Direct Ordering vs Deliveroo: Which Is Better for Restaurants?
The short answer
Direct ordering. Deliveroo is fine for getting found by new customers, but if it's where most of your orders come from, you're handing over a big slice of every order and getting very little back for it.
What Deliveroo actually costs you
Deliveroo takes a commission on every order. The rate depends on your contract and volume, but UK restaurants usually end up paying somewhere between 25% and 35% of order value once commission and fees are added together.
On a £25 order, that's £6 to £9 gone before you've paid for a single ingredient.
The commission isn't the whole bill. Deliveroo owns the customer, so you can't email, text or retarget the person who just ordered your food. You get very little data on who ordered, when, or what they keep coming back for. A lot of contracts include price parity, which means you can't make your own channel cheaper. And on the app you're one listing among every other restaurant nearby, sitting next to whoever's running a promotion that night.
What direct ordering gives you
A direct channel is your own branded website, app or kiosk. You pay card processing, usually 1-3%, instead of 25-35% commission. That's the big one.
You also get the customer list. You know who orders, what they buy and how often, so you can run a loyalty scheme, send an offer to people who haven't ordered in a month, or put on a Tuesday night deal without asking anyone's permission. The prices and the menu are yours to set.
Where Deliveroo earns its fee
Deliveroo isn't useless. People who've never heard of you can find you there. Getting listed is quick and doesn't need any tech. And if you use their riders, you don't have to hire and manage drivers yourself.
For a new restaurant trying to get its name out, that's worth paying for. The trouble starts when Deliveroo stops being a way to find new customers and becomes the main way you take orders.
Moving customers over
Restaurants that cut back on marketplaces tend to do it in roughly this order:
- Launch a direct ordering channel, either a branded restaurant website or a mobile app
- Run a launch offer to get existing Deliveroo customers ordering direct
- Put your ordering link on packaging inserts, receipts and signs in the restaurant
- Start a loyalty programme that only works on the direct channel
- Scale Deliveroo back, or keep it purely for picking up new customers
Step 3 costs almost nothing, and it reaches people who've already ordered from you once and liked the food enough to keep the receipt.
Cost comparison
| Channel | Commission / fee | Customer data | Loyalty possible | Your brand |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Deliveroo | 25-35% of order value | No | No | Shared with marketplace |
| Direct ordering | 1-3% payment processing | Yes | Yes | Fully yours |
On that same £25 order, direct costs you about 25p to 75p. Deliveroo costs you £6 to £9.
How Flipdish fits in
Flipdish gives restaurants the whole direct ordering setup: branded websites, mobile apps, self-service kiosks and a restaurant POS system that ties them together.
Orders from all of those land in the same system as your in-person orders, so the kitchen works off one queue instead of a row of tablets.
Flipdish's AI marketing tools use your ordering data to run automated retention campaigns. Deliveroo won't do that for you, because as far as Deliveroo is concerned those customers are theirs.
If you run a restaurant in the UK or Ireland and want to move orders off Deliveroo and onto a channel where you keep the margin, talk to Flipdish about what that would look like for you.