Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel
What Uber Eats costs you
Uber Eats takes 15-30% commission on every order. On a £20 meal, that's £3 to £6 gone before you've paid for ingredients, staff or rent. If you put £10,000 a month through the app at 25%, you hand over £2,500 a month. £30,000 a year.
The money isn't the only thing you lose. Uber Eats keeps the customer details. You don't get an email address, an order history or any way to message that person again. They're Uber Eats customers who happen to be eating your food.
The usual fix is to build your own ordering channel and run it next to the marketplace.
What a direct ordering channel is
Customers order from you through your own website, your own branded app or a kiosk in the restaurant. No marketplace in the middle. You set the menu, the look of it and the fees. Orders land in your kitchen through the same system as everything else.
Two things change. You keep more of each sale, and you end up with a customer list that belongs to you.
Do you have to leave Uber Eats?
No, and most restaurants don't. Uber Eats puts you in front of people who would never have found you otherwise, so keep it for that. What you're changing is the balance.
Say £10,000 a month of your sales come through Uber Eats at 25%. Move a third of those orders to your own channel and you stop paying commission on about £3,333 of sales. That's roughly £833 a month, or £10,000 a year, before you subtract what your own platform costs. Take your direct share of orders from 10% to 40% and the saving climbs with it.
Collection orders are the easiest place to start. Nobody has to schedule or pay a driver, so every collection order you move from Uber Eats to your own site is commission you simply stop paying. Delivery can follow once the habit is there.
Over time Uber Eats becomes the place new customers find you. Your own channel is where they go the second time.
How to build a direct ordering channel
Step 1: Get your own ordering website
Start here. The site has to load fast on a phone, be easy to find on Google and send orders straight to the kitchen. A website order should show up the same way a counter order does. If staff have to retype it, or you need a separate tablet on the pass, the setup is wrong.
Flipdish online ordering gives you a fully branded ordering website that connects to the Flipdish POS. Customers see your branding at every step and the kitchen sees one order queue.
Step 2: Launch a branded mobile app
Regulars order again and again, and an app makes that easy. Saved payment details, loyalty points and order history mean a repeat order takes a few taps. Marketplaces can't offer that for your restaurant, because the loyalty belongs to them and not to you.
Flipdish branded apps carry your branding and use the same loyalty and ordering system as your website. Someone who has your app on their phone has one less reason to open Uber Eats.
Step 3: Send customers to it
A direct channel does nothing if nobody uses it. Most of the work is telling people it exists:
- Print your ordering URL on every receipt and on all packaging
- Put a QR code on bags and boxes that links to the ordering website
- Get staff to say it out loud: "Order direct next time and you'll earn loyalty points"
- Run a launch offer on first direct orders, like free delivery, 10% off or a free side
- Add your ordering link to your Google Business Profile
- Use Flipdish AI marketing to message people who have ordered before
Do the printed and in-person ones first. They cost almost nothing and they reach people who've already bought from you.
Step 4: Add kiosks for in-restaurant orders
Flipdish self-service kiosks put every in-restaurant order into your own system. Someone who orders at the kiosk ends up in your loyalty database. Someone who ordered through a marketplace last night doesn't.
Kiosks also prompt for extras and add-ons on every order, which a busy person at the counter will sometimes forget to do. And they take pressure off the front of house at peak times, when the queue is the problem.
Step 5: Move phone orders over
Plenty of takeaways still get a big share of orders by phone. Each call ties up a member of staff, and the caller usually isn't in any database afterwards.
The Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers those calls itself. It takes the order, suggests extras, takes payment and sends a confirmation, all without anyone leaving the kitchen. Phone customers go into the same customer database as online ones.
Why Flipdish for this
Some restaurants try to build a direct channel from separate pieces: one tool for the website, another for the POS, something else for loyalty, a different system for kiosks. It works for a while. Then someone has to reconcile four sets of reports, and the same customer exists in three places under three spellings.
Flipdish avoids that by doing all of it in one system. Your POS, website ordering, app, kiosks, phone ordering and loyalty share one customer record, one kitchen queue and one reporting dashboard. When a customer orders on the app on Friday and at the kiosk on Sunday, that's one customer with one history, and you can market to them as one person.
It also covers the obvious worry about losing marketplace orders. You don't have to turn Uber Eats off to try this. Flipdish's marketplace order aggregation brings Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders into the same kitchen system. Staff watch one screen. The marketplace orders keep arriving while your direct share grows, and you can see both side by side in the same reports.
That last part matters for working out whether the whole thing is paying off. If marketplace and direct orders sit in one system, comparing them takes a minute rather than an afternoon with two spreadsheets.
Mistakes that slow it down
Launching and then saying nothing is the most common one. A website nobody has been told about gets few orders, and then the owner decides direct ordering doesn't work. It does. It needs the same push you'd give a new menu item.
Pricing is the next one. Customers compare. If your own site charges more than your Uber Eats listing for the same burger, they'll go back to Uber Eats and you've lost the point of the exercise. Match the price at least, then give them a reason to come direct: a free item on the first order, free delivery over a certain spend, loyalty points that only exist on your channel.
Burying the link is a smaller mistake with a real cost. If "Order online" sits in the footer of your website, or your Instagram bio still points at a marketplace listing, you're sending your own customers to the commission. Put the link where people look first.
Then there's switching off the marketplace too early. It's tempting once direct orders start coming in. Don't. Watch your direct share for a few months, see what your repeat customers do, and decide with real numbers. Many keep it running for good.
What to track once it's live
Five numbers are enough.
Direct order share is the first. What percentage of your total orders come through your own channel compared with marketplaces? Look at it weekly. It should only go one way.
Cost of winning a new direct customer is the second. Work out what you spend on your own marketing to get one new direct customer, then compare it with the commission you'd have paid if that order had gone through Uber Eats.
Repeat order rate tells you whether the loyalty side is working. What percentage of direct customers order a second time within 30 days? A third time within 60?
Average order value is worth comparing channel by channel. Put direct orders next to marketplace orders. Check whether yours are bigger.
The last one is the annual commission saving. Add up what you would have paid Uber Eats on every order that came in directly instead. Then subtract the cost of running your own platform. If the number is positive, the channel has paid for itself and the customer data is a bonus.
Where to start
If you only do one thing this week, set up the ordering website and print the URL on your receipts and packaging. That alone starts moving repeat customers off the marketplace. Add the app once people are reordering. Add kiosks and phone ordering when the counter or the phone line is getting busy enough to need them.
Uber Eats finds you new customers. It shouldn't be the only place they ever buy from you, and every order that goes through your own channel is one where you keep the margin and the customer's details.
Flipdish puts the website, app, kiosks, POS, loyalty and AI marketing in one place, so you're not stitching it together yourself.
Ready to rely less on marketplaces? Talk to the Flipdish team about building your direct ordering channel.