Online Ordering for Restaurants: Your Own Site or Delivery Apps?

Since the spring shutdown, a large part of the restaurant business has been running on takeout and delivery. Plenty of owners signed up for one or two delivery apps in a hurry just to keep some revenue coming in, and are now asking a calmer question: keep relying on Uber Eats or SkipTheDishes, or build proper online ordering on the restaurant's own site? Here is the grid I use with restaurant clients to work through that decision, and what it actually takes to set up.

What really changes between a restaurant's own site and a delivery app?

The difference is not in how the customer experiences it, since they are ordering from their phone either way. It is in what the restaurant keeps after the order is placed. A delivery app handles everything: it shows the menu, takes the payment, sometimes sends a driver, and keeps the customer inside its own app from start to finish. An order placed on the restaurant's own site takes more work to set up, but everything that happens during and after that order stays with the restaurant. That difference, not how easy either option is to use, should drive the decision.

How much margin is left on an order placed through an app?

Every delivery app keeps a percentage of the order total, on top of the delivery fee the customer pays, and that percentage depends on the specific agreement and on whether the restaurant also uses the app's delivery service or only its ordering storefront. On a dish that already runs a thin margin, which describes most prepared restaurant food, that cut can wipe out a good chunk of the profit, sometimes all of it. I am not going to hand out a universal percentage here, because every app publishes its own rates and they shift from one agreement to the next. The first thing I ask a client to do is pull up the actual contract or sign-up screen and work out what is really left on a fifteen-dollar plate once every fee comes off. That one exercise tends to move the conversation further than any argument I could make.

Who ends up owning the customer's contact information?

On a delivery app, the customer stays the app's customer. The restaurant rarely sees a name, never sees an email address, and gets a masked phone number for delivery purposes at best. There is no way to send that person a birthday offer, tell them about a new menu, or even know whether they order once a month or once a week. An order placed directly on the restaurant's own site, through a form that asks for an email or phone number, keeps that information with the restaurant. That is what makes it possible to build a list of repeat customers over time instead of starting from zero with every marketing push.

Which one gets found more easily: the app or the site?

A delivery app has its own internal search, and a new customer looking up "Portuguese chicken" nearby might discover a restaurant they had never heard of, sitting right next to three competitors on the same screen. That is a genuine advantage for reaching new customers, especially for a restaurant that is not well known yet. The restaurant's own site does not get discovered on its own: it depends on search rankings, the Google My Business listing, and word of mouth. The two channels are not playing the same role, which is exactly why they should not be treated as competing with each other but as two different front doors.

How do I weigh this with a restaurant client?

I look at three things before recommending anything: the margin left on an average order once app fees come off, how much value there is in keeping or losing the customer's contact information (a restaurant with a strong base of regulars has more to gain from keeping that list than one that lives mostly on foot traffic), and how much real weight app-based discovery carries for that specific restaurant, based on how long it has been open and how well known it already is in the area. A newer restaurant with few regulars often gets more out of staying visible on the apps, even at a thinner margin, while it builds a customer base. An established restaurant with a loyal following usually has more to gain from steering those customers back toward its own ordering, where every order keeps its full margin.

Do you have to pick one, or can you run both?

For most of the restaurants I am working with this year, it is not an either-or choice. Staying listed on one or two delivery apps keeps a door open for new customers searching for a restaurant in their area without knowing its name yet. At the same time, promoting online ordering on the restaurant's own site to regulars, on the receipt, on the Facebook Page, in emails, keeps a share of orders where the restaurant earns its full margin and keeps the customer relationship. The goal is not to drop the apps. It is to stop letting every single order go through them by default.

How do you actually build online ordering on a restaurant's site?

The simplest version, and the one I set up first with a client, does not need a full shopping cart: an order form that lists the menu, lets the customer check off dishes and pick a pickup or delivery time, followed by a confirmation email or text from the restaurant. For a restaurant that wants to go further and take payment directly online, a store built into the site, on WooCommerce inside WordPress for example, can reproduce most of what an app offers, minus the automatic discovery of new customers. In both cases, there is one step a lot of restaurants are missing: Google My Business has let businesses add an "Order online" action link to their listing since 2017, a field the restaurant sets up itself and can point to its own ordering page instead of a third-party app. It is often the easiest way to send traffic toward the restaurant's own ordering without relying on the site alone to pull it in, as long as someone checks where that link currently points.

Where should you start this week?

Start by pulling the invoice or contract from every delivery app in use and working out what is actually left on a typical order once every fee is counted. Next, check whether the restaurant's Google My Business listing already points to an online order option or only to a third-party app, and update it if an in-house system exists. Finally, if the site cannot yet take an order directly, start with the simple form rather than waiting for the budget for a full online store. The first version does not need to be perfect. It just needs to exist.

This kind of decision comes up often in my work on restaurant online sales, where the goal is not to replace delivery apps overnight but to hand the restaurant back a share of orders where it keeps its margin and its customers. Restaurant e-commerce does not look like a shop that ships packages across the country, but the same principles around data ownership and margin still apply.

Drafted with AI assistance, checked and published by Marven Salgado.