Stop Paying 30% to Delivery Apps: Take Orders Direct

If you are running a restaurant and taking delivery or collection orders through Just Eat, Deliveroo, or Uber Eats, you are almost certainly paying between 25% and 35% of every order back to a platform that owns your customer data, sets the terms, and can change those terms whenever it chooses. On a £30 order, that is up to £10.50 leaving your business before you have bought a single ingredient.

How much commission are delivery apps actually charging UK restaurants?

The headline commission rates from the major platforms typically sit between 14% and 35%, but the true cost per order is higher once you factor in service fees, promotional deal requirements, and payment processing charges. Deliveroo and Uber Eats have widely reported all-in costs of 30% or more for most operators.

The maths is brutal at scale. A restaurant turning over £15,000 a month through delivery apps at a blended 30% commission rate is paying £4,500 a month, or £54,000 a year, to platforms that share none of your customer data with you. You cannot email those customers. You cannot follow them up. You do not even know their names.

Is the discoverability argument still valid?

The apps do bring in new customers, and that is a real benefit worth acknowledging. But the economic case for using them as your primary long-term ordering channel falls apart the moment you separate customer acquisition from repeat orders.

A first-time customer discovering you on Just Eat may well justify a 30% commission fee. A regular who orders from you twice a month and already knows your name does not. Paying the same commission rate on every loyal repeat customer is the structural problem most restaurant owners never sit down to calculate. That distinction, between acquiring a customer and simply processing their repeat business at full commission cost forever, is the single most important thing to understand about platform dependency.

The smarter position is to treat the apps as a paid acquisition channel for new customers, alongside a clear strategy to convert those customers to direct orders over time. That is not a hostile stance toward the platforms. It is basic margin management.

What does a direct ordering system actually cost?

A branded direct ordering system for a UK restaurant typically costs between £30 and £100 a month, plus standard payment processing fees of around 1.4% to 2.5%. That is the entire monthly cost, not a percentage of every order you take.

Several UK-focused platforms offer white-label ordering systems that sit on your own domain, carry your branding, and send order data straight to your kitchen display or printer. You own the customer records. You set the menu prices. There are no promotional deal requirements or ranking algorithms to navigate.

To put firm numbers on it: a restaurant taking £10,000 a month in direct orders through its own system at 2% payment processing pays £200 in fees. The same volume through a delivery app at 30% costs £3,000. The monthly saving is £2,800. Annually, that is over £33,000 in margin recovered, for a system that costs less than a weekly grocery shop to run.

Does a better website actually increase direct orders?

Yes, and the effect is faster than most owners expect. A restaurant in Manchester that Braynex Services worked with replaced a static PDF menu on its website with a live, mobile-optimised ordering page. Within four weeks, online orders were up 34%. Nothing else changed: same food, same prices, same social media. The only variable was removing the friction between a customer's intent and the act of placing an order.

A PDF menu forces a customer to copy a phone number, navigate back to an app, or give up entirely. A live ordering page removes every step between decision and purchase. Delivery apps have spent years and hundreds of millions of pounds optimising that experience on their own platforms. Building an equivalent experience on your own site is now straightforward and inexpensive. The technology gap that once justified ceding that ground no longer exists.

How do I get customers to order direct instead of opening the app?

The most effective single tactic is a visible incentive: free delivery on direct orders, a discount code printed on every delivery receipt, or a loyalty scheme that only applies when ordering from your own site. Customers are not loyal to platforms. They are loyal to convenience and value.

Practically, this means acting on a few specific touchpoints:

• Print a card with every delivery order that includes a discount code for the customer's next direct order.
• Make your direct ordering link the primary call to action on your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio, and your website homepage.
• Add a QR code to your packaging that goes straight to your ordering page, not to a third-party menu app.
• Train collection staff to mention direct ordering to every customer who walks in.

The goal is not to win a philosophical argument about platform loyalty. It is to break the specific habit of opening Just Eat when that particular customer wants your food.

What do you actually own when you rely on a delivery app?

Nothing, beyond the food and the kitchen. The platform owns the customer relationship, the order history, the review data, and the terms governing your access to all of it. If Just Eat changes its commission structure, introduces a new tier, or decides to delist your restaurant, you have no contractual protection and no way to contact the customers you have served through it.

This is a structural vulnerability that many restaurant owners accept because steady order volume feels like proof that the arrangement is working. Volume and profitability are not the same thing. A restaurant processing £20,000 a month through apps at 30% commission has a turnover story dressed up as a success story.

Owning your ordering infrastructure means owning the customer data, the ability to run your own promotions and loyalty programmes, and the freedom to follow up with customers without asking a third party for permission. Over five years, that is the difference between building a business and renting one.

Should you leave the delivery apps entirely?

Not immediately, and possibly not fully. The practical approach is to run a direct ordering system alongside the apps while actively migrating repeat customers to your own channel. Over six to twelve months, as direct order volume grows, you can negotiate better terms with the platforms, reduce your promotional commitments, or exit the ones where the economics clearly do not work.

The mistake is treating platform commission as a fixed, unavoidable cost of running a restaurant in 2026. It is not. It is a choice, and for most restaurants, it is quietly the most expensive one on the books.

If you want a clear picture of what your current platform costs are adding up to, what a direct ordering system would realistically cost to set up, and how quickly the investment pays back, Braynex Services offers a free audit at braynexservices.com. One conversation is usually enough to show whether the numbers make sense for your business.