Foaps Direct was initially built for restaurants that wanted their own online ordering and delivery platform, without depending on marketplaces that could take around 30% from each order.
The idea was simple: let restaurants sell directly to their customers, keep more of what they earn, and build a relationship with their own customers instead of handing that relationship to a third-party platform.
I worked on the product as a UI/UX Designer, designing the customer-facing storefront and ordering experience.
Food delivery platforms made it easy for restaurants to get online, but that convenience came with a high cost. A significant percentage of every order went towards commissions, while the restaurant had limited access to the customer relationship and data.
For smaller restaurants especially, this could make direct online ordering difficult to justify.
We designed Foaps Direct as a way for restaurants to create their own online ordering experience without having to build everything from scratch.
Customers could discover the restaurant, browse the menu, add items to their cart and place an order directly.
The restaurant gets the order and the customer relationship.
The challenge was making a direct ordering experience that felt as easy as using a delivery marketplace, without actually being one.
I worked on the customer journey from:
Restaurant → Menu → Product → Cart → Checkout → Order
The experience needed to be quick and familiar, especially for customers ordering food on their phones.
The first step was understanding why restaurants would want their own ordering platform in the first place. The main pain points were clear: high marketplace commissions, dependency on third-party platforms, and limited access to customer data. The product had to solve those problems without making direct ordering harder for the customer.
I mapped the complete customer journey from discovering a restaurant to placing an order. Restaurant → Menu → Product → Cart → Checkout → Order At each step, I looked for places where the experience could become confusing or unnecessarily slow.
The storefront needed to feel familiar, but still give restaurants their own identity. I worked on the structure for restaurant information, categories, products, variants, cart, checkout and order confirmation while keeping the experience focused on getting the customer to their order quickly.
One of the challenges was that Foaps Direct wasn't meant for just one restaurant. Different restaurants have different menus, categories, images, pricing and branding. So the design needed to work as a system, rather than as a single restaurant website.
Foaps Direct started with restaurants, but the product soon expanded into the GCC and Georgia. That meant the original experience couldn't simply be copied into new markets. We needed to support different languages, currencies, regional formats and business requirements while keeping the core experience consistent.
I worked on adapting the product for a multi-language and multi-region experience. The challenge wasn't just translating text. Things like currency, number formats, addresses, phone numbers, language direction and content length could all affect the UI. The goal was to build these considerations into the product instead of treating each new market as a separate version.
As more regions were added, we focused on keeping the core ordering flow familiar while allowing the details around it to change based on the market. Same product. Different markets. This became an important part of the design system and how we approached future expansion.
Foaps Direct gives restaurants a way to build their own direct ordering channel while keeping more of their revenue and access to their customer data.
The platform has since grown beyond its initial restaurant use case, supporting 100+ businesses and 10,000+ orders.
