Online Store: Storefront and Selling

Meni isn't only a restaurant menu — it's also a full online store: a product catalog with variants, a storefront with filters and search, a product page, a cart and checkout, pickup/delivery, and payment collection. This page is an overview of the whole path from turning on the retail vertical to making a sale; follow the links in the text for details on each step.

Turning on the "Store" vertical

The location's business type is switched in the location's general settings, or right inside the site's web settings (Websites section → "Site settings"). As soon as the type is set to "Store" (retail), the storefront switches into online-store mode:

• instead of a restaurant conversational menu, you get product pages at /product/name, category pages and a catalog;
• at the register (POS), instead of table/floor binding you get barcode scanning and weighed-goods sales;
• in the SEO prerender served to search engines and AI agents, you get product cards instead of dish cards, and Product/Offer structured data instead of restaurant menu markup (details — SEO & storefront promotion).

Catalog

The catalog is the set of products and categories the storefront is built from.

• Categories — the structure a product "lives" in (not to be confused with collections — marketing storefront groups).
• Products and variants — a product can have several variants (SKUs) along axes like "Color"/"Size"/"Material": every combination is its own inventory row with its own price, barcode and stock.
• Sibling color swatches — if the same product ships in several materials/colors as separate product cards, the storefront shows them as small color-swatch dots right in the category list: clicking a swatch swaps the card's photo, title and price to that colorway — no need to open the product page to see another color.
• Product features (characteristics) — size, color, material, volume, brand and any other attribute; details — Product features.
• Multi-photo gallery — a product can have a gallery of several photos and videos (not just one cover image), with a caption on each frame; one photo can be set as the "hover photo" — on the storefront it cross-fades in when a shopper hovers the card in the catalog.

The same catalog also powers register sales: the POS barcode scanner finds a product by its code and adds it to the ticket instantly, and weighed goods are weighed on a connected scale and sold by actual weight — see Hardware & bridge.

The fastest way to fill the catalog is AI catalog import: upload a price list (Excel/Word/PDF/photo), the AI recognizes products and prices and shows a plan for you to review.

Storefront: filters and search

On catalog and collection pages, shoppers can:

• Filter by characteristics — a facet panel (sidebar on desktop, a bottom sheet on mobile) is built automatically from the characteristics of products in the category: color, size, material and any others, plus price and stock. Checked values within one characteristic combine with OR, different characteristics combine with AND (standard faceting logic).
• Search by text — the search box matches title, description and characteristics.
• Search by meaning (semantic search) — for larger catalogs, search understands the meaning of a query, not just exact words: "something warm for winter" will find jackets and sweaters even if those words aren't in the title. It runs on a vector index of products that includes the full picture of a product — characteristics, brand, SKU, barcode, attached documents.
• Ask the AI shopping assistant — a built-in chat answers questions about products in the shopper's language: suggests a product from a description, compares options, tells stock and characteristics. The same assistant can find a product by barcode, even one that isn't shown anywhere on the storefront.

Product page (PDP)

The product page shows:

• Gallery — all photos and videos of the product, with captions and zoom;
• Characteristics — a "property → value" table (size, material, weight, etc.);
• Editorial blocks — additional "photo + heading + text" content sections in several layouts (full-width, image left/right, overlay on the photo) — great for brand story, materials, care instructions;
• Related products, "frequently bought together" and "recently viewed" — cross-sell blocks below the description;
• Wishlist — a heart icon to save the item, available in the customer's account;
• "Notify me when available" — if a product is out of stock, a shopper leaves their contact and gets notified when it's back in stock.

Cart and checkout

• Cart can be built from any catalog/product page and supports several variants of the same product as separate lines.
• Promo codes and coupons are validated and applied server-side — the discount amount can't be tampered with on the shopper's side.
• Tax is calculated per product category (different rates for different product types).
• Multi-currency pricing — the storefront can display prices in the shopper's currency (converted) while the location itself keeps its books in one currency.
• Customer accounts — a separate sign-in for shoppers (not shared with venue staff): order history, saved addresses, wishlist.

