Which channel you sell through

A plate of pasta is the same plate of pasta whether it is carried six metres to a table or handed to a courier. What it leaves you is not the same at all. Most restaurants now sell through three or four channels that grew one at a time, each added because it seemed like extra sales, and very few have ever compared them with the same arithmetic. This topic is that comparison — and it frequently changes which channel an owner wants to grow.

💸 The same order, three ways

Take a forty-peso order and follow it out of three different doors. Food cost is the same in all three, thirty percent, or twelve pesos.

The same order leaves you sixteen and a half pesos through the platform against twenty-eight in the room — a little under three fifths. That does not make the platform wrong; it makes it a different product with a different economics, and one that has to be judged on what it actually adds rather than on the sales figure it produces. A month where platform sales grow and dining room sales shrink can be a month where sales rose and money fell, which is exactly the pattern the financial reporting course warned about.

The commission is only the visible part, and the two invisible parts are worth naming. Packaging is a real cost that exists in no other channel and is easy to leave out. And labour is not free: a courier order still occupies a cook, but it does not occupy a table, which cuts both ways — it does not consume your scarcest asset on a busy night, and it does not produce the drinks and desserts that make dining room checks bigger.

🪑 What each channel is actually for

Once you can see the contribution per channel, the useful question stops being "which is best" and becomes "what is each one for", because they do genuinely different jobs.

• Dining room. The highest contribution per order and the only channel that sells the experience: drinks, desserts, second rounds, the reason people come back. It is also capacity-limited — a full room cannot take more.
• Your own takeaway or ordering. Nearly the same money as the room, without the table. The best-kept channel in most restaurants, and the one the online ordering course exists to grow.
• Platforms. Lower contribution, but they fill capacity you were not using and put you in front of people who have never heard of you. Both of those are real value, and neither is visible in the contribution figure.
• Catering and events. Usually a large order with predictable costs and no table turnover, so it can pay very well — but it is worth checking the labour, because a job that needs staff outside normal hours can quietly cost more than it looks.

The most common strategic mistake is judging a channel by its total rather than by what it displaces. If the platform is filling your empty Tuesday, sixteen and a half pesos is sixteen and a half pesos you would not otherwise have had, and that is good business. If it is filling your Saturday — where the room was going to be full anyway and every courier order takes a cook away from a table that would have left twenty-eight — then you are paying a commission to earn less. Same channel, opposite conclusion, decided entirely by whether you had spare capacity.

🧭 Reading each channel on its own terms

Beyond contribution, each channel has its own diagnostic numbers, and mixing them up is how owners reach wrong conclusions about their own business.

The clearest example is the average check. Delivery orders are usually larger than dining room checks in absolute terms — people order for a household — and smaller in what they leave. If you look at a single blended average check across every channel, it will move whenever your mix moves and tell you nothing about either channel. The same applies to covers: a delivery order is not a cover in any sense the dining room would recognise, and blending them makes the previous course's five numbers unreadable.

So keep the channels apart in your reporting, and watch each one's own mix. It is common and useful to find that the menu behaves differently by channel — the dishes that travel well are not the same as the ones that shine on a plate, and a puzzle in the room can be a star on the platform, or a dish can be quietly damaging your reputation because it arrives twenty minutes later than it should. That is a menu decision this course can surface: the mix report from topic 3, run separately per channel.

🔀 Deciding what to grow

The point of all this is to make one decision honestly: where the next unit of effort goes. Growth is not free — every channel needs attention, and a restaurant that runs four of them badly does worse than one that runs two well.

A reasonable order of priorities falls out of the arithmetic itself. First, fill the room, because that is where a peso of sales leaves the most behind. Second, grow the channel you own, since your own takeaway leaves nearly as much as the room and its customers are yours rather than the platform's — the ordering and marketing courses are entirely about that move. Third, use platforms deliberately: for the shifts with spare capacity, for discovery, and with a clear eye on what they cost. And fourth, treat catering as a separate business with its own numbers rather than as a favour you do occasionally.

Two things this topic deliberately does not do. It does not tell you how to negotiate with a platform or how their fee structures work — that is the delivery course, which owns that relationship in detail. And it does not tell you to leave any channel: this is a comparison, not a verdict. What it gives you is the ability to say, with a number rather than a feeling, what each of your doors is actually worth.