A delivery platform does not sell your food. It sells access to customers, and it charges you for that access on every single order, forever. Understanding exactly what you are buying is the difference between delivery being a second revenue stream and delivery being a slow leak.
📱 What a platform actually does
Strip away the branding and every platform does the same four things:
- Listing. It puts your restaurant in front of people browsing an app, most of whom were not thinking about you specifically.
- Ordering. It takes the order and the payment, so you never touch the customer's card.
- Dispatch. It assigns a courier — sometimes theirs, sometimes yours.
- Support. It handles the customer when something goes wrong, and decides who eats the cost.
You can buy all four together, or some of them separately. That choice is the single biggest lever you have on what delivery costs you, and most restaurants never realise they have it.
💸 Where the money actually goes
The headline number a platform quotes you is rarely the number that lands in your account. A $40 order typically breaks down closer to this:
| Line | Typical | On a $40 order | Notes |
| Order total | — | $40.00 | What the customer sees for the food |
| Platform commission | 15–30% | −$10.00 | Higher when the platform delivers; lower for pickup |
| Payment processing | 2.9% + $0.30 | −$1.46 | Sometimes folded into commission, sometimes not |
| Promotion / discount | 0–20% | −$4.00 | Only if you opted into a campaign |
| Packaging | — | −$1.20 | Yours. Never appears on the statement |
| You keep | $23.34 | Before food cost and labour |
Those percentages are ranges because they move by market, by year and by what you negotiate. Use your own statement, not this table. The point of the table is the shape, not the numbers: there are four deductions, not one, and only two of them appear on the invoice.
🎯 Why bother at all
Given the above, a fair question is why anyone does this. Three honest reasons:
- Reach you cannot buy otherwise. The people ordering on an app at 8pm are not choosing between you and cooking. They are choosing between you and the other twelve restaurants on that screen. Not being on the screen is not neutral.
- Capacity you already paid for. Your rent, your hood, your walk-in and your cook are all paid for whether or not the kitchen is busy at 3pm. Orders that fill dead time are worth taking at a margin you would refuse at 7pm.
- Demand you can measure. Platform data tells you what people in your area order, at what time, at what price. That is market research you would otherwise pay for.
None of those reasons work if you are losing money per order. They are arguments for delivery done deliberately, not delivery done by default.
🚩 The three ways this goes wrong
Almost every restaurant that regrets delivery made one of these three mistakes:
- Same menu, same prices, no math. The dining-room price assumes no commission. Carrying it straight over to delivery hands the platform your entire margin on some dishes.
- Signed up for everything. Three platforms, three tablets, three sets of promotions, nobody reconciling any of it. Volume looks great; the bank balance does not move.
- Never looked at the statement. Not the summary email — the itemised statement. Promotions and fee changes are announced in ways that are easy to miss and expensive to ignore.
The rest of this course is, in order: how to choose (topic 2), how to set up so the food arrives well (topics 3 and 4), how to promote without giving away the margin (topic 5), and how to tell whether it is working (topic 6).