The Commission Trap: What Uber Eats and Takeaway Really Cost Your Restaurant

The apps are a great way to be discovered. They're a terrible way to be loyal to.

Here's a number that should bother every restaurant owner in Belgium: on a typical delivery order, somewhere between 14% and 35% of what the customer pays never reaches your kitchen. It goes to the app.

For a customer who found you through that app — fair enough. That's a marketing cost, and discovery has value. But here's the part nobody likes to do the math on: most of the orders you're paying commission on aren't new customers. They're your regulars. The people who already know your food, already love it, and would happily order from you directly — if you'd given them somewhere to do it.

You're paying a finder's fee on people you already found.

How the Commission Actually Works

Let's be specific, because the percentages sound abstract until you put euros on them.

The big aggregators — Uber Eats, Takeaway.com (Just Eat), Deliveroo — charge a commission on the full order value. Depending on your plan and whether they handle the delivery, that's roughly:

• Delivery handled by the app: ~25–35% commission
• You deliver yourself, app just lists you: ~12–20% commission
• Plus payment processing, service fees, and "marketing boosts" that are increasingly hard to opt out of

On a €25 order with full delivery, you're handing over €6 to €8.75. Do forty of those a week and you're looking at €12,000 to €18,000 a year — gone, on customers a large share of whom would have come back regardless.

The Discovery vs. Loyalty Distinction

This is the whole game, and it's simpler than the platforms want you to think.

There are two completely different jobs happening when someone orders food:

Discovery — a hungry person who's never heard of you scrolls the app and picks your place. The aggregator did real work here. They earned that commission. Keep them for this.

Loyalty — someone who ate your food last week, loved it, and wants it again. They open the app, search your name, and order. The aggregator did nothing to earn this order except sit between you and a customer who was already yours. You pay the same 25–35% anyway.

The aggregators have quietly merged these two jobs into one bill. You're paying discovery prices for loyalty traffic.

The fix isn't to abandon the apps. It's to stop letting them tax the half of your orders they didn't earn.

"But Everyone's on the Apps"

Yes. And you should be too — for discovery. This isn't an anti-aggregator argument. The apps genuinely put you in front of people you'd never reach otherwise, and walking away from that reach to "go independent" overnight is how restaurants lose volume.

The move is quieter and smarter: be on the apps and own a direct channel. Let the apps do what they're good at — finding new mouths — while you build a place your regulars can come back to without the middleman.

Every regular you move to direct ordering is pure margin recovered. You don't need all of them. You need the loyal third — the people who order most often, who cost you the most in cumulative commission — and that's exactly the group most willing to bookmark your site and skip the app.

What "Owning the Channel" Actually Means

A direct ordering channel is your own website, on your own domain, where customers order pickup or delivery and pay you directly. Concretely:

• No commission. You pay a payment-processing fee — usually around 1–2% on Bancontact and cards — instead of 14–35%. On that same €25 order, that's about €0.40 instead of €6+.
• You own the customer. Their order history, their email, their favourite dish — yours, not locked inside an app's database you can't export.
• You set the rules. Your delivery zone, your minimum order, your own "order direct and save 10%" offer, your loyalty card. None of which the apps let you run.
• It works where the apps don't. Plenty of Belgian towns aren't covered by Uber Eats or Deliveroo at all. Your own site can deliver there the moment you decide to.

And critically — it doesn't mean ripping out anything. Your POS keeps running. Orders from your site can flow straight into Lightspeed, Square or your kitchen printer. The apps keep delivering. You're adding a front door, not demolishing the kitchen.

The Honest Math Over a Year

Say you do 60 delivery orders a week at an average of €25. That's €78,000 a year in delivery revenue.

Leave it all on the aggregators at ~28% blended commission, and roughly €21,800 a year goes to the apps.

Now move just the loyal third — 20 orders a week — to your own site. That slice (~€26,000 of revenue) drops from ~€7,300 in commission to about €400 in payment fees. You've kept nearly €6,900 a year, every year, on orders you were already getting.

A custom restaurant site with ordering and reservations is a one-time build, not a monthly tax. The channel pays for itself in months — and then it just keeps paying.

Bye Bye to Paying Twice

There's nothing wrong with the apps. They're a tool. Used for discovery, they're worth the cut. The mistake is letting them quietly become your only channel — so that every loyal customer, every repeat order, every regular who'd happily order direct is funnelled through a 30% tollbooth forever.

Keep the apps. Add your own door. Let discovery be discovery, and let loyalty come home.

That's what we build: restaurant websites with commission-free ordering, reservations and a POS connection — your brand, your customers, your margin. See how it works for restaurants →