Services · Ecommerce development · Restaurant ordering marketplaces
Codeeo delivers online food ordering website development in Saudi Arabia for operators building a marketplace of restaurants, cloud kitchens and caterers that may span several cities. Diners order from many vendors through one Arabic first site and pay with mada, Apple Pay or STC Bank. Vendors run their own menus and orders. You control onboarding, commission, payouts, refunds and the tax records that Saudi regulators expect.
A national platform faces national rules: e-commerce law, data protection, e-invoicing, payments regulation, food information and delivery licensing. We design the platform so those rules are part of how it runs, not an afterthought patched in before launch.
200+ companies servedFrom a first store to an ADX listed developer
Core platform
Operators planning a national ordering marketplace usually launch in one city and add others once the model works. The platform should be ready for that from day one: cities as configuration rather than code, vendors who may operate in several cities, and reports that compare markets side by side.
The Kingdom's cities behave differently. Riyadh is spread out with strong office and late night demand. Jeddah follows the coast and serves many visitors. Makkah and Madinah revolve around pilgrims and prayer times. Dammam, Al Khobar and Dhahran in the Eastern Province form a connected metropolitan area with its own habits. A good national platform lets each city keep its own delivery zones, fees, hours and promotions while sharing one vendor system, one payment set up and one set of compliance controls. The capabilities below are the core we build before adding any city specific feature. Once the core is stable, local additions such as hotel ordering in Makkah or corporate lunch accounts in Riyadh can be switched on for one city without affecting the others.
Add a city by configuring its zones, fees, hours and service types in the admin panel. Diners can enter their Saudi National Address short code or drop a pin, and the address is validated before checkout. Zones can be switched between delivery and collection as conditions change.
New cities open through configuration, not new code.
Vendors submit commercial registration, municipal licences, VAT number and IBAN. Where your team chooses, registration details can be checked against official Ministry of Commerce data services. Multi branch brands can list branches in several cities under one vendor account with separate menus.
One verified vendor record per brand, nationwide.
SFDA requires calorie information on restaurant menus, and the requirement covers food delivery platforms. Menu items carry calorie values, allergen notes and other fields your vendors must show, in Arabic and English. Listings missing required fields cannot be published.
Nutrition information is enforced at the listing stage.
mada, Apple Pay, STC Bank and Visa and Mastercard through a payment provider licensed by SAMA, with Tabby and Tamara for larger orders. SADAD can serve corporate invoices where your provider supports it. Cash on delivery remains a per city choice.
Each city gets the payment mix its diners expect.
Commission by vendor, city or order type. Refunds, vendor funded promotions and delivery fee sharing recorded per order. Payouts handled through your provider's marketplace or split feature, so diners' money moves to vendors without passing through the platform's own operating account.
Payouts that stand up to finance and regulatory review.
Tax invoices to diners and commission invoices to vendors, built to ZATCA Fatoora requirements with QR codes and connected to your e-invoicing solution for clearance or reporting as your phase requires. Your accountants agree who issues which invoice during discovery.
Every sale and every commission is invoiced correctly.
Vendors can deliver themselves, the platform can dispatch its own couriers, or orders can go to a licensed delivery company. The Transport General Authority licenses delivery activity through apps and platforms, and the right licence depends on your model, so the platform supports all three.
Your delivery model matches the licence you hold.
Consent records, privacy notices in Arabic and English, data minimisation and retention rules under PDPL, supervised by SDAIA. Hosting, access control, logging and backups are planned against NCA controls, and personal data stays in approved locations.
Privacy and security reviews start from a documented baseline.
Operators see orders, acceptance times, cancellations, refunds, commission and payouts by city, zone and vendor. Finance exports reconcile with payment provider reports and VAT records. City managers see only their own market.
Decide where to grow from real numbers.
Ramadan, Eid, the Hajj season, national holidays and city events change demand differently in each market. Operators set seasonal hours, iftar and suhoor windows, order caps per slot and promotions per city from one calendar, so Makkah can prepare for pilgrims while Riyadh prepares for late night trade.
Each city is ready for its own busy weeks.
Who it is for
General delivery apps already reach most Saudi cities, so a new national marketplace needs a clear angle. We see operators succeed when they serve a specific segment, own a set of kitchens or bring a commission model vendors prefer. Food ordering platform development in Saudi Arabia then follows a rollout plan rather than launching everywhere at once. These four starting points each lead to a different first release.
You run virtual brands from production kitchens in one city and plan more in others. The platform treats each brand as a vendor and each kitchen as a branch, so a new city means configuring zones and attaching kitchens. Diners mix brands in one basket, and your reports show which brands work in which cities before you commit to more kitchen space. Production planning also gets easier, because the platform shows which items sell in which zones at which hours.
Branch level menus allow different prices and items per city.
Some marketplaces focus on one segment: healthy meal plans, traditional regional cooking, catering for offices or desserts and specialty coffee. A focused marketplace can grow city by city, recruiting the best vendors in each. The vendor tools and payouts must be strong enough that kitchens in a new city choose to join. City pages for each market also help diners find the marketplace in search, with local vendors and cuisines rather than one national list.
Groups running several concepts across the Kingdom often send orders through different apps, each with its own fees and data. One owned platform brings all the brands together, with group reporting and a single customer base, while third party apps can remain as an extra channel rather than the only one.
Owning the diner relationship is usually the main motive.
Companies with offices in several cities order meals for staff, meetings and events. A corporate marketplace offers company accounts, allowances, approvals, scheduled deliveries and monthly invoices, with caterers in each city as vendors. Large employers prefer one supplier relationship, even when many kitchens do the cooking. Approval steps, cost centres and purchase order numbers make the platform fit their procurement rules instead of fighting them.
Working with Codeeo
Codeeo has delivered 200+ projects across the UAE and the US, has a team of 80+ across Dubai, Riyadh and Karachi, and is rated 4.7 from 23 Google reviews. For clients based in Riyadh, discovery and reviews can take place in person. For teams in other Saudi cities, sessions run by video call. Either way you have one lead, a written plan and access to a test site throughout, so your operations, finance and vendor teams can check each part as it is built. After each city launch we review what worked and adjust the plan for the next one.
A defined build with a deadline
We agree what the product has to do, write it down with a price and a date, and build exactly that. Changes are priced before they are made, not discovered on the invoice.
A product that keeps evolving
Named engineers who work your hours, join your standups and stay on the codebase. You direct the backlog; we own the quality of what ships.
Something live that needs looking after
A monthly block of hours for improvements, fixes and the small requests that otherwise wait months. Unused hours carry for a quarter.
Technology
The stack is chosen after discovery. National marketplaces usually need a fast web front end, a vendor console, a relational database for orders and settlements, background jobs for payouts and invoices, and hosting arranged for PDPL and NCA requirements. Menu and search pages are kept light for mobile diners on slower connections in smaller cities.
01Web
02Commerce
03Data and cloud
04Marketing and tracking
We set it after discovery, usually as a first city launch followed by planned rollouts.
The shared core, with vendors, ordering, payments, payouts and invoices, takes most of the effort. Each extra city is mostly configuration and vendor recruitment. External steps affect timing too: Ministry of Commerce registration, payment provider approval for split settlement, e-invoicing onboarding and any delivery licence. We write the agreed timing into the plan and show working parts as they are finished. A fixed season, such as Ramadan, is a sensible target for the first city when planned early.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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