How Vitrina was built together with the Pyrizhok café

About the café

Pyrizhok is a Ukrainian-cuisine café in the centre of Kharkiv: pastries and lunches in the dining room, with pickup and delivery on the new website. Here the dining room, the pickup counter and the couriers have to work at the same time, and that is exactly where separate programs for each channel get in each other’s way the most.

Where Vitrina came from

Vitrina wasn’t dreamed up in an office but in a café. Mykhaylo Yuminov, Vitrina’s founder, has worked with Pyrizhok since 2016. This is how things looked before Vitrina, in his words:

Pyrizhok is a café in the centre of Kharkiv, across from the Shevchenko monument. A small team and affordable food. For years everything ran on Excel, tablets and trust. Our accounting software was complicated and outdated and lacked features, a proper system was beyond our budget, and there was no money for a delivery platform and its commission. We didn’t know how much food we were losing or what to buy. There was no delivery. And when the internet went down, everything stopped.

So we built the system ourselves: a website with delivery, kitchen orders, couriers, stock with recipe cards and proper record-keeping, all in one place. That’s how Vitrina was born. Now we offer it to other venues at a price a small café can afford.

What we built together

A menu that didn’t have to be simplified

A real café menu is portions, variants, sides and combos, not a “name and price” list. All of that is on the website and in the QR menu, and every dish has its own page that Google can find. More on the QR menu and online ordering.

Kitchen

Kitchen tickets on thermal printers through a print agent in the café’s network, and one sold-out list for the website and the QR menu. More: kitchen & printing.

Delivery with its own couriers

Delivery zones with a minimum order, a courier app with live tracking for the guest, and accounting for the cash couriers bring back to the café. More: delivery.

Inventory and purchasing

Recipe cards and food cost, ingredients written off by orders, and purchasing with delivery notes recognised from photos. More: inventory and purchasing.

Guests who come back

Cashback points and tiers, a birthday discount, a referral bonus, partner coupons with neighbouring venues and a review after every order. More: loyalty.

One code for everyone

There is no special version for Pyrizhok: it is the same code you would get. A separate instance of the system with its own database, its own brand, its own keys and its own payment provider: guests’ money goes straight to the café’s account.

What’s next

The launch of the new website for Pyrizhok’s guests is still ahead: it has not taken real guests yet. We will show the results here (the share of online orders, returning guests and delivery time) after the launch, rather than invent them in advance.

If you are choosing an ordering service

Start with the numbers: how much an ordering website really costs, what a “free plan” means and how to switch to another service without losing guests.