Building your catalog

Your catalog is the product. The builder lets you structure it exactly as customers should browse it, and everything you publish goes live across your app, web ordering, the kiosk, the POS register and dine-in menus immediately — no app release required.

Where to find it

Dashboard → Network → Outlets → (your outlet) → Menu Builder (/outlet/manage/:outletID/menu-builder) — Admin, Co-Admin — outlet staff can make day-to-day changes from the partner app where permitted

The hierarchy

Category group   optional — "Food", "Drinks", "Breakfast"
└── Category     the sections customers scroll — "Burgers"
    └── Item     what they actually order
        ├── Variants   Small / Medium / Large
        └── Add-ons    Extra cheese, no onions

Category groups are optional and bundle related categories. They earn their place on a long catalog, or one with dayparts. On a short catalog they are a level of navigation nobody needs.

The same structure serves every vertical: a restaurant uses categories as menu sections, a store uses them as departments, and a supermarket uses category groups as aisles with categories beneath them.

Categories

Give each one a clear, customer-facing name, optionally a description and image, and drag them into the order customers should see.

Lead with what sells

Customers order disproportionately from the first two or three categories. Making “Most popular” or “Chef’s specials” your first category reliably lifts average order value, and costs nothing.

What an product carries

More than most people use, and knowing what is there saves inventing workarounds:

• Identity — name, description and long description, a POS name for the kitchen or register, SKU and barcode.
• Imagery — a main image, a header image, and a gallery.
• Classification — category, badges, icons, dietary markers, brand.
• Pricing — base price, retail price and packing price, plus minimum and maximum order quantity.
• Tax — an override, where this product is taxed differently. See Taxes & charges.
• Stock — a current count and a daily quota, active only where the outlet tracks inventory. See Availability.
• Variants and add-ons — see Add-ons & options.
• Upsells — other products to suggest alongside it.
• Language — every customer-facing field, per language.

Pricing per channel

An product can be priced differently by channel: delivery, pickup, dine-in and kiosk each take their own price, and each can be marked unavailable independently.

This is how a delivery price absorbs a courier cost while the counter price does not, and how a large sharing product stays on the dine-in catalog and off the delivery one. Set the base price first and use channel prices only where there is a real reason — a catalog with four prices per product becomes impossible to reason about.

Publishing

Changes go live immediately across every surface. There is no staging step, which is fast and unforgiving in equal measure: check a price twice before saving, because the next order will use it.

Who edits what

You, from the dashboard, for structure and pricing — categories, new products, prices, tax.

Outlet staff, from the partner app, for the day-to-day — marking something sold out, disabling an product until tomorrow, quick edits. What each person can touch is a per-user grant; see Users & roles.

That split is the right one. Whoever is standing in the kitchen when something runs out should be able to act on it without ringing you.

Import, export and POS sync

XLSX export and import handles bulk work — a price rise across a category, a seasonal catalog swap, a new outlet starting from an existing catalog. Import runs in create, update, or create-and-update mode, and there is a copy mode for cloning between outlets.

Where you run a connected point-of-sale, the catalog can be previewed, imported and pushed between the two rather than maintained twice. See POS integrations.

Export before any bulk import

An import in update mode overwrites what it matches. Export first, so there is something to go back to — this is the single most common way a catalog gets damaged.

A build checklist

1. Sketch the categories on paper first, in the order customers should meet them.
2. Create category groups only if the catalog genuinely needs a level.
3. Add products with real names, real descriptions and real photography.
4. Build add-on groups once and attach them, rather than per product.
5. Set tax where it differs from the outlet default.
6. Add channel prices only where there is a reason.
7. Order a few products yourself, on a phone, as a customer would.

Troubleshooting

Symptom	Cause
An product is not visible	It or something above it is disabled — see Availability
It shows but cannot be added	It is marked sold out, or out of stock where inventory is tracked
The price differs from what you set	A channel price, or a variant setting the price
A change did not appear	Changes are immediate; confirm you edited the right outlet
An add-on is missing from an product	The group is not attached to it
An import removed things	Update mode overwrites; restore from your export

Related: Add-ons & options · Availability · Taxes & charges · POS integrations