The operators paying 30% commission to reach customers they already have

There's a pattern we see again and again with the operators we audit. A healthy delivery volume through the platforms. A CRM database with thousands of contacts from past orders, reservations and loyalty sign-ups. And almost no connection between the two.

Every order placed through Uber Eats or Deliveroo costs you a commission. Some of those customers are first-time visitors who found you through the platform — fair enough, that's what you're paying for. But a significant proportion are guests who've been in before, who already know you, who would order from you directly if you made it easy enough.

You're paying 30% to reach people who already chose you. That's the problem.

What the platforms are actually selling you

Delivery platforms are customer acquisition tools. They take margin in exchange for exposure to their user base. That trade makes sense for genuine new customers. It makes very little sense for customers you already have a relationship with.

The issue is that platforms make re-ordering frictionless. The app is already on the phone. The card is already saved. Your menu is right there. Without an equally frictionless owned alternative, even loyal customers default back to the platform — and you pay for it every time.

What a working direct channel actually looks like

Web ordering is the foundation. A clean, fast ordering experience on your own site or a branded app — with the customer paying you directly, not via a third party. The technology for this is accessible and affordable. The barrier isn't the tech, it's the will to build the habit and drive customers to it.

That's where CRM comes in. Email and SMS are not glamorous, but they are effective. A well-timed message to a customer who ordered from you three weeks ago — with a straightforward reason to order direct — converts. Not every time, but consistently. And over time, the customers who shift to direct become your highest-margin guests.

Loyalty mechanics can accelerate the shift. A modest reward for ordering direct, or a programme that accrues points regardless of channel but pays out better for direct orders, reshapes customer behaviour over time without requiring the customer to sacrifice convenience.

The maths

Take a restaurant doing £15,000 a month through Uber Eats. At 30% commission, that's £4,500 a month in platform fees. If 30% of those customers have ordered directly or dined in before, you're paying £1,350 a month to re-acquire people you already know.

Shifting a third of that volume to direct ordering — at 0% commission plus a modest payment processing fee — saves around £1,000 a month at the same revenue level. The investment required to build and activate a direct channel is a fraction of that.

We're not suggesting operators abandon the platforms. They're valuable acquisition tools and they're not going anywhere. The point is to stop paying acquisition cost for retention. Run the platforms to win new customers. Run your own channels to keep the ones you've already got.

Getting there

The operators who have built effective direct channels didn't do it overnight. They started by getting the web ordering experience right. Then they started capturing contact data consistently. Then they started communicating with that list regularly, with genuine offers rather than noise.

The cadence matters as much as the content. Monthly emails get ignored. Weekly messages from a brand customers trust, with relevant offers, build a habit. That habit is worth more than any individual campaign.

This is the kind of work that doesn't look like much in any given week but compounds significantly over a year. The operators doing it well don't think about it as "off-premise strategy." They think about it as keeping in touch with their best customers and making it easy for those customers to come back.