How Restaurants Can Get Customers to Order Direct
The problem with delivery app dependency
Delivery apps take between 15% and 35% commission on every order. If you're doing £20,000 a month through a marketplace, up to £7,000 of that is gone before you've paid for food, staff or rent.
Direct ordering through your own website or app costs a lot less. You usually pay a flat monthly platform fee, not a cut of every transaction.
The hard part is getting customers to move from apps they already use to a channel you control.
Why customers default to delivery apps
People use marketplaces for real reasons:
- They're convenient, and the app is already on their phone
- All the menus are in one place, so browsing is easy
- They get loyalty schemes and promo discounts
- New customers can find your restaurant without ever having heard of you
Whatever you do to push direct ordering has to answer each of these. The marketplaces have spent hundreds of millions getting and keeping customers. That's who you're up against.
Six practical ways to shift customers to direct ordering
1. Give them a reason to switch
Discounts eat into the margin on the exact channel you're trying to make more profitable. Give them something else:
- Loyalty points that only build up on direct orders
- Menu items or bundles you don't list on the marketplaces
- Shorter delivery times when they order through you
- First go at new dishes for direct customers
2. Make ordering direct better than the marketplace
If your website is slower than Just Eat or Deliveroo, harder to use, or the menu looks worse, people will stay on Just Eat or Deliveroo.
Your site has to load fast on a phone. It needs good food photos and menu descriptions that tell people what they're actually getting. Returning customers should be able to check out in a few taps with a saved card. And the menu has to match what the kitchen is serving today, updated in real time, not whatever was on it three months ago.
3. Use every order to advertise your own channel
Every order you send out, marketplace orders included, can carry a card, sleeve or sticker with:
- A QR code to your ordering website or app
- A clear reason to order direct next time (e.g. “Earn loyalty points when you order direct”)
- Your website URL and app download link
These are the easiest customers to convert. They've already had the food and they came back for more. What keeps them on the app is habit, not preference.
4. Own the customer relationship
When someone orders through Just Eat or Deliveroo, the marketplace keeps their details. You don't get them. With a direct order, the customer's email address and order history are yours.
Use them:
- Send a post-order email with a loyalty sign-up offer
- Text customers ahead of quiet nights or when a new menu goes live
- Use AI marketing tools to send personalised re-engagement messages automatically, based on what people order and how often
The list grows with every direct order, so each campaign has more people and more order history to work with than the last one.
5. Point your online presence at your own channel
When someone searches for your restaurant by name, your ordering website should come up before your marketplace listing. For that you need:
- A fast, mobile-friendly restaurant ordering website
- Your Google Business Profile linking to your direct ordering page
- Social posts that link to your own ordering page, not your Deliveroo profile
6. Get staff to mention it
In counter-service places, staff can bring up the direct channel when people collect. “If you order through our app next time, you get loyalty points.” It takes five seconds and costs nothing.
What the economics look like
| Order through marketplace | Order direct |
|---|---|
| £25 order value | £25 order value |
| 25% commission: £6.25 | Flat monthly platform fee (shared across all orders) |
| Restaurant receives ~£18.75 | Restaurant receives ~£24.50+ |
The more direct orders you take, the thinner that fixed fee gets spread, and the wider the gap.
Common mistakes
The big one is launching a direct channel and not telling anyone. Customers won't stumble across it. You have to tell them, more than once, in more than one place.
A direct site that's worse than the marketplace is the next one. A slow website or an out-of-date menu sends people straight back to Just Eat.
Undercutting marketplace prices on your own channel doesn't hold up for long. It also teaches customers to shop on price instead of coming back because it's you.
Then there's taking direct orders and doing nothing with the customer data. Owning the channel means owning the relationship. If you're not collecting contact details and using them, you've skipped the main reason to go direct in the first place.
How Flipdish helps restaurants build a direct ordering channel
Flipdish provides restaurant websites, branded mobile apps and self-service kiosks, with loyalty and marketing built in.
Direct orders go to the same POS system as counter orders, so the kitchen works from one queue whichever channel the order came through. Customer data from every direct order feeds into Flipdish's AI marketing tools, which run personalised re-engagement campaigns on their own. Nobody on your team has to write and send every email by hand.
Start building your direct ordering channel: Flipdish online ordering