Getting Started: Menu Item Add-Ons

Menu items by themselves might suffice for many situations, but most restaurants also need to offer their customers a variety of ways to modify their menu items by either adding this to the item or specifying choices for various options that exist for the menu item. For example, a hamburger could have an optional (or maybe a required) choice of cheese. That choice may or may not have an additional cost. Add-ons allow you to do these sorts of things.

It is important to note that when you create an add-on, you are not creating it for any particular menu item. You are just creating it as a standalone add-on. The reason for this is that many add-ons are applicable to more than just a single menu item. For example, maybe you have ten types of sandwiches on your menu, and all of those come with a choice of side. It would be tedious and confusing to create ten different add-ons, all named "Choice of Side" just to get all of your sandwiches looking right. Instead, you create one "Choice of Side" add-on and then in a separate step you assign that add-on to all of them menu items that need to use it.

Creating your First Add-On

Add-ons in eHungry.com come in three varieties:

• Options - An option is a required choice for customers. It is displayed in our system as a drop-down select box, and when an option is assigned to a menu item, customers must choose one of the option choices in order to place the menu item in their cart. Options have one or more option choices, and each of those choices may or may not have a single price value. Unlike the other two types of add-ons, options themselves are not selectable by customers. Only the choices contained within the option, which we sometimes call an "option group", are actually selectable.


• Toppings - Toppings are optional choices for customers and they never have a price. Toppings are displayed as checkboxes which may be checkedor unchecked by customers. You may specify that a topping be preselected for a customer by default, ni which case they would need to uncheck that topping if they did not want it.


• Extras - Extras are very similar to toppings, except that they always have prices. Like toppings, they are optional for customers, are displayed as checkboxes, and may be preselected for customers by default.

One common mistake that people make when setting up their add-ons is creating the wrong type of add-on for the purpose they are trying to achieve. The most important thing to remember is that only options can be made a "required" choice. You can provide a "None" or "No Answer" choice for an option, though, and in that way create an option that requires an explicit answer by the customer, but still allows them to "opt-out" of that choice.

Another common mistake is that people will create an extra or a topping and then create a bunch of option choice for that extra or topping. Option choices are only applicable to options. Extras and toppings are single, once-off types of add-ons that have one name, one price (for extras) and are displayed as checkboxes.

Assigning Add-Ons to Menu Items

When you click into the "Add, Edit, or Remove Menu Item Add-Ons" page, you will see a link labeled "Assign Add-Ons to Menu Items." Clicking into that page takes you to the interface for associating the add-ons that you have previously created with your existing menu items. On that page, all of your menu items are listed, subdivided by category, and next to the name of each menu item is a link labeled "View, Assign, or remove Add-Ons." To assign add-ons to any menu item, simply find the desired menu item in the list, click on the "View, Assign, or remove Add-Ons" link, and then click the checkbox next to each add-on that you want to assign to that menu item. Uncheck the boxes for any already assigned add-ons that you want to remove from that menu item.

Advanced Options and Multiplicity

For options (and not for extras or toppings, at this time), you will see a link labeled "Advanced Options" inside of the "View, Assign, or remove Add-Ons" window for each menu item. Advanced options opens a window that allows you to specify the "Multiplicity" of the option for that particular menu item. Multiplicity simply means "how many times do I want to display this option group for this menu item?". For example, let's say that you have a Prime Rib Dinner on your menu. that dinner comes with a choice of three sides, and you have a single option-type add-on that contains the entire list of the available side-items from which a customer should choose. Now, you don't want to create three separate but identical list of side-items just so you can get it to offer three choices of the same list of items. And, you cannot in our system assign the same option group to the same menu item more than once. So, to accomplish this goal, you would set the multiplicity of the "Choice of Side Item" option to "3". This tells the system to show the drop-down box three times and to require the customer to make all three choices even though the actual list of choices is the same in all three cases.

Manage Extra Groups

Extra Groups are just containers for your extra-type add-ons. They don't really "do" anything. They simply allow you to specify that "these five extras should be displayed under this label, and those fine should be displayed under this other label." The labels are the names of the extra groups. Extra groups are used entirely for aesthetic reasons to make a very long list of extras appear more manageable to your customers. In an upcoming update, we will be extending this functionality to options and toppings as well.