Should you build a storefront?

Click-and-collect gives you the ordering API. It does not give you a shopfront, and you should think twice before building one.

What Aura provides: the product list with live availability, collection slots with capacity, order placement that holds stock, and order tracking. Any website or app can call these — they need no login, so a developer can put a page in front of them in a day.

Our recommendation for most venues: don't build a storefront. A shop window is not the hard part; keeping it current is. A bespoke site needs hosting, payment integration, mobile testing, SEO, and someone to maintain all of it — and a venue that stops maintaining it has a worse shopfront than none.

Better options, roughly in order:

1. Put collection on the page you already have. If you have a website, a single ordering page pointed at these endpoints is a small job and inherits your existing domain and traffic.
2. Use the QR ordering app you already have. Aura's customer app already handles browsing and ordering; a link in a WhatsApp reply or an Instagram bio reaches people without a new build.
3. Let the delivery apps be your storefront (§31). They already have the customers and take the payment. You pay commission — but no build, no hosting, and no maintenance.
4. Build one only when collection is a real channel — enough of your revenue that the commission on option 3 costs more than a site would, and you have someone whose job includes keeping it alive.

If you do build, two things to get right: send an idempotency token with every order so a double-tap can't order twice, and take payment online rather than on collection, so an abandoned basket can't hold your stock.