A restaurant doing $4,000 a month in online orders through a delivery app at 20 percent pays $800 a month for the privilege. That is $9,600 a year, every year, and it does not decrease as you get better at your job — it increases, because the commission is a percentage of a number you are working hard to grow.
That arithmetic is the entire argument for taking your own orders, and it is strong enough that it does not need exaggerating. What it does need is an honest account of what you give up, because the restaurants that switch and then regret it are the ones nobody told.
What you are actually paying for
It is worth being precise about what the commission buys, because the answer is not “a website with a menu on it”. Technically, online ordering is not hard. What the platforms sell is demand.
Someone opens an app at seven o'clock without a restaurant in mind and browses until something looks good. That person is not searching for you. The platform introduces you to them, and the commission is the finder's fee. Seen that way, 20 percent on a genuinely new customer is not obviously a bad deal — it is a marketing cost with perfect attribution, which is rarer than it sounds.
The problem is that the same fee applies to the regular who has eaten your food for six years, knows exactly what they want, and opened the app only because that is where the ordering button lives. You are paying a finder's fee to be reintroduced to your own customer, every single time.
That distinction — new customers versus existing ones — is the whole decision, and it is worth doing the split before changing anything.
Do this arithmetic before you do anything else
Pull three months of platform orders and sort them by customer. Most restaurants find something like this:
- Genuinely new customers who came back. The platform earned its fee here. This is the number that justifies staying.
- Repeat orders from people who already knew you. Regulars, locals, people who have your menu on the fridge. Every one of these is commission you are paying on a customer you already own.
- One-time orders that never repeated. Ambiguous — the platform found them, and they were worth roughly one order's margin minus the fee.
If the middle group is large, you have a clear case. Those orders can move to your own site with almost no marketing effort, because those people already intend to order from you — they simply need somewhere to click. If the middle group is small and most of your volume is genuinely new discovery, the platform is doing real work and you should think hard before walking away.
Most established neighbourhood restaurants find the middle group is the majority. Most new restaurants find it is not. That is the single best predictor of whether this move works for you.
The honest cost of doing it yourself
Three things move onto your plate, and pretending otherwise is how people end up angry.
Marketing becomes your job. Nobody browses your website at seven o'clock the way they browse an app. You have to tell people the ordering page exists: a QR code on the table and the takeaway bag, a sign at the counter, the link in your social profiles, a line on every receipt. This is not hard, but it is a habit you have to build and keep.
Support becomes your job. When a payment fails or an order does not arrive, that is your phone. The platform absorbed some of that, and it absorbed it at 3am when you were asleep.
Delivery, if you do it, becomes a logistics problem. This is the one that catches people. Taking your own orders is genuinely easy. Getting food to an address is not, and if you do not already have drivers, a platform's fleet is a real service you are buying. Plenty of restaurants land on a sensible split: own site for pickup, platform for delivery. That single change often removes most of the commission without touching the hard part.
When the platform is the right answer
Worth saying plainly, because an article like this usually will not. Stay on the platform if you are new and nobody knows you exist yet, if your volume is genuinely low enough that the fees are noise, if delivery is most of your business and you have no drivers, or if you do not want another thing to run — which is a completely legitimate reason and not a failure of nerve.
The strongest position is usually not either/or. Keep the platform for discovery, move your regulars to your own site, and let the commission apply only to customers you did not already have.
What taking your own orders actually requires
Technically, four things, and if you already run WordPress with WooCommerce you have most of them:
- A menu with prices that a customer can add items from.
- A checkout — which is WooCommerce, with whatever payment gateway you already use. No new payment integration, no API keys.
- Pickup or delivery, and when. The kitchen needs to know which and at what time, or you will be cooking things nobody is coming for.
- Somewhere the order appears that staff already look at. A new dashboard nobody opens is worse than no system.
Notice what is not on that list: a driver app, a live map, a loyalty engine. Those are what the platforms build to justify a recurring percentage. A restaurant taking its own orders needs none of them on day one, and several of them never.
If you would rather not build it
Restaurant Pro adds exactly that to the free Restaurant Menu plugin: an [rs_order] page where priced menu items get an “Add to order” button into your own WooCommerce cart, pickup-or-delivery with a requested time shown on the order, and optional reservation deposits so a table is held only once paid. Your gateway, your money, no percentage of orders — $69 once. It does not do driver dispatch or table management, and the page says so.
The no-show problem, while you are here
If you take reservations, this is worth the same arithmetic. A no-show on a Friday costs you the whole table, and the standard fix — asking for a card — usually means another service and another fee.
A deposit taken through the checkout you already run does most of the work. The mechanism that matters is the ordering: the table is held only once the deposit is paid. An abandoned checkout never blocks a table, so your book stops filling with reservations nobody intends to keep, and every booking that does land is already confirmed and already paid.
Start with pickup
If you do one thing: put ordering on your own site for pickup only, and leave delivery where it is. Pickup has no logistics problem, it is where your regulars are, and it is the highest-margin order you take. Tell people it exists — QR on the table, note on the bag, link in every profile — and watch what moves over the first month.
If a meaningful share of your pickup volume shifts, you have removed that commission permanently for a one-time cost, and you have learned what your customers will actually do before betting the delivery side on it. If nothing moves, you have learned something important cheaply, and the platform was doing more for you than you thought.
Running a restaurant and tired of the percentage? Tell us what you are paying — the arithmetic is usually clearer than it looks.