Transforming a Restaurant Website into an Operational Ecosystem

There was a time when it was enough for a restaurant to have a simple website with a menu and a “Call” button. Today, guests want more: to place an order online, schedule a pickup time, book a table, leave a review, earn and spend points. All of this happens on a mobile phone and takes just a few seconds. At the same time, the restaurant owner faces many tasks: sales tracking, inventory management, interaction with delivery providers, bonus accrual, marketing.

The market offers hundreds of ready-made solutions: POS terminals, CRM systems, delivery apps, loyalty programs. But at the same time, each service lives its own life. As a result, restaurants use dozens of tools that are often not connected to each other: some for schedules, others for inventory, and others for orders. Data has to be transferred manually, which leads to errors and wasted time. And adding a new service turns into yet another expensive integration project.

For developers, the problem usually looks different. Most modern restaurant applications are not about a complex user interface, but about a large number of integrations with external systems, each of which evolves independently and has its own limitations. Over time, it is the architecture of these integrations that becomes the main source of complexity.

Where the Complexity Lies

The main challenge is connecting all operational systems in such a way that customer-facing applications remain simple. If an application knows how to communicate with every POS system and delivery aggregator, any new service or API change risks bringing everything to a halt.

In practice, this means that the frontend begins to take responsibility for processes that have nothing to do with the user interface: handling various integration scenarios, dealing with the specifics of individual POS systems, accommodating differences between vendor APIs, and managing numerous edge cases. This approach quickly leads to increased code complexity and makes the application more difficult to maintain and evolve.

We believe that the frontend should remain lightweight, while all the complexity should be hidden in the backend. This makes it possible to develop the interface and functionality independently of integrations.

Our Approach: The Backend as a Synchronization Layer

We built a platform that acts as a unified synchronization layer between the point of sale, delivery services, payment systems, loyalty programs, and analytics. The purpose of this layer is to collect data from different sources, transform it into a unified format, and deliver it wherever it is needed.

The idea is to ensure that client applications never communicate directly with external services. Instead, they interact with a single API, while all integration logic, data transformation, and error handling are centralized in one place.

This simplifies operations:

• Orders from different channels are automatically sent to the POS system and the kitchen.
• Menus, promotions, and prices are updated in one place and instantly reflected across all channels.
• Sales, inventory, and customer data are consolidated into a single reporting system.

We use proven architectural patterns: middleware for data exchange, message queues, and reliable APIs.

This approach makes it possible to add new services or replace existing ones with minimal impact on client applications. Changes remain isolated within the integration layer instead of propagating throughout the entire application.

Even if a service is temporarily unavailable, the platform continues to operate, and the data will be delivered once the connection is restored.

Our Experience: A Demo Project Built with Next.js

To validate our ideas, we built a demo project using Next.js. It was important for us not just to build another restaurant application template, but to validate whether the chosen architecture could withstand the growing complexity of real-world business logic.

Our goal was to answer several questions:

• Can the frontend remain as flexible as possible, even as business logic becomes more complex?
• How can we prevent the backend from turning into a collection of disconnected services?
• How can we ensure that integrations do not "leak" into the user interface?
• And how can we move away from a rigidly defined data structure without having to rewrite the code every time a new attribute is added?

As part of the experiment, we built a demo application, which you can explore here:

https://oneentry-nextjs-restaurant-demo.vercel.app

The project landing page explains the purpose of the template—to demonstrate how OneEntry works in a real application and highlight its customizable design, flexible functionality, and centralized data management:

https://oneentry-free-template-restaurant-nextjs.vercel.app

The source code is available on GitHub: it is a reference restaurant storefront built with Next.js and React, fully integrated with OneEntry:

https://github.com/ONEENTRY-PLATFORM/nextjs-restaurant-demo

The repository demonstrates how the menu, product catalog, shopping cart, table reservations, and promotional pages are built from data managed in the OneEntry admin panel.

It’s important to note that this project wasn’t built to showcase a user interface. Instead, it was created to validate architectural decisions in an environment as close as possible to a real-world production project.

While working on the demo, we realized that the problem is not the user interface. A simple Dish model with the fields title, description, and price quickly becomes insufficient: attributes such as spiciness, allergens, calories, preparation time, meal sets, availability flags, service tags, delivery settings, promotional badges, and regional pricing begin to appear.

At the same time, the attributes themselves are constantly evolving. One project may introduce new delivery parameters, another may require additional dish properties, while a third may impose integration-specific requirements. If the data model is rigidly defined, changes like these quickly begin to affect the entire application.

In traditional applications, this leads to constant changes to the schema, APIs, and validators until the code becomes filled with special cases and exceptions.

We came to the conclusion that the frontend should not be aware of operational logic, specific POS providers and courier service APIs, hard-code entity structures, or store application-specific workflows. It should remain the application layer responsible for the user experience. All operational complexity should reside in the backend. This is exactly the architecture that OneEntry was originally designed for.

This experiment ultimately confirmed our belief that the scalability of systems like these is determined not by the number of components, but by how clearly responsibilities are separated between application layers and how effectively business logic is isolated from the user interface.

Flexible Menu Management and Dynamic Attributes

One of the biggest challenges restaurants face is managing menus across multiple platforms. In many cases, every change—whether it is a new price, a seasonal dish, or a promotion—requires numerous manual updates. This is because many POS systems have a static structure: changing the context requires creating duplicate menu items.

We offer a different approach. Dynamic menu elements make it possible to assign an unlimited number of attributes to dishes: time of day, sales channel, delivery type, price, image, and more. As a result, the same dish can be displayed differently depending on the context.

From an architectural perspective, this means that the application's structure is no longer tied to a predefined data model. Instead of modifying the database schema or API, developers can extend the model by adding new attributes without changing the existing application code.

Adding or modifying attributes requires neither database migrations nor system downtime.

In addition, our system allows dynamic attributes to be added to any object (menu items, orders, users). For example, dishes can be marked as vegan, assigned regional pricing, or tagged for analytics. All of this is done through the administrative interface without the involvement of developers.

This approach proved especially valuable when working with integrations, where different external systems impose different data structure requirements. Instead of creating separate models for each provider, it is enough to define the required attributes at the configuration level.

A Unified Management Center

The platform enables you to manage everything related to a restaurant’s digital presence from a single interface:

• Menu and Products. Create and update dishes, assign attributes, and launch promotions.
• Orders and Payments. Receive orders from all channels in the POS system, track their status, and manage deliveries.
• Loyalty and Marketing. Configure loyalty programs, segment customers, and launch personalized offers.
• Reports. Access up-to-date data on sales, inventory, and channel performance.

All information is consolidated into a single repository, making it possible to make decisions quickly and maintain full control over the business. At the same time, our approach preserves flexibility: you do not have to abandon your existing services, we can integrate with them through a standardized layer.

For developers, this means that adding a new integration does not require reworking the user interface or the application's business logic. Most changes remain isolated within the integration layer.

Conclusion

The restaurant industry is evolving rapidly, and customer expectations are rising along with it. Today, success depends not only on the quality of the food or service, but also on how effectively a business manages its digital processes. OneEntry allows businesses to focus on the customer experience by moving technical complexity into a reliable backend, where all elements of the business model work together as a unified ecosystem.

Working on this project reinforced our belief that the scalability of systems like these is determined not by the number of integrations, but by an architecture that allows those integrations to evolve independently. That is why, from the very beginning, we designed OneEntry around a clear separation of responsibilities between the frontend, business logic, and external services.