What Delivery App Commissions Actually Cost a Restaurant
Delivery marketplaces are good at one thing: putting your menu in front of hungry people who've never heard of you. The price for that is a commission on every order, and it applies whether the customer found you through the app or has been eating at your place for ten years.
Here's why that matters. A typical restaurant keeps only a small slice of each sale after food, labour, rent and supplies. Now take an order and hand a meaningful percentage of it to a third party. The exact rate depends on the plan you chose and the services bundled in, so check your own agreement rather than relying on anyone's headline number.
Do a simple exercise with your own figures:
- Pull last month's total sales through the delivery app.
- Add up every fee on the statement: commission, delivery fees you absorbed, promotional spend, and any menu markup you offset with discounts.
- Subtract your food and packaging costs for those orders.
- Divide what's left by the number of orders.
That last number is your real profit per delivery order. For a lot of owners it's far smaller than the profit on an identical meal eaten in the dining room, and sometimes it's close to zero. That's the point where the question changes from "is the app worth it?" to "which of these orders did the app actually earn?"
Plenty of those orders come from people who already know you. They'd have ordered from you directly if the path were easy. Paying a commission on a regular's order is paying for an introduction you didn't need.
What Direct Online Ordering Looks Like Instead
Direct ordering is less exotic than it sounds. It's your menu, a cart, a checkout and a way to tell your kitchen what to make, all behind a link you control. The customer opens the link, picks items, chooses pickup or delivery if you offer it, pays and gets a confirmation.
What changes for you:
- The page is yours. Your photos, your item descriptions, your specials. No competitor's sponsored listing appearing above you.
- You set the rules. Minimum order, prep times, the hours you accept orders, what's sold out today.
- You keep the relationship. You see who ordered, how often, and what they like.
The link is the whole trick. Because it's one address, you can put it everywhere: your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio, the QR code on the table tent, the bottom of the receipt, the bag stapled shut on a takeout order. Every time a regular sees it, an order that might have gone through an app has a free route to you instead.
If your menu also lives on a QR code menu, the same list of items can serve both dine-in guests who scan at the table and takeout customers who order from home. Keeping one source of truth for the menu saves you from updating three places every time the price of an ingredient moves.
A caution worth stating plainly: direct ordering doesn't come with a fleet of drivers. If you want delivery, you'll arrange it yourself, through your own staff or a courier. Many small restaurants begin with pickup only, which has no delivery cost and no one else's driver representing your brand at the customer's door.
Where the Money Goes
When you move away from a marketplace, one of the biggest practical differences is who handles the payment and when you see it.
On a marketplace, the customer pays the platform, and the platform pays you on its own schedule after deducting its share. On direct ordering, the customer pays through a payment processor and the funds settle to your own merchant account. You can see each sale in your own dashboard rather than reconciling a weekly statement from an app.
Two things to check with any ordering tool before you commit:
- What does it charge, and where is that charge taken? Some tools charge a monthly subscription, some take a percentage per order, and some do both. Add the processor's card fees on top. Calculate the all-in cost on a typical week of orders, not just the headline rate.
- Whose account is the money in? Funds landing in an account you own and control is a very different position than funds sitting with a third party until they decide to release them.
Even with processing fees, direct orders typically cost far less than marketplace commissions. Run the numbers with your own order volume before assuming that, but the gap is usually large enough to be obvious.
Own Your Presentation, Not Just Your Checkout
Margin is the headline, but presentation matters too. On a delivery app your restaurant is one tile in a grid, sorted by an algorithm, next to every competitor in the neighbourhood. Your photography is cropped to fit their layout. Your menu is categorized the way they decided.
A restaurant with its own ordering page can do things a marketplace tile can't:
- Lead with the three dishes you're proudest of.
- Tell the story of the place in two sentences.
- Show a photo gallery that looks like your room, not a stock template.
- Flag seasonal items, catering trays or family bundles without negotiating placement.
This isn't vanity. A customer who has seen your actual food and your actual space is more likely to come in next time, book a table, or buy a gift card for someone. A tile in an app rarely does any of that for you. If you also sell gift cards, your own page is where those get discovered, too.
Loyalty and Repeat Orders Without a Delivery App's Data Wall
The biggest hidden cost of marketplaces isn't the commission. It's the data. The app knows who your best customers are, how often they order and what they spend. You see an order number and a first name. You can't thank them, invite them to a tasting, or tell them when the dish they love is back on the menu.
Direct ordering flips that around. When customers order from you, you have the details and the history. That lets you do the thing small restaurants are naturally good at: recognizing people.
A loyalty program is the most obvious way to put that to work. Stamps are the classic format because they're easy to explain: buy ten, get one free. Loyalty stamps tied to your own ordering give regulars a concrete reason to skip the app, because the reward only exists on your side. Shopolo's ordering and loyalty tools are built to work together for this reason, though the principle holds with any system that keeps both in one place.
Some practical tips:
- Keep the reward simple. Customers will not memorise a tiered points table. One stamp per order or per visit is enough.
- Mention it at the moment of the app order. If a regular orders through a marketplace, a small card in the bag with your direct link and stamp offer is a polite nudge.
- Make the first reward close. Starting a card with the first stamp already given makes people more likely to finish it.
Is Cutting Out a Delivery App Right for Every Restaurant?
No, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.
Marketplaces still make sense when:
- You've just opened and nobody knows you exist. Discovery has value, and a listing can be a cheap way to be seen.
- You're in a high-density area where many hungry people search apps by cuisine and don't know specific restaurants.
- You don't have the capacity or inclination to run your own delivery and the only way to reach home diners is through someone else's drivers.
- You have unused kitchen capacity at slow times, where a lower-margin order is still better than none.
Direct ordering wins when:
- You have regulars who already know and like you.
- Your orders are mostly pickup or short-range.
- You want to build repeat business and know who your customers are.
- Your margins are tight enough that every commission hurts.
For most independent restaurants the answer isn't all or nothing. Think of marketplaces as advertising, and your own ordering page as the shop. Use the app to be found, then move customers to direct as soon as you can, with the card in the bag, the link on the receipt and the loyalty offer that only exists on your side.
Start by looking at your last two months of delivery statements and asking which orders came from people who already knew you. That share is what you can win back first.
Getting Started
If you'd like to try the direct route, Shopolo's online ordering gives you a menu, checkout and one shareable link. It's free to start with no monthly subscription; a flat 1.9% platform fee applies to card payments, taken from your own Stripe payout, and you'll need an active Stripe account before money can move. You can sign up here or see the full pricing first.
Frequently asked questions
Why are restaurants looking for an UberEats alternative?
Mostly margin. Delivery marketplaces charge a commission on each order, and restaurant margins are already thin. Owners also dislike not owning the customer relationship, since the app holds the contact details and order history.
Can a restaurant stop using delivery apps entirely?
Some do, but most don't need to go all the way. A common approach is to keep a marketplace listing for discovery while steering regulars to your own ordering link, so the repeat orders stop paying a commission.
How do I get customers to order direct instead of through an app?
Make the direct link easy to find and easy to use: put it on your Google Business Profile, social bios, receipts, packaging and counter signs, and give a reason to use it, such as loyalty stamps, a small perk or a faster pickup time.
Does direct online ordering include delivery drivers?
Not automatically. Your own ordering page handles the menu, the order and the payment. Delivery itself means your own staff, a courier you arrange, or sticking to pickup. Many small restaurants start with pickup and add delivery later if demand justifies it.