If you take orders through Just Eat or Deliveroo, you already know the catch: a slice of every single order goes to the platform. Depending on the deal, that’s commonly 14% to 30% per order — money skimmed off the top of food you cooked, for customers who often found you in the first place. There’s another way, and for a lot of Irish kitchens it pays for itself in a single busy season: take orders directly on your own website.
What the commission actually costs you
The percentage sounds survivable until you run it across a year. Say you do €4,000 a month in orders through a platform at a 20% commission. That’s €800 a month — €9,600 a year — gone, every year, for as long as you stay on the platform. The busier you get, the more it takes. You’re effectively paying rent on your own customers, and it never stops.
Worse, the platform owns the relationship. The customer’s details, their order history, the ability to email them an offer — that all sits with Just Eat or Deliveroo, not with you. You’re a listing in their marketplace, competing on price with the takeaway two doors down.
The alternative: your own online ordering
A custom online ordering system is built into your own website. Customers browse your menu, order, and pay you directly — for collection or delivery — and the money lands in your account, minus only the normal card-processing fee. No per-order commission. No monthly marketplace rent.
Done well, it does everything the platform does for the part that matters to you:
- Takes the full order and payment on your own site, on any phone
- Collection or delivery, with your own delivery zones and charges
- Your menu, your branding — not a listing buried among competitors
- You keep the customer — their details and order history are yours, so you can bring them back
The difference is who the system works for. A platform is built to grow the platform. Your own ordering system is built to grow your business.
”But the platforms bring me customers”
This is the honest counter-argument, and it’s a fair one. The big apps do have reach — people browse them when they’re hungry and don’t know what they want. So the smart play usually isn’t “delete Just Eat tomorrow.” It’s this:
- Put your own ordering on your site so regulars and anyone who already knows you can order commission-free.
- Point your own audience at it — your social, your menus, your bag inserts, the sign at the counter, your Google Business Profile.
- Let the platforms be discovery, while your own channel becomes where your loyal customers order.
Over time, the orders you’d be paying 20% on — the regulars who’d come to you anyway — quietly move to the channel that costs you nothing. The platform becomes a top-up, not a tax.
It works for more than takeaways
The same commission-free idea applies to any business taking orders or bookings online:
- Cafés and restaurants — collection and delivery orders, plus table bookings
- Bakeries and delis — pre-orders and click-and-collect
- Any business that takes deposits or sells direct — the same engine handles online bookings and deposits too
It’s all one idea: build it once, own it, and stop renting a slice of your takings to a middleman.
What about the cost of building it?
A custom ordering system is a one-off fixed price, agreed before any work starts — not a monthly subscription and not a cut of your sales. For most kitchens, the commission you stop paying covers the build well inside the first year, and everything after that is money you keep.
There’s also help available: many small Irish businesses can part-fund this kind of work through the Trading Online Voucher — up to €2,500 from your Local Enterprise Office toward getting trading online properly. It’s designed for exactly this.
How to get started
You don’t need the all-singing version on day one. Often the right start is a clean menu-and-checkout that takes orders and card payments on your own site, then you add delivery zones, scheduling and the rest as you go.
If you’re handing a chunk of every order to a platform, a commission-free ordering system is one of the fastest-paying upgrades you can make. Tell me how you take orders now and I’ll give you a straight answer on what would suit and what it would cost — or read more about how I build commission-free booking and ordering systems for Irish businesses.
