → Categories. Categories group related products. For a sandwich shop that might be "Sandwiches", "Hot food", "Cold drinks" and "Crisps & snacks". Three to six is usually right, because a long list of categories is hard to scroll through on a phone.
Each category needs a name. You can also add an image, which the Billboard layout shows prominently. Drag categories into the order you want customers to see them.
Your own photos, or ours
Press Choose a photo on the category. One window has three tabs: Our library, Unsplash and Your own photo. Click any photo to see it large, with how it will look as a banner and as a tile, then press Use this photo and Save.
Your own photo is shown just as it is. Photos from our library or Unsplash are other people's photographs, so your menu shows a small credit to the photographer in the corner of the photo ("Photo by … on Unsplash"). That's a condition of using them, and it can't be switched off. Use your own photo later and the credit disappears with the stock one.
Categories can be nested one level, for example "Sandwiches" containing "Cold" and "Hot". Deeper than that gets confusing on a phone.
Products
Under Menu → Products, press Add product. Each product has:
- Name: what the customer sees
- Description: short and appetising. "BLT" does better as "Smoked back bacon, lettuce, tomato and mayo on white or brown bloomer."
- Category: where it appears on your menu
- Price: in pounds and pence
- Status: Active items are on sale. Set an item to Inactive to take it off your storefront without deleting it, for example when you've run out or it's seasonal.
- Photo: optional, but products with a photo tend to sell better
- Allergens: see below
Catering shops that are VAT registered also set a VAT rate on each product, and enter prices before VAT. See Catering.
Allergens
Each product has two lists of the 14 major allergens: contains, and may contain traces of. Tick every one that applies. Customers see them on your menu and they're printed on order tickets and labels.
This is your legal responsibility. The menu importer brings in allergens only where your menu clearly marks them, and never guesses from ingredients, so check every product, including imported ones. Options have allergens too: a "Cheddar" extra should be marked as containing milk.
Choices: option groups
Option groups let customers customise what they order: bread, extras, size, how it's cooked. Set them up under Menu → Option groups. For each group you choose:
- Name: "Bread", "Extras", "Size"
- Required or not: must the customer choose something?
- Minimum and maximum choices: typically 1 and 1 for bread, 0 and 5 for extras
- Options: each with a name, an optional price change (for example "Cheddar +£0.50") and any allergens
Then attach the group where it's needed. On a category, it applies to every product in that category, which is the quickest way to give all your sandwiches a bread choice. On a product, it applies to that product only.
Customers choose options in a pop-up with a running price. They can't add the item to their basket until they've made every required choice.
Meal deals
Set up bundles under Meal deals in the sidebar. A meal deal is made of slots you define, such as "Sandwich + Snack + Drink", and you choose which products count for each slot. Price it one of three ways:
- Fixed bundle price: the whole combination for, say, £6.00
- Percentage off: for example 10% off the combination
- Amount off: for example £1 off the combination
Meal deals apply automatically at checkout when the basket matches. Customers don't need a code. The menu importer doesn't create meal deals, so set up any your printed menu mentions.
Before you go live
- Check prices against your current menu, especially if you imported from an older photo
- Check allergens on every product and option
- Make sure anything you don't sell online is set to Inactive
- Place a test order on your test site and go through the whole checkout
The rest of the setup, from your address to going live, is in Getting started.
Stuck on something? Contact support.