Your own ordering website vs Just Eat and Deliveroo

Delivery apps are very good at one thing: putting your food in front of people who have never heard of you. They also take a share of every order, including the ones from regulars who would have ordered from you anyway.

This article works through the numbers, so you can see what that share costs you and what your own ordering website would cost instead.

What the apps charge

Commission depends on the plan. When the platform delivers, Deliverect's guide to Deliveroo puts the typical rate at around 25% to 35%. Plans where you deliver the orders yourself are lower, and are commonly quoted from around 14%.

Your rate is in your contract, so check it. The maths below works with any figure.

The monthly maths

Take a restaurant doing £4,000 a month through an app.

• At 14% commission, that is £560 a month.
• At 25%, £1,000.
• At 30%, £1,200.
• At 35%, £1,400.

Now take the same £4,000 through your own website. If the average order is £25, that is 160 orders. With Stripe's standard UK card fee of 1.5% plus 20p per payment, the card fees come to about £92 a month.

That is not the whole story. Your own site costs money to build and to host, and if you deliver, the drivers are yours to arrange. But the gap is large, and it comes round every month.

What your own site does that an app will not

• You keep the customer. On an app, the relationship belongs to the app. On your own site you can, with their permission, tell your regulars about a new dish or a quiet-night offer.
• Your prices, your menu, your brand. No competitor listed next to you.
• Collection without commission. Many regulars are happy to collect. On your own site, a collection order costs you only the card fee.
• Your own languages. TAVDI, the concept site below, works in English and Gujarati.

What the apps do that your site will not

• Discovery. People browsing an app for something new tonight will not find your website.
• Delivery, if you do not want to run it.
• Reach. Promotions inside the app reach people you cannot.

So this is rarely an either-or choice. A common approach is to use the apps to be found, and your own site for the people who already love you. A card in every delivery bag that says "order direct next time" connects the two.

What that looks like: TAVDI

TAVDI is a concept site we designed and built for a Surti egg house in London. It is a demonstration of the approach, not a commissioned project. It puts two things first on its home page: order for collection and book a table. The story and the 37 dishes sit underneath, in English or Gujarati.

What an ordering site costs

On our estimator, a small booking or ordering website is £4,300 to £6,600, or £5,000 to £7,950 with online card payments.

To see how quickly that pays back, use your own numbers. Moving £1,500 a month of regular orders from 30% commission to your own site saves £450 in commission, less about £35 in card fees: a little over £400 a month. On a £5,000 build that is about a year. Your figures will differ, and that is the point of doing the sum.

Where to start

Work out what you paid in commission last month, and how many of those orders came from regulars. If the number surprises you, our estimator prices an ordering site in about two minutes, or you can tell us about your restaurant. You can also read how we designed the TAVDI concept.