The category, defined
What is direct ordering?
Direct ordering is when a restaurant takes online orders through its own website and app rather than a marketplace - so the restaurant owns the customer relationship, the data, and the margin, and pays a per-order processing fee instead of commission on every basket.
How is direct ordering different from a marketplace?
A marketplace - Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Just Eat - is a demand channel you rent. The guest belongs to the app: it holds their details, sets the presentation, ranks you against every competitor within delivery distance, and takes a percentage of each basket for the privilege.
Direct ordering inverts that. The storefront runs on your domain and your brand, the guest record lands in your database, and nothing ranks you against the kebab shop next door. The trade-off is honest: a marketplace brings you strangers, and direct ordering keeps the people who already know you. Most operators run both - marketplaces for discovery, direct for the regulars - and push repeat traffic toward the channel they own.
What does direct ordering actually save?
Marketplace commission in the UK typically runs from around 14% for order-only listings to around 30% where the marketplace delivers. On a £30 basket at a blended rate, that is roughly £7 gone before food, labour, or packaging.
Direct platforms charge a per-order processing fee instead - a flat rate per transaction rather than a percentage of the basket that grows with your prices. The bigger the order and the busier the night, the wider the gap gets. The second saving is quieter: a customer list you own is marketing you never have to buy back. Winning a lapsed regular with an email costs pence; winning the same person through a marketplace promotion costs commission plus the discount.
What should a direct ordering platform include?
The channels: takeaway and delivery, click and collect, QR order-and-pay at the table, pay-at-table, and pre-orders for catering. One menu behind all of them, or you will be updating five.
The operations: orders that drop into your EPOS without re-keying, capacity limits per time slot so the kitchen never takes more than it can plate, delivery-zone control, and dispatch to your own drivers or a courier network with live tracking.
The ownership test is the one that matters: can you export your customer list, today, without asking? If the answer is no, you have bought a marketplace with your own logo on it.
Who is direct ordering for?
Independents use it to stop renting their regulars back from the apps. Groups of three to thirty sites use it to run one menu, one dashboard, and one customer database across the estate, with site-level reporting and permissions. Larger estates run it as infrastructure - API access, EPOS integrations across mixed tills, and phased rollout site by site.
It is not for everyone. A brand-new restaurant with no following yet gets more from marketplace discovery than from a direct channel nobody knows exists. The usual path is both: launch on the marketplaces, build the direct channel from day one, and shift the regulars across as they appear.
Direct ordering, channel by channel
The maths
What the marketplaces cost you
Same orders, same food, same kitchen. The commission comes off the top before you have paid for any of it.
Paid to the marketplace per year
£41,400
£3,450 a month, before you have paid for the food, the staff, or the boxes it left in.
What you keep of every basket
77%
Commission at the rate you selected - check your own contract. Direct ordering has its own per-order cost: a flat processing rate, never a percentage of the basket. How direct ordering works
Direct ordering, asked and answered
What is direct ordering?
Direct ordering is when a restaurant takes online orders through its own website and app rather than a marketplace - so the restaurant owns the customer relationship, the data, and the margin, and pays a per-order processing fee instead of commission on every basket.
Is direct ordering cheaper than Deliveroo, Uber Eats, or Just Eat?
Per order, almost always. UK marketplace commission runs from around 14% (order-only) to around 30% (full delivery), taken as a percentage of every basket. Direct platforms charge a flat per-order processing fee instead, so the cost does not scale with your prices or your success. The full picture includes bringing your own demand - marketplaces include discovery, direct ordering does not.
Should a restaurant leave the marketplaces entirely?
Usually not. Marketplaces are a discovery channel: they bring in people who have never heard of you. The standard play is to run both, then move repeat customers to the direct channel - QR codes on packaging, a better deal on your own site, and a customer list you can actually contact.
Do guests really order direct instead of using the apps?
Regulars do, when the direct experience is at least as good - real photography, saved details, live order tracking, and no app download. The operators who succeed at it treat the direct channel as the primary one and the marketplaces as overflow, not the other way round.
How long does it take to set up direct ordering?
On Storekit, most restaurants take a live order the same day. Building the menu is the slow part; if it already exists in a spreadsheet or on another platform, it imports. EPOS integration and multi-site rollout take longer and are usually phased.
What is the difference between direct ordering and white-label ordering?
White-label usually means a marketplace's technology reskinned with your logo - which can still leave the platform holding the customer data and charging basket percentages. Direct ordering is defined by ownership: your domain, your guest records, exportable at any time. Check the export question before signing anything.
Own your
orders
Free to set up, live the same day, and your customer list is yours from the first order.