Services · Ecommerce development · Food ordering marketplaces
Codeeo takes on online food ordering website development in New York for companies that take orders for many restaurants through one site: borough delivery startups, food hall operators, restaurant groups with several brands, and office catering marketplaces. Customers order from several kitchens, pay once, and each restaurant is paid out automatically. New York City licenses third-party food delivery services and caps what they charge restaurants, so commission logic, seller agreements and reporting are designed with those rules in view from the first sprint.
The work covers the ordering site, the restaurant portal, the admin your team runs and the payment flows between them. We work with New York clients remotely, holding discovery, design reviews and demos by video call.
200+ companies across the US and the UAEFrom a first store to a listed developer
What goes into the platform
New York orders arrive in sharp waves: a twelve to two lunch rush in Midtown and the Financial District, evening peaks in residential Brooklyn and Queens, late orders around nightlife. Couriers on e-bikes are fast but face buzzers, walk-ups and lobbies where they cannot go upstairs. Restaurants run small kitchens with little room for extra tablets.
Regulation shapes the business model too. The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection licenses apps that take orders for restaurants, limits the fees they charge those restaurants, and sets minimum pay for app-based delivery workers. A platform here has to show, in its own records, that it charges within the limits and pays couriers correctly. The capabilities below are chosen for those conditions, with admin controls so your team can change settings as rules and contracts change.
Restaurant charges are recorded in the categories the city's caps use: delivery, other services, and payment processing. The admin prevents settings above the limits for New York City orders and keeps the proof needed when a processing charge legitimately exceeds the standard cap.
Commission settings that stay inside city limits.
Customers save floor, apartment, buzzer code and lobby rules with each address, and the courier sees them before arriving. Office towers can register a delivery room or mail area, so lunch orders for a whole floor go to one known point.
Fewer calls from couriers stuck at the door.
Kitchens set how many orders they can take per ten-minute slot. During the peak the site offers pre-ordering from mid-morning and steers customers to the next open slot, so restaurants are not flooded at noon. Slot limits can differ by day, so a Friday in the Financial District and a Sunday in Park Slope each get the pacing they need.
Lunch orders paced to what small kitchens can cook.
If you run your own couriers rather than using a delivery provider, the platform records trip time, distance, pay and tips per delivery, so you can show that pay meets the city's minimum rate. Tips are passed through in full and shown separately.
Pay data ready if the city asks for it.
Each restaurant signs its agreement during onboarding, and its terms are stored against its listing. Your own license details and renewal date sit in the admin, with reminders well ahead of expiry. Contract changes are versioned, so you can see which terms applied to any past order.
Contracts and license status in one place.
Restaurants can display their Department of Health letter grade on their page, and your team can set a policy for sellers whose grade is pending or low. Grades come from the city's open data and are refreshed on a schedule, so a new inspection result appears without manual edits.
Customers see the same grade posted in the window.
A team lead opens a group order, colleagues add meals from several restaurants before a cutoff, and the company pays on one card or invoice with a budget per person. Each meal arrives labeled with a name.
Office lunches without a spreadsheet of orders.
Card, Apple Pay and Google Pay go through a processor's marketplace product. It verifies each restaurant, separates your fees, handles refunds and pays out on schedule, so your company never holds restaurant funds itself.
Restaurants paid accurately, with clear statements.
Customers report a missing, cold or wrong item with a photo inside their order page. The case goes to the restaurant, the courier provider or your support team according to written rules, and refunds or credits adjust the right party's payout automatically. Patterns by seller or zone show up in a weekly report.
Complaints settled fairly and quickly.
Menus and order updates can be offered in Spanish, Chinese, Russian, Bengali, Korean or Haitian Creole as sellers choose. Restaurants in Flushing, Jackson Heights or Brighton Beach often serve customers who search in those languages first.
Neighborhood customers order in their own words.
Who this is for
In New York the national apps are everywhere, and the fee caps mean restaurants have strong opinions about what any platform should charge them. A new ordering platform succeeds when it brings something the big apps cannot: a defined group of sellers, a particular customer base, or a service the apps do not handle well. These are the four situations we plan for most often, and each one changes the first release. The common thread is a clear answer to why a restaurant should join and why a customer should come back.
You want to serve one part of the city really well, perhaps a set of Brooklyn neighborhoods or a corner of Queens, with restaurants that trust you. The first release needs onboarding, tight delivery zones, courier dispatch, payouts and the licensing and fee setup your counsel confirms. Marketing leans on the sellers themselves. Window stickers, receipts and bag inserts point regulars to your site, and referral codes show which restaurant brought each new customer.
Density in a small area beats a thin presence across the city.
Your vendors serve a busy lunch crowd and a weekend audience, and you want orders for pickup, delivery and table service to come through one site. Payments split to each vendor automatically, your share is kept, and sales by vendor and hour inform leasing and staffing. Vendors you operate yourself can sit alongside tenants. A pickup board or text alert tells customers when each part of a mixed order is ready, so the crowd at the counter stays manageable.
You run concepts across Manhattan and the outer boroughs and want one site where guests can order from any of them and earn one set of rewards. Because you own every seller, internal commission replaces third-party fees, and brand-by-brand reporting goes to each concept's manager. Shared kitchens can run several brands from one line, with one ticket queue for the cooks.
Your own brands make the first sellers easy to sign.
You supply offices in Midtown, Hudson Yards and the Financial District with meals from partner restaurants. Ordering against budgets, approvals, cost centers, invoicing and delivery to a building's receiving point matter more than consumer browsing. Partner restaurants still need agreements, payouts and clear rules about late or missing items. Recurring orders for standing meetings repeat automatically unless an admin pauses them.
How we work together
Most New York clients begin with a fixed scope first version covering one or two neighborhoods and a defined set of features, priced from a written list. A monthly retainer then covers new zones, integrations and changes as city rules or restaurant contracts evolve. Operators with funding for faster growth sometimes take a dedicated team that joins their own planning and release cycle. All three run remotely with shared boards, recorded demos and video calls, and the platform belongs to you from the first release.
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
We choose technology around your processor, tax service, delivery partner and the POS systems your restaurants use. A typical build pairs a fast React or Next.js storefront with a headless commerce or Laravel back end, hosted in your own cloud account.
01Web
02Commerce
03Data and cloud
04Marketing and tracking
The build itself does not, but operating the platform may.
New York City requires third-party food delivery services to hold a license from the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, renewed every two years. If your platform takes orders for restaurants you do not own, it may fall under that requirement. A group selling only its own brands is usually in a different position. Your counsel should confirm the answer for your model before launch, and we design the admin around it. Areas outside the city, such as Westchester or Long Island, are not covered by these city rules, so the platform applies settings by delivery address.
Schedule a free consultation and get a written recommendation, with costs, before you commit to anything.
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