Where Your Online Orders Actually Go
A few years ago, an order from a regular came in one of two ways. They phoned it through, or they walked in and ordered at the counter. Both of those have something in common: the restaurant took the order, knew who placed it, and kept all of what it was paid.
That has changed. A good share of orders now arrive through a third-party ordering service — the customer opens an app, finds your restaurant on it, and places the order there. The app does a real job, which is bringing a customer to you who might not have found you otherwise, and in exchange it takes a percentage of the order placed through it. That is the arrangement, and it is worth understanding clearly, because it is not a small percentage.
What makes it matter more now than it used to is the volume. It is rarely one order a week. For plenty of restaurants a meaningful share of online orders runs through one app or another, and every one of those orders carries the same arrangement attached to it.
None of this is a story about anybody behaving badly. It is simply the structure of ordering through somebody else’s platform: the platform brings the customer, so the platform takes a share of the order.
What That Cut Comes To
The figure worth keeping in your head is this: third-party ordering services can take 25% to 30% of the order. That is the range, and it is not a small margin on a restaurant’s operation. DoorDash, for the online orders it handles, charges 30%.
Now do the arithmetic plainly, with no clever framing needed. If a service takes somewhere between a quarter and nearly a third of the order, then a meaningful part of every order placed that way does not reach the restaurant at all. On a busy night with a stack of online tickets, that is not a rounding error. It is a real share of the money the kitchen has just earned.
It is worth being precise about where that cost falls, too. It is not taken out of the customer’s pocket on top of the price of the food. It comes out of revenue the restaurant has already earned — the food was cooked, the order was packed, somebody was paid to do both, and the share comes off the top of what the restaurant is paid for it.
So the honest version of the point is a short one. A percentage of that size, on an order a restaurant has already fulfilled, is money the restaurant does not keep.
The Order Belongs To The App
There is a second cost, and it is the one that is easier to miss because it never shows up on a statement. When an order comes through an app, the customer relationship sits with the app rather than with the restaurant.
In practice that means the restaurant often does not get the customer’s details. No name to greet next time, no phone number, no email address, no order history of its own. It cannot speak to that customer directly next week, and it cannot market to them later, because as far as its own records are concerned that customer does not exist.
For a restaurant, that is the harder loss of the two. A regular is worth more than any single order — they come back, they bring people with them, they fill a quiet Tuesday. But a regular who only ever orders through an app is a regular the restaurant cannot reach and cannot count on, because the relationship is held somewhere else.
It also changes who decides whether that customer sees you at all. On a platform, where your restaurant appears, and to whom, is a decision the platform makes. Your own ordering page does not have that question in it.
The Direct Route
The alternative is not complicated. It is taking orders directly rather than only through the delivery apps, so the order comes to the restaurant and the customer stays with the restaurant.
In practice that means the restaurant has an ordering page of its own, on its own web address, that a customer can open on their phone. There is no app to download and no account to create somewhere else. They look at the menu, choose what they want, add their details, and send the order through to the restaurant.
The order arrives with the customer’s details on it, and it goes into the restaurant’s own records, which means the restaurant can reach that customer again if it wants to. And no third party takes a percentage of the order, because there is no third party in the middle of it.
We install and support the systems restaurants use to run this: the ordering side, the point of sale behind the counter, and the hardware that takes the payment. That is what we do for a living, and it is the same team that supports it afterwards.
What we will not do is promise you a number. How much of your online ordering you move across, and what that does for your business, depends on your restaurant, your customers and how your orders come in today. We will tell you what we can do, and be straight with you about the rest.
A Fair Word On The Apps
One honest paragraph, because the apps are not the problem here. They put a restaurant in front of people who would never otherwise have found it, and for some businesses that reach is worth what it costs. Plenty of restaurants run them, and we would not tell anybody to switch off a source of trade.
The point is not that using them is wrong. It is that the orders a restaurant can take itself should not all be going that way — and the customers who already know and like your restaurant are the ones you have the best chance of keeping.
Where To Start
Our offer is the same three things it always is, and there is nothing underneath them. Zero cost equipment, so the hardware you need to take cards costs you nothing to get started with a business account. 0% fees with Cash Discount, so your card processing fees come to 0% instead of a percentage of every sale. And 3 months free marketing, so a restaurant gets help getting found while it is being set up.
If you want to look at what your online orders are costing you, call us on (916) 918-7017, or send your details through the form on this site. Tell us how your online orders come in today — which apps you are on, and roughly how much goes through them — and we will go through it with you. If the honest answer is that what you already have is working for you, we will say so.
There is no obligation to go further, and no pressure either way.
The takeaway
Third-party ordering services can take 25% to 30% of an online order, and the customer relationship goes with the order — the restaurant often does not get the details, and cannot reach that customer again. An ordering page on the restaurant’s own website keeps the order, and the customer, with the restaurant. Send us your details and we will go through how your online orders come in today.
Read more about this on our Online Ordering page.