Promotion on a delivery platform is the easiest place in this whole course to lose money while the dashboard says you are winning. Order volume goes up, the graph is green, and the deposit is smaller than last month. This chapter is about spending on visibility without giving away the thing you were trying to earn.
🧮 Run the discount before you offer it
A discount does not come out of the price. It comes out of what is left after the commission, which is a much smaller number. On a dish that leaves you 30% after commission, a 20% discount does not cost you a fifth of your margin — it costs you two thirds of it.
| On a $20 dish | No promo | 20% off |
| Menu price | $20.00 | $20.00 |
| Discount | — | −$4.00 |
| Commission at 25% | −$5.00 | −$4.00 |
| Food cost at 30% | −$6.00 | −$6.00 |
| Packaging | −$1.00 | −$1.00 |
| Left over | $8.00 | $5.00 |
Same food, same work, 37% less left over. That can still be the right call — if the discount brings someone who comes back at full price. It is the wrong call if it discounts people who were going to order anyway.
🎯 Which promotions are worth running
- First-order discount. The clearest case. You are paying to acquire a customer, once, and you can measure whether they return.
- Off-peak offers. Your fixed costs are already paid at 3pm. An order at a thinner margin in dead time is close to free money.
- Free delivery over a threshold. Raises average ticket instead of cutting price. Set the threshold above your current average, not below it.
- Bundles. Better value for the customer, better margin for you, and they move the items you want to move. The best of the five.
- Blanket percentage off everything. The one to avoid. It discounts your regulars and your best sellers hardest, and it teaches people to wait for the next one.
⭐ Reviews are a ranking input, not just feedback
Platform search ranks on rating and completion. A slipping rating quietly reduces how often you appear at all, which costs more than any promotion buys.
- Reply to the bad ones, briefly and without arguing. The reply is not for the reviewer; it is for the next person reading.
- Look for the pattern, not the incident. One cold delivery is noise. Three in a week about the same dish is a packaging problem, and topic 4 is where you fix it.
- Never cancel to protect your times. Cancellation hits your ranking harder than a slow order and it is the one metric you fully control.
🔁 Turning a platform customer into yours
The highest-return marketing on delivery is not a promotion. It is the note in the bag. You rarely get the customer's contact details from the platform, but you do get one moment of their attention when they open the order:
- A small printed card with your direct ordering link and a reason to use it — better price, bigger portion, something not on the app.
- Consistent branding on the packaging, so they know who fed them well.
- Nothing that badmouths the platform. It reads badly and it can breach your contract.
Every regular you move from marketplace to direct is a permanent 25% raise on that customer.