Delivery App Commission vs Your Own Website

In the first week of October 2025, both of the delivery platforms that most Irish takeaways depend on changed hands. DoorDash completed its acquisition of Deliveroo on 2 October. Four days later, Prosus settled its offer for Just Eat Takeaway.com, which was delisted from the Amsterdam exchange the following month. Two ownership changes, one week, and not a single restaurant was consulted about either.

I am not going to tell you the apps are evil. They are not. For a kitchen nobody has heard of yet, those platforms put hungry people in front of a menu that would otherwise sit unseen, and for some businesses that is the whole ballgame. But the commission on those platforms is not a marketing cost you can switch off in a bad month. It is a permanent share of your revenue, taken before you pay for the chicken.

This is a straight look at what that share actually costs, what the alternative costs, and where the honest line between the two sits.

What the Commission Actually Takes

Writing for RTÉ Brainstorm last November, UCC's Ronan Carbery put the commission the global delivery platforms charge at somewhere between 25% and 35% of the order value. Locally run platforms, he noted in an earlier piece, tend to sit nearer 17.5%. Your own contract may land anywhere in that band depending on when you signed, what you negotiated, and whether the platform's riders or your own driver carries the bag.

Now hold that against the other number in the same article. Restaurant net margins in Ireland generally run between 3% and 5%.

Read those two ranges together and the arithmetic stops being abstract. On a €30 order at the top of the commission band, roughly €9 leaves before you have paid for the food, the gas, the packaging or the person who cooked it. The ingredients cost you exactly the same as they would if that customer had rung the shop.

That is the part owners tend to underestimate. A delivery order is not a normal sale with a small fee attached. It is a sale where a third party takes a slice several times larger than the profit you were hoping to make on it, and you absorb the difference by selling more.

Where the Money Goes on a Thirty Euro Order

Channel	Typical cut of the order	Who holds the customer	Who decides where you appear
App, platform's rider delivers	Roughly 25% to 35%	The platform	The platform's ranking, plus paid placement
App, you deliver or customer collects	Lower band, commonly quoted in the mid teens	The platform	The platform's ranking, plus paid placement
Your own website, card payment	Card processing only, from about 1.5% plus 25 cent	You	You

Three channels, three very different deals. Each one deserves a closer look, because the differences are not only about the percentage.

The App With Their Rider

This is the expensive version and, for a kitchen with no driver, the only version. You are buying two things in one fee: demand, and a delivery fleet you do not have to employ, insure or manage at eight o'clock on a Tuesday night. That bundle has genuine value. The problem is that you cannot buy the half you need and decline the half you do not.

The App With Your Own Driver or Collection

Self-delivery and collection orders sit in a lower commission band. The published rate cards move around and the numbers circulating online are mostly second-hand, so treat any figure you read as indicative and check your own invoice, which itemises service commission, marketplace commission and any placement fees separately. What matters structurally is this: on a collection order, the platform did not deliver anything. It charged you for the introduction. That is a real service, and it is also the service your own website can perform for repeat customers who already know your name.

Your Own Website

Here the only unavoidable cut is card processing. Stripe publishes a standard Irish online rate of 1.5% plus 25 cent for standard EEA cards, rising for UK and international cards. On that same €30 order, the processing fee is well under a euro. What you take on instead is the work the platform was doing: being found, taking the order accurately, and getting the food to the door.

The same orders either way. The channel decides how much of each one you keep.

The Commission Is Not the Whole Cost

The percentage is the number owners quote to each other. It is rarely the number that hurts most.

Your position in a platform's listing is not fixed and it is not earned once. Platforms sell prominence. Just Eat's own partner material describes a Top Placement product with a direct sales model and an auction model, and partner invoices itemise placement charges alongside commission. The European Commission's platform-to-business rules require online intermediation services to tell business users the main parameters that determine ranking, including whether payment influences it, precisely because that influence exists and was previously invisible.

So consider what a Thursday looks like when a competitor two streets away outbids you for the top slot in your area. Nothing on your side has changed. The food is the same, the kitchen is the same, the reviews are the same. Orders simply thin out, and the dashboard will not tell you why. You cannot email the two hundred people who ordered from you last month, because you do not have their email addresses. The platform does.

Then there are the promotions. Discount campaigns that make the platform look generous are frequently funded, in whole or in part, by the restaurant carrying the discount. You opt in for the visibility, the visibility works, and the orders that arrive are the least profitable ones you will cook all week.

I have made a version of this mistake myself, on the hosting side rather than the food side. Years ago I let a chunk of new business come through a single referral channel because the volume was good and the effort was low. When that channel changed its terms, the volume did not transfer to us. It just stopped. The lesson was not that partners are bad. It was that a channel you do not own is a channel that can be repriced without your agreement.

Who Owns the Customer

Ask any owner who their best customers are and they will describe them from memory: the Friday regulars, the family that orders the same three mains every second week. Ask for their phone numbers or email addresses and the answer, for app orders, is that they do not have them.

That is the quiet transfer at the heart of the model. You cook the food, you take the complaint if it is cold, you carry the reputational risk, and the platform builds the customer relationship. When the platform later markets a competitor's opening offer to that same customer, it is marketing to a list you helped build.

Owning the relationship is the same argument that applies to any rented channel, and it is why renting a marketplace shop rather than owning your website tends to look cheap for the first year and expensive by the third. Economics differ by sector. The ownership question does not.

