Restaurant marketing · United States
Your best customers are ordering through someone else’s app.
The problem is not that marketplaces cost too much
It is that they are the only channel most restaurants have. When the app is where your customers order, every one of them is a customer you have to buy again next week — and the platform, not the restaurant, decides what that costs.
A marketplace listing does not usually create demand for an established restaurant. It intercepts demand that already existed, keeps the customer’s name and order history, and rents the relationship back one order at a time. That is a reasonable deal for genuine discovery. It is a terrible deal for the twentieth order from a regular.
“The question worth asking is not what commission you pay. It is what share of your repeat business you would still have next month if you stopped paying for placement.”
What the arithmetic actually looks like
Marketplace commission in the US runs at 6% on orders the customer collects and 15% to 30% on delivery, depending on plan. Those rates are all-in — they include card processing — so the fair comparison is against roughly 3.6% to take the same order on your own site.
Two things make the real gap wider than the headline. Most marketplace volume is delivery, not collection: across one multi-location client’s reporting, 94% of marketplace orders were delivery, so the low collection rate barely applies. And commission is only the floor — sponsored placement and funded promotions are bought on top, with the restaurant covering both the discount and a per-order fee. Independent operators commonly report a blended real cost of 25% to 35% once all of it is counted.
Check how much you can save by adding your actual data here:
0% of your digital orders are already your own
Worth every 10% of that volume you move across
$12,840saved per year
Direct ordering keeps customer data in your hands and eliminates repeated marketplace acquisition fees.
What a realistic shift is worth, per year
This works out what the commission costs you and what moving volume to your own channel is worth. It deliberately does not project a return on marketing spend. We have no idea what your demand, menu, location or competition look like, and any figure we produced for you here would be a guess wearing a spreadsheet. What the shift is worth is arithmetic. What it takes to achieve is a conversation.
The fee is the part everyone argues about. The part that compounds is the list. One of our clients now runs the clear majority of its digital ordering through channels it owns rather than rents — a decision made years ago that cannot be made retrospectively.
Before you hire anyone
We will tell you what your channel is worth before you hire anyone. Send us a month of ordering data and we will come back with what your first-party share is, what the marketplace share is costing, and whether there is a case for changing it.
No charge, and no obligation to work with us.
How we work
Four rules, arrived at by getting them wrong first. Each one links to the case study where you can check it.
- 01
Measure the baseline before spending anything
You cannot tell what marketing is worth without knowing what the business does without it. That number takes two weeks to establish and is worth more than six months of campaigns measured against last year.
We ran no marketing for the first sixteen days after one client's site launched, purely to get a clean organic baseline. Sanpeggio's Pizza
- 02
Fix the close rate before buying traffic
Paying to send people into an ordering flow that loses most of its carts is the most expensive way to find out what your site cannot do. Menu architecture and checkout come first; media comes after.
Cart conversion went from 24% to 48% before the first campaign ran — about half of that year's revenue came from closing better, not buying more. Bawarchi Atlanta
- 03
Build the demand before you open
The first fortnight is the hardest trading period a new location will ever have, and it is the only one you can prepare for entirely in advance. Marketing should start before the kitchen does.
Forty-five days of pre-launch campaigns built a list of 1,200 people for a restaurant that did not exist yet. It passed $40,000 of website takeaway in 51 days. Bawarchi Kennesaw
- 04
Own the customer rather than renting them
Every channel is either an asset or a subscription. Search position, an ordering platform and a customer list keep working when you stop paying. Paid placement in someone else's app does not.
One client's website channel has grown for nine consecutive years, through a pandemic and three direct competitors opening in the same catchment. Bawarchi Atlanta
Four engagements you can check
Full write-ups carry the diagnosis, the decisions and the arithmetic. Briefs cover shorter engagements, or ones where only part of the work has a clean audit trail.
How we report numbers
Six rules we hold every figure on this page to. They are the reason some of the numbers here are smaller than they could be.
Marketplace commission rates cited on this page are published US rates and are inclusive of payment processing: 6% on collection and 15% Basic, 25% Plus or 30% Premier on delivery. The pickup rate was reduced from 15% to 6% in April 2021. Blended real-cost figures for independent operators come from published industry reporting, not from our clients’ accounts. Own-website processing is assumed at 2.9% plus 30 cents a transaction. Rates vary by market, platform, ticket size and agreement — check your own before relying on ours.
- 01
Every figure comes from the client's system
Their point of sale, their ordering platform, their analytics. Where our own reporting once differed from a client's final records, theirs is used.
- 02
Percentages carry a base and a period
A multiple without a starting number and a date is not a result, and we do not publish one.
- 03
We name what is excluded
Untracked walk-in trade, dine-in demand, closed locations, new openings — if it is not in the number, it is written on the page.
- 04
We publish the adjusted figure, not the flattering one
Where seasonality or an existing trend explains part of a result, we take it out first and show the smaller number.
- 05
We do not publish our fees
Ask, and we will walk you through the full return calculation on any case here — what we charged included.
- 06
We say when we got it wrong
Every case study has a section on what the work cost the client and what we would do differently.
Ask us for the spreadsheet, not the testimonial.
If you want to know whether we have done something like your problem before, ask — and ask for the numbers behind it. Every figure on these pages has a source we can show you.
