Cubes by Chefstin — an ordering and payment system for a restaurant and lounge

Cubes by Chefstin operated as a restaurant and lounge, and needed a system that let customers place orders online and pay directly — without funnelling every order through an aggregator marketplace that would take a commission on each transaction and own the customer relationship. Most restaurant ordering platforms at the time were either aggregators (Deliveroo, Uber Eats-style) or generic e-commerce tools that didn't understand how a working restaurant actually handles a queue of incoming orders mid-service.

Cubes wanted to keep their margins, keep the customer data, and run the ordering layer themselves.

A direct-to-merchant ordering and payment platform built on WordPress and WooCommerce, extended with custom theme work and a Stripe integration. Customers browsed the menu, placed orders, and paid by card directly — no aggregator marketplace between them and the restaurant, no commission on each order.

The build concentrated custom work where it mattered: an operator admin view designed around the operational rhythm of a restaurant rather than the abstract flow of a generic shop, order state management tied to kitchen workflow, and payment reconciliation that closed out cleanly at end of service. WooCommerce gave us a stable commerce core; the custom layer made it behave like a restaurant system rather than a webshop.

The system ran as the backbone of Cubes' online ordering operation throughout the life of the business. Following Cubes' closure, the platform was decommissioned, but the pattern it proved — direct-to-merchant, no aggregator in the middle — remains the right shape for restaurants that want to own their margins and their customer relationships rather than rent them from a marketplace.