Consider a family-run Thai takeaway in Tullamore doing most of its trade through the apps. The kitchen is busy, the reviews are good, and the owner genuinely cannot tell you which customers are regulars, because every order arrives anonymised behind a platform ID. Two years of goodwill, all of it stored on somebody else's server.

What Direct Ordering Actually Costs to Run

Strip the marketing away and a direct ordering setup needs four things: a site that loads quickly on a phone, a menu that is easy to update, a way to take a card payment, and somebody to get the food out the door.

The first three are cheap now in a way they were not five years ago. WordPress handles the site and the menu, an ordering or checkout plugin handles the basket, and a payment processor handles the card. The infrastructure underneath is the part people still overpay for, which is why Web60 bundles the hosting, SSL, nightly backups, security and support into everything-included hosting for €60 a year rather than charging per feature. Add card processing at roughly one and a half percent and your cost per order is a rounding error next to a commission in the twenties or thirties.

If you are taking payments online for the first time, the mechanics of keeping the sale instead of the platform's cut are worth reading before you pick a processor.

The fourth thing is the honest catch, so let me put it plainly rather than bury it.

Your own website does not deliver food. It takes the order, takes the money and prints the docket. Somebody still has to drive. If you have no driver and no interest in employing one, direct ordering realistically means collection orders and a delivery radius you cover yourself, not a full replacement for the platform fleet. Plenty of kitchens run exactly that split, taking collection and local delivery direct while leaving the wider radius on the apps. That is a sensible position, not a half measure.

When the Platforms Are Genuinely the Right Call

Here is the case I would make for staying on them, and I mean it.

If you are opening a new takeaway in an area where nobody knows your name, the platforms give you something a new website cannot give you in week one: people actively looking for dinner, right now, within two kilometres. Add a rider network you do not have to manage and the commission starts to look like what it partly is, an outsourced sales and logistics team paid entirely on results. For a first-year kitchen with no list, no reviews and no driver, that trade is often correct.

The trade stops being correct when it stops being temporary. A business three years in, with regulars who could be ordering direct, paying a third of every order for an introduction to people who already know the way to the door, is not buying discovery any more. It is paying rent on its own customer base.

Most kitchens do not leave the platforms. They stop depending on them.

Shifting Orders Across Without Losing the Ones You Have

You do not switch overnight, and any advice that tells you to close the app account on Monday is advice from somebody who has never run a kitchen. Four steps, in order.

Deploy the ordering page first. Get a working menu and checkout live on your own domain while the apps are still running, so nothing depends on the change succeeding immediately.

Verify with a real order. Place one yourself from a phone on mobile data, pay for it, and watch what the kitchen printer does. Test the failure cases too, including a card decline and an order placed one minute before closing.

Capture the customers you already feed. A card or QR code in every bag, a line on the receipt, a small standing discount for ordering direct. This is the slow part and it is the part that compounds.

Measure the split monthly. Track direct orders as a share of total orders. When the direct share is carrying the fixed costs, you can decide how much platform reach you still want to pay for.

Notice that none of those steps require you to leave anything. The goal is not purity. It is that no single channel can reprice your business without your say.

Conclusion

The commission is visible. It shows up on an invoice every week and every owner can quote their rate. The costs that do the real damage are the ones with no line item: the ranking you rent rather than earn, the promotions you fund, and the customer list you build for somebody else.

Delivery platforms earn their percentage when they are bringing you people who genuinely do not know you exist. They stop earning it the day they are charging you a third of an order to reintroduce you to a family that has been eating your food for two years.

You already know which of those two describes most of your orders. The only thing worth doing this month is finding out the actual number.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much commission do food delivery apps charge in Ireland?

Published academic commentary puts the global platforms at roughly 25% to 35% of order value, with locally run platforms closer to 17.5%. Rates vary by contract, by whether the platform's rider or your own driver delivers, and by what you negotiated when you signed. Your invoice is the only authoritative figure, and it should itemise service commission, marketplace commission and any paid placement separately.

Is it cheaper to take orders on my own website?

On a per-order basis, substantially. Card processing on a standard Irish Stripe account starts at 1.5% plus 25 cent for EEA cards, against a commission in the twenties or thirties. The cost you take on instead is being found and getting the food delivered, which is real work rather than a fee. For customers who already know you, direct ordering is almost always the cheaper channel.

Can I be penalised for asking customers to order direct?

Platform terms generally restrict how you can market to customers acquired through the app, and terms differ between platforms and change over time. Read your agreement. What no platform can stop you doing is putting your own web address on your packaging, your receipts, your shopfront and your Google Business Profile, because those are your property and your customer's choice.

Do I need WooCommerce to take food orders?

Not necessarily. A simple menu page with a checkout, or a dedicated ordering plugin, will handle most takeaway workflows including collection times, delivery zones and a kitchen notification. WooCommerce becomes worthwhile when you need stock control, scheduled ordering or account-based reordering. Start with the simplest setup that takes money correctly.

Should I leave the delivery apps entirely?

Most kitchens should not, at least not at first. The common outcome is a split: collection and local delivery taken direct, wider-radius delivery left on the platforms. That keeps the discovery value while moving your most profitable, most loyal orders onto a channel nobody else can reprice.