Adding an online store for your bakery can help you to streamline the ordering and payment, as well as delivery and pickup processes for your business.
If you’re thinking of setting up your online storefront with Shopify, you’ll find out quickly that Shopify on its own doesn’t come with features that can support a bakery’s business model.
Instead, you’ll need to install a few additional apps to make your bakery store work the way it should.
Here are top three I recommend:
Pick up and delivery app
A date and time picker app will allow your customers to select the best time and date for them to have their food delivered, or picked up from their store.
For this, we recommend Store Pickup + Delivery by Zapiet. With this app, you can not only offer the usual pick up and delivery options, but also provide curbside pickup as well.
The app allows you to customise things like
- Inventory based on store
- Allow products to be pickup or delivery only
- Limit the number of pickups in a day
- Preparation buffer times, i.e. “order by 2pm for next day delivery”
- Control over time slots for pick up and delivery
- … and more!
The app works for single as well as multi-location stores and I’d say is an essential part of any bakery store.
Product options app
If you do custom orders for your baked goods, you’ll find product options quite useful for your store. Product options gives your customers more options for their custom orders such as:
- Multiple flavours
- Wording
- Decoration
- Packaging
- … and more!
Having the Product Option feature will save you the time from having to note down your customer’s order preferences manually.
Here are some product option apps we recommend:
The apps differ slightly with what they offer, so do check both out before deciding on one. If you can’t decide, you could always try both and keep that best fits your business.
“We’re open/closed” app
By default, you won’t be able to set an opening or closing hour on Shopify. While this isn’t a big deal for e-commerce stores on Shopify, it can be a headache for bakeries. Since you can only take orders during opening hours, you don’t want customers to be ordering outside of that.
To only take orders during opening hours, you can use an app like We’re Open. The app will not only disable the Add to Cart and Checkout buttons, you’ll also be able to put your store on holiday mode too (super useful for solo bakers!).
Conclusion
There you have it – the top three apps I’d recommend every bakery owner who is planning to build their store on Shopify to install. They will not only make your life a lot easier, but could also help you improve your conversions.
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