Restaurants
Should my restaurant use DoorDash or its own ordering system?
Use the marketplaces for discovery and your own ordering for regulars. Marketplace commission typically runs 15–30% per order and the customer belongs to the platform — you get no name, no contact details and no ability to bring them back. Your own ordering costs payment processing plus a platform fee and keeps the relationship. The mistake is treating it as a choice: keep the marketplaces for strangers and make direct ordering the obvious option for anyone who has already eaten your food.
The short version
- Marketplace commission is the price of reach. Paying it on repeat customers is the avoidable part.
- Your menu should exist as readable text on your own site — not only as a PDF or an image.
- A PDF menu is invisible to search and to AI assistants. This is the most common restaurant web mistake.
- Move regulars with an incentive they can see, not by complaining about the apps.
How to do it
Get the menu onto your site as real text
Not a PDF, not a photograph of a printed menu, not an iframe from a vendor. Item names, descriptions and prices as HTML. This is what search engines index and what assistants quote when someone asks what you serve.
Add direct ordering with a visible price advantage
Whatever the mechanism, the customer needs a reason to switch. Lower prices than the app, a free item, or loyalty points — stated plainly on the page.
Capture the order details you are allowed to keep
Name, phone, email, order history. This is the asset the marketplace never gives you, and it is what makes the second order cost nothing to win.
Put the switch in front of people who already ordered
Insert cards in delivery bags, a QR code on the receipt, signage at the counter. The people who already like the food are the cheapest to convert.
Keep the marketplaces running
They reach people who have never heard of you, which your own site cannot do. Treat their commission as an acquisition cost and judge it on whether those customers ever order directly afterwards.
Fix the listings that feed AI answers
Google Business Profile, Yelp, Foursquare and Apple need matching hours, address and menu. ChatGPT now sources more than 70% of local results from Foursquare, and OpenAI licensed Yelp’s review corpus in July 2026.
What the commission actually buys
Marketplace commission is usually described as a rip-off, which is not quite right and leads to the wrong decision.
It buys genuine distribution: placement in front of hungry people in your area who do not know you exist, plus delivery logistics you would otherwise have to build. For a new restaurant that is worth paying for and hard to replicate.
What it does not buy is a customer. The platform holds the name, the contact details and the order history. So when that person orders from you again next week, you pay full commission again — for a customer you already earned. That is the part worth fixing, and it is separate from the question of whether the apps are worth using at all.
The PDF menu problem
A large share of restaurant websites publish the menu as a PDF or an image, because that is what the designer produced for print.
Both are effectively invisible. Search engines extract little useful structure from them, they are unreadable on a phone without pinching, and an assistant asked "does this place have anything gluten free" has nothing to read. The single most common question about a restaurant cannot be answered from its own website.
Publishing the menu as text takes an afternoon and fixes search visibility, mobile usability and AI answers simultaneously. It is the highest-return hour available to most restaurants and it keeps getting skipped because it feels like a design downgrade.
Moving regulars across without a fight
The failed version of this is a sign reading "order direct, the apps charge us 30%". Customers are sympathetic and change nothing, because sympathy is not an incentive.
The version that works gives them something visible. Direct prices lower than the app, a free side on the first direct order, or a loyalty scheme that only counts direct orders. The message is about what they get, not about what you pay.
Put it where the existing customer is: in the bag, on the receipt, at the counter, on the takeaway container. These people already chose you once, which makes them far cheaper to convert than anyone a marketplace could send.
What to measure
Three numbers decide whether this is working, and none of them is total order volume.
Direct orders as a share of all orders, month over month. Repeat rate among direct customers, which should be far higher than marketplace repeat rate because you can actually contact them. And contribution per order after commission or processing, which is the honest comparison between the two channels.
If direct share rises while total volume holds, the strategy is working even if the marketplace numbers fall — the customers moved rather than disappeared.
| Delivery marketplace | Your own ordering | |
|---|---|---|
| Typical cost per order | 15–30% commission | Processing plus platform fee |
| Who owns the customer | The platform | You |
| Cost to win the next order | Full commission again | Effectively zero |
| Reaches new customers | Yes — this is the value | No |
| Control over menu and pricing | Constrained | Complete |
| What you learn | Very little | Order history, frequency, preferences |
Commission bands vary by market, service level and negotiated terms. Check your own statements rather than assuming a published figure applies to you.
Common questions
- Will the delivery apps punish me for offering lower direct prices?
- Platform terms on price parity vary and have changed repeatedly under regulatory pressure, so read your current agreement rather than relying on what was true a year ago. Where parity is required, incentivise with loyalty points, free items or exclusive specials rather than a lower headline price.
- Do I need my own delivery drivers?
- No. Several providers handle delivery as a service for orders placed on your own site, so you keep the customer relationship and still outsource the logistics. Compare that per-order fee against marketplace commission — it is usually considerably lower.
- Is a restaurant app worth building?
- Only once direct ordering volume justifies it. An app earns its keep through repeat frequency and push notifications, which means it needs an existing base of regulars. Get direct web ordering working first; the app is the second step, not the first.
- How do I get my restaurant to show up when someone asks an assistant for recommendations?
- Menu as readable text on your own site, then consistent listings across Google, Yelp, Foursquare and Apple — matching hours, address and cuisine. Then reviews that describe specific dishes, because that is the text an assistant matches against when someone asks for a particular thing.
Where these numbers come from
- Foursquare supplies more than 70% of ChatGPT local results; OpenAI licensed Yelp’s 330M reviews and 8M listings on 2026-07-23.
- — Reported platform sourcing changes, 2026
Last reviewed .
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