What Delivery App Commissions Are Really Costing Your Restaurant

Third-party delivery is not evil. It brought in orders during years when a lot of restaurants had nothing else, and it still puts you in front of people who would never have found you. Plenty of good operators use it and should keep using it.

But most owners I talk to have never sat down and worked out what it actually costs them over a year. When they do, the number is bigger than they expected — and there's usually a straightforward way to shrink it without cutting the apps loose.

The rates

Most of the major delivery platforms price on a tiered model. Broadly:

• Delivery orders: roughly 15% to 30% of the order total, depending on which plan tier you're on. The cheaper tiers get less visibility in the app; the expensive tiers buy placement.
• Pickup orders: typically much lower, often in the 6% to 15% range.
• Card processing: usually folded into the commission on these platforms.

For comparison, taking a card payment directly runs you somewhere around 3%. So on a delivery order, you're paying somewhere between five and ten times what the payment itself costs. The rest is the marketplace fee.

Run it on your own numbers

Here's the arithmetic. Use your actual figures, not mine.

Example: 40 app orders a week at a $35 average ticket, on a 25% tier.

• Weekly volume through the app: 40 × $35 = $1,400
• Commission at 25%: $350/week
• Annually: $18,200

Now the part that stings. If your restaurant runs a 6% net margin — which is a normal, healthy number in this industry — you would need to sell roughly $300,000 in additional food to net back what that commission cost you in a single year.

Do the same math at 100 orders a week and the annual number clears $45,000.

I'm not saying those orders would have existed without the app. Some wouldn't have. But a meaningful share of them are people who already knew about you, opened the app because it was convenient, and would have ordered directly if directly had been easy. Those are the orders worth going after.

The orders you're paying to keep

Here's the specific thing to notice: your regulars are on there too.

Somebody who eats your food twice a month, knows your name, and would happily order straight from you — if they're ordering through an app, you're paying 15–30% every single time on a customer you already earned. That's not customer acquisition. That's a toll on a relationship you built yourself.

You also don't get to keep anything from those orders. The app owns the customer relationship, the email address, the order history, and the ability to market to them. You get a ticket printing in the kitchen.

What direct ordering actually costs

The reason a lot of restaurants never moved on this is that direct ordering used to mean expensive software with its own monthly fee. That's no longer true.

If you're already running Square, Square Online is included with your account at no additional monthly cost. It pulls your existing item catalog straight from your POS, so your menu and pricing stay in sync without double entry, and orders land in the same system your staff already uses. You pay standard online card processing — in the neighborhood of 2.9% plus 30¢ — and that's it. No commission on the food.

Other POS systems have their own equivalents with different terms, and some are genuinely better than others. The question to ask your provider is simple: what does an order placed on my own website cost me, all in?

The realistic strategy: use both, shift the mix

Nobody serious is telling you to delete the apps. Here's what actually works:

• Keep the apps for discovery. They're a customer acquisition channel. Price that in and treat the commission as a marketing cost for new people.
• Make direct ordering the obvious option. Ordering button in the header, above the fold, on every page. Not buried in a menu. Somebody on their phone should be able to start an order in one tap.
• Put the direct link everywhere you control. Google Business Profile, Instagram bio, Facebook, your receipts, a small sign at the register, the confirmation text. Every one of these is free.
• Give people a reason. A small direct-order perk — free drink, a dollar off, a loyalty punch — still leaves you far ahead of a 25% commission. You can be more generous than the apps and still make more money.
• Consider adjusting your app pricing. Many restaurants list slightly higher prices on delivery platforms to offset commission. Check each platform's current policy before you do it, because the rules differ and they change.
• Watch the shift. If direct ordering goes from 0% to 20% of your online volume in six months, that's real money staying in the building. You can only see that if you're measuring it.

What this looks like on the site

Practically, a restaurant site that's set up to take orders directly needs:

• The ordering button visible without scrolling, on mobile first
• A menu that's real text, not a photo or a PDF, so the ordering flow and search both work
• Hours that are correct, so nobody starts an order when you're closed
• The ordering system connected to your existing POS so the kitchen workflow doesn't change
• The direct link tied into your Google Business Profile so "order online" points at you

That's it. It isn't complicated. It's just usually nobody's job, so it doesn't get done.

The bottom line

The apps aren't the problem. Paying a marketplace fee on customers you already own is the problem.

Every order you move from a 25% channel to a 3% channel is about 22 points of that ticket back in your pocket, and you keep the customer relationship on top of it. You don't have to move all of them. You just have to make it easy for the people who would have chosen you anyway.

If you want to see what direct ordering would look like on a real site for your restaurant, I'll build the preview first and you can look at it before we talk about anything else. Free for 7 days, no deposit, and you own it if you keep it.

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