How to Stop Paying So Much Delivery-App Commission

If you run a restaurant or takeaway in the UK, there is a good chance the biggest line on your bill isn’t rent, staff or ingredients — it’s the delivery apps. Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats brought you customers, yes, but they also quietly take a slice of nearly every order that lands. For a lot of kitchens working on wafer-thin margins, that slice is the difference between a profitable month and a break-even one.

The good news: you don’t have to choose between “stay on the apps and bleed commission” or “quit overnight and lose all your orders.” There’s a middle path — keep the apps working for what they’re genuinely good at, and steadily move your regulars onto a channel you own. This article walks through the real numbers and the practical steps to get there.

Just how much are the apps actually taking?

Let’s be clear-eyed about the figures. Commission rates vary by contract, location and the deal you signed, but the rough UK picture looks like this:

• Deliveroo — typically around 25–30% per order for the full delivery service.
• Uber Eats — similar, roughly 25–30% per order.
• Just Eat — often lower on the headline rate, around 14% plus a 50p per-order fee, though this depends heavily on whether you use their drivers or your own.

Those percentages come off the top before you’ve paid for a single chip. And that’s usually before card processing fees, packaging, and any promotional discounts the app “encourages” you to run.

A worked example: what commission costs on £6,000 a month

Numbers make this concrete. Say you push £6,000 of orders through the apps in a month — a modest volume for a busy little kitchen.

• At a 28% blended commission (typical if most of it goes through Deliveroo or Uber Eats), you hand over roughly £1,680 a month. That’s £20,160 a year.
• Even on Just Eat’s friendlier 14% + 50p, on the same £6,000 across, say, 400 orders, you’re looking at around £840 in commission plus £200 in per-order fees — roughly £1,040 a month, or about £12,500 a year.

Now put that next to your margin. If your net profit on a delivery order is 10–15% after food, packaging and labour, a 28% commission doesn’t just dent the profit — it can wipe it out entirely and eat into the food cost. You end up busy, stressed, cooking flat out on a Friday night, and effectively working for the app rather than for yourself. That is the heart of why this hurts: commission is charged on revenue, but it’s paid out of margin, and margin is the thin bit.

The honest trade-off: the apps do provide real value

Here’s the part a lot of “ditch the apps” advice skips. The apps aren’t charging that much for nothing. For your commission you get two genuinely valuable things:

• Discovery. Millions of hungry people open those apps with no particular restaurant in mind. Being listed puts you in front of customers who would never have found you otherwise. That’s marketing you don’t have to do.
• Drivers and logistics. A fleet of riders, live tracking, and support when an order goes wrong is a real operational cost the app absorbs for you.

So the goal isn’t to pretend that value doesn’t exist. It’s to stop paying 28% on the customer who already knows you, loves your food, and orders from you every fortnight. You should pay for discovery once — not commission forever. That reframe is the whole strategy.

Five practical ways to cut commission without losing orders

1. Take direct orders on your own website

The single biggest lever is having your own ordering channel where the commission is zero (or close to it — just card fees). When a regular orders directly from you instead of through Deliveroo, you keep the entire 28%. Do that on even a third of your orders and the annual saving runs into thousands. This is exactly where commission-free ordering changes the maths — every order that moves across is margin you keep.

2. Use the apps for discovery, then convert regulars

Treat the apps as the top of your funnel, not the whole funnel. A new customer finds you on Uber Eats — great, that’s the app doing its job. Your mission from that first order onwards is to give them a reason and a route to come back directly next time. Every repeat customer you convert is one you stop paying commission on, while the app keeps feeding you fresh faces. This “use both” approach is especially powerful for takeaways with a loyal local base.

3. Put your own QR menu and links on packaging and receipts

Your delivery bags are travelling billboards that go straight into a customer’s home. Use them. A small flyer, sticker or printed insert with a QR code that opens your own menu — plus a short line like “Order direct next time and it’s the same food, better for us” — costs pennies and quietly rewires customer habits. Add the same QR to receipts and dine-in tables. A free digital menu with a scannable QR is exactly the sort of thing you can set up today, ready to point people to your own channel.

4. Reward loyalty and repeat orders

People will happily change how they order if there’s something in it for them. A simple loyalty incentive — “10% off when you order direct,” a free side on their fifth order, or a members-only Friday deal — gives customers a concrete reason to skip the app. You’re effectively sharing a slice of the commission you’d have paid with the customer instead of the platform, and both of you come out ahead.

5. Push collection and click-and-collect direct

Not every order needs a driver. For collection orders, there’s no logistics for the app to justify its cut — so steer those to your own channel hard. Offer a small collection discount, promote it in-store and on your packaging, and make direct pickup the obvious choice. It’s the easiest commission to eliminate because you’re not replacing anything the app was genuinely providing.

Where DineKit fits (and an honest note about timing)

Time to be straight with you, because being on the side of the restaurateur means not overselling. DineKit’s own commission-free online ordering is still on the roadmap — it’s coming soon, not live today. We’d rather tell you that plainly than have you sign up expecting something that isn’t ready yet.

What DineKit gives you right now, for free, is the groundwork that makes your own channel ready to switch on:

• A proper menu builder so your menu lives on your own site, not just inside an app.
• QR code menus you can print onto packaging, receipts and tables to start moving customers across today.
• All 14 UK allergens handled properly, with a printable allergen matrix — compliance sorted, no spreadsheets.
• Live opening hours so customers always know when you’re open.

In other words: you can build the channel you’ll own now, get your regulars used to scanning your QR and visiting your menu, and be ready the moment commission-free ordering lands. If that’s the direction you want to head, you can join the waitlist and be first in line when it goes live. And if you’re weighing up your options, it’s worth seeing how DineKit compares to Deliveroo for the everyday menu-and-ordering side of things.

The balanced takeaway: use both, on your terms

Please don’t read this as “delete the apps tonight.” For most kitchens that would be throwing away real discovery and a chunk of revenue you can’t afford to lose. The smart play is a use-both approach: let Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats do what they’re good at — bringing you strangers — while you quietly and steadily convert those strangers into direct-ordering regulars on a channel you control.

Every order you move across is commission you keep. You don’t need to win all of them. Shifting even 20–30% of your volume to a direct channel can hand back thousands of pounds a year — money that goes into better ingredients, fairer wages, or simply staying open. Start with the free menu, the QR codes and the loyalty nudges today, and get your own front door ready for the day the commission-free ordering opens.