What Delivery App Commission Costs Your Restaurant
A $100 order on a delivery app. The platform takes its cut, the marketing fee, the processing fee. What lands in your bank account? Somewhere around 70% on a good day. Take that same $100 order direct through your own pickup site and you keep almost all of it.
What actually comes out of a $100 delivery order
Most owners know the headline number, somewhere between 15% and 30% to the platform. Fewer know the full stack. There's the commission, the credit card processing on the full ticket, sometimes a marketing fee you forgot to opt out of, and sometimes a "small order" surcharge the customer pays that you never see. Add them up and a $100 order can quietly lose 30% to 40% to outside parties before you even pay for the food.
- The base commission, between 15% and 30%
- Payment processing on the full ticket
- Any "promoted" or "boost" spend you forgot to turn off
- Refunds the platform processes without asking you
- The customer data, which never reaches your inbox
What you keep when the order is direct
Same $100 order through your own pickup site. No commission. The small service fee ($2) is shown to the customer at checkout and goes to the platform running the site, not to the app on your phone. You keep the customer. You keep the email. You keep the full margin on every reorder.
- Reorder rate. A direct customer orders a few times a month. An app customer often orders once and disappears.
- The email address. You can write to them next Tuesday.
- Menu control. You can change a price or 86 an item without an approval queue.
- Your food cost stays your problem, not theirs.
One thing to do this week
- Pull last month's delivery app payouts.
- Add up every fee, not just the headline commission.
- Divide by the number of orders. That number is your real per-order drag.
- Look at your POS data. Find your top repeat customers. Reach out to them with a way to order direct.
Pickup at the counter is still the most profitable order a restaurant takes. Every step between you and the customer costs something. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not. Now you have the number to decide.