Coupons, automatic discounts and shipping cost rules are configured in a dedicated section — Commerce.

Order rules and customers

The settings that decide what a shopper may put in the cart and who may buy from you at all.

• Product personalisation — input fields on the product page: engraving, a message on a cake, a made-to-measure size. Values travel with the order and are visible in the kitchen, at the POS, on the KDS and on the receipt.
• Order quantity — minimum, step and maximum per product. Steppers, hints and checkout respect the rules on the storefront, and the server validates them again.
• Unit system — metric or imperial: weight and dimensions are entered in pounds, ounces and inches while being stored in a single canonical unit. Handy for the US.
• Customer groups and sign-up moderation — a new customer can land “under review”: until approved, the storefront shows a gate instead of checkout. Groups decide who sees what.
• Blocklist and anti-fraud — banning orders by phone/email and limiting the number of orders per period. A rejected order shows the guest a clear message, and the order list shows the reason. Contacts can be added to the blocklist straight from an order.
• Storefront maintenance mode — pause order taking: a localised notice in every language, a “closed” badge in the dashboard and a server-side block on checkout.
• Owner-editable storefront labels — rename standard strings (“Add to cart”, “Checkout” and others) to match your tone of voice.

Fulfillment

CDEK and Russian delivery aggregators

For stores in Russia, checkout can show a rate comparison across several carriers at once — CDEK, Yandex Delivery, Russian Post, 5Post — letting the shopper pick the cheapest or fastest option. For carriers with a pickup-point network, checkout shows a map of nearby pickup points — the shopper picks a convenient one right during checkout, without leaving to a third-party site.

Rates and pickup-point addresses sync automatically; the resulting shipping cost flows into the order and onto the receipt. Going fully live with a given carrier needs your own carrier contract (CDEK — by contract and tax ID; some carriers — by phone number) — rate quotes and pickup points are available right away, while creating shipments and printing labels require a live carrier account.

Payment

The store accepts payment the same way a restaurant menu does: online by card/wallet through a connected payment provider (the set of providers depends on the location's country), cash/card on delivery to the courier, and pay at the register for pickup/in-person sales. Details, provider list and setup — see Payments.

Storefront readiness for AI agents

The store's catalog is "readable" not just by people but by AI agents (voice assistants, search and shopping agents):

• an llms.txt page on your domain — a machine-readable site map for AI;
• product and catalog pages are served to bots in an enriched form: breadcrumbs, brand, availability, a characteristics table, variants with prices, structured data (Product/Offer markup, and for products with several variants — grouped markup covering all variants);
• a product search tool is available to external AI agents through the public Guest API / MCP — the same protocol voice assistants use to place a restaurant order. Details — Guest API for AI Agents.

Related sections

• Collections — storefront groups like "New arrivals", "Best sellers" and rule-based automatic collections
• Product features — catalog attributes and the AI characteristics wizard
• Returns & RMA — how a shopper returns a product and how it's processed
• AI catalog import — quickly filling the catalog from a price list
• Website builder — storefront styling: templates, colors, card layout
• SEO & storefront promotion — product feeds, structured data, redirects
• Articles & Pages (CMS) — storefront content beyond the catalog

FAQ

Can I run a restaurant and a store on the same account?

Business type is set per location, so a chain with several venues can have some locations running as restaurants and others as stores, each with its own storefront mode.

Does semantic search work on any catalog?

Regular text search and filters work on any catalog. Semantic (meaning-based) search kicks in for larger catalogs — for smaller stores, text search and facets are usually enough.

Does the storefront show the exact stock count?

The storefront shows an availability status ("in stock" / "out of stock"), not the exact unit count on hand — exact stock levels are only visible in the admin panel.

Are color swatches variants of one product or separate products?

Technically they're separate product cards (each with its own slug, photos, and possibly its own price), but on the storefront they're visually combined into one card via swatches — the shopper switches color right in the list without losing browsing context.