If you take orders through Just Eat or Deliveroo, you already know the catch: a slice of every single order goes to the platform. Depending on the deal, that’s commonly 14% to 30% per order, money skimmed off the top of food you cooked, for customers who often found you in the first place. There’s another way, and it takes that cut out of the equation entirely: take orders directly on your own website.
What does Just Eat and Deliveroo commission actually cost you?
The percentage sounds survivable until you run it across a year. Say you do €4,000 a month in orders through a platform at a 20% commission. That’s €800 a month, €9,600 a year, gone, every year, for as long as you stay on the platform. The busier you get, the more it takes. You’re effectively paying rent on your own customers, and it never stops.
Worse, the platform owns the relationship. The customer’s details, their order history, the ability to email them an offer, that all sits with Just Eat or Deliveroo, not with you. You’re a listing in their marketplace, competing on price with the takeaway two doors down.
What is commission-free online ordering?
A custom online ordering system is built into your own website. Customers browse your menu, order, and pay you directly, for collection or delivery, and the money lands in your account, minus only the normal card-processing fee. No per-order commission. No monthly marketplace rent.
Done well, it does everything the platform does for the part that matters to you:
- Takes the full order and payment on your own site, on any phone
- Collection or delivery, with your own delivery zones and charges
- Your menu, your branding, not a listing buried among competitors
- You keep the customer, their details and order history are yours, so you can bring them back
The difference is who the system works for. A platform is built to grow the platform. Your own ordering system is built to grow your business.
”But the platforms bring me customers”
This is the honest counter-argument, and it’s a fair one. The big apps do have reach, people browse them when they’re hungry and don’t know what they want. So the smart play usually isn’t “delete Just Eat tomorrow.” It’s this:
- Put your own ordering on your site so regulars and anyone who already knows you can order commission-free.
- Point your own audience at it, your social, your menus, your bag inserts, the sign at the counter, your Google Business Profile.
- Let the platforms be discovery, while your own channel becomes where your loyal customers order.
Over time, the orders you’d be paying 20% on, the regulars who’d come to you anyway, quietly move to the channel that costs you nothing. The platform becomes a top-up, not a tax.
The actual alternatives to Just Eat and Deliveroo
“What else is there” is the question behind most searches that land on this page, so here is the honest landscape rather than a pitch.
Other marketplaces. Flipdish, Bidfood and a few smaller Irish operators. Some charge a lower cut than the big two, some charge a monthly fee instead of a percentage. They are still marketplaces, so you are still a listing beside your competitors, but the terms are often better and they are worth pricing.
White-label ordering products. Flipdish, UrbanPiper, GloriaFood and similar sit on your own site under your own branding and charge either monthly or per order. This is the middle ground: cheaper and faster than a custom build, more yours than a marketplace. The thing to check is whether the customer data is genuinely exportable, because “your own branding” and “your own customer list” are not the same promise.
A custom ordering system. Built into your own site, paid for once, no cut per order. Best when volume is high enough that percentages hurt, or when your menu does something the products do not handle well: complex modifiers, pre-order windows, multiple sites, unusual delivery zones.
Nothing but the phone. Still the right answer for some small kitchens, and worth saying out loud. If you take fifteen orders on a quiet week, none of the above will pay for itself in either money or hassle.
Who owns the customer, and why it matters
This is the part that is easy to skip and expensive to learn later.
On a marketplace, the order sits with the platform. The customer’s email, their phone number, their order history and the ability to contact them again all belong to the marketplace, not to you. That is not a technicality, it is the whole business model: the reach you are paying for is reach over customers you are helping them accumulate.
The practical test for any system, marketplace or otherwise, is a single question: can I export my customer list today, in a usable format, without asking permission? If the answer is no, or “contact support”, you are renting the relationship as well as the software.
Under GDPR you have rights over data you control, but that only helps if you are the controller. Sort out who that is before you have five years of orders sitting in someone else’s account.
It works for more than takeaways
The same commission-free idea applies to any business taking orders or bookings online:
- Cafés and restaurants, collection and delivery orders, plus table bookings
- Bakeries and delis, pre-orders and click-and-collect
- Any business that takes deposits or sells direct, the same engine handles online bookings and deposits too
It’s all one idea: build it once, own it, and stop renting a slice of your takings to a middleman.
What about the cost of building it?
A custom ordering system is a one-off fixed price, agreed before any work starts, not a monthly subscription and not a cut of your sales. The comparison worth doing is not build cost against zero, it is a single figure against a percentage that repeats on every order for as long as you stay.
Grant funding won’t cover a custom build like this. The Trading Online Voucher closed in December 2024, and its replacement, the Grow Digital Voucher, covers off-the-shelf software subscriptions, not custom website builds.
How to get started
You don’t need the all-singing version on day one. Often the right start is a clean menu-and-checkout that takes orders and card payments on your own site, then you add delivery zones, scheduling and the rest as you go.
Tell me how you take orders now and I’ll give you a straight answer on what would suit and what it would cost, or see exactly how I build commission-free online ordering for restaurants, and booking systems for any Irish business.
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