What the delivery platforms really cost

Ask an owner what delivery costs them and you get one number: the commission. Thirty per cent, or twenty-seven, or whatever was negotiated. It is the number on the invoice, so it is the number people argue about.

It is also the smallest part of the bill.

I am not going to tell you to leave the platforms. For a lot of venues they are the difference between a quiet Tuesday and a viable one, and anyone who tells you to walk away has not looked at your numbers. I am going to tell you what the rest of the bill is, because most people have never added it up.

The part you can count

Start with the commission, whatever yours is. Then add the things that sit next to it and never get counted as delivery costs.

The packaging. Not the box — the box, the lid, the bag, the sauce pot, the cutlery, the sticker. On a twelve euro main that is rarely under a euro, and it is spent whether or not the order is profitable.

The repriced menu. Most venues lift delivery prices to cover the commission, which works until the guest notices, and the guest always notices. What you have bought is a second price list that makes your own restaurant look expensive.

The discounts. Every platform runs promotions, and the funding for them comes out of your margin, not theirs. Read which side of the ledger the campaign sits on before you agree to it.

And the minutes. Somebody stops what they are doing, reads the tablet, keys it in, watches for the rider. Four tablets on a shelf during a Saturday service is not a small tax on a kitchen. It is the reason the orders in the room go out slower, and nobody attributes that to delivery.

The part you cannot count, which is the expensive part

Put the money aside for a moment. The platform sits between you and the person eating your food, and that is the real transaction.

You do not get the name. You do not get the email, the phone number, the fact that they order every second Thursday, or the fact that they always ask for no onion. When they are unhappy, they tell the platform. When they are delighted, they rate the platform's delivery.

Which means you cannot do the one thing every venue in history has survived on: bring a happy guest back yourself. You are renting an audience you will never be introduced to, and the rent goes up.

There is a second cost hiding in there. The platform learns which of your dishes travel and which don't, what people in your postcode pay, when they order. You learn none of it. Over a few years that is not a commission problem, it is a knowledge problem, and knowledge is what you would have needed to stop paying the commission.

What actually helps

Not a crusade. The useful goal is much smaller than leaving: keep the platforms for reach, and take the repeat orders back.

The first order from a stranger is worth paying for — that is genuinely what the commission buys, and it is a fair trade. The fourteenth order from the same regular is not. That one should arrive through your own channel, at your own price, with the guest's name attached to it.

Practically that means three unglamorous things. Your own ordering page has to exist and be no harder to use than the app. There has to be one reason to switch, printed on something that goes into the bag — not a discount war, just a small honest reason. And the orders, wherever they come from, have to arrive in one place instead of on four tablets, or the kitchen will quietly sabotage whichever channel is most annoying.

Do that and the commission stops being a percentage of everything and becomes a marketing cost for new guests, which is what it should have been all along.

The honest version

The platforms did not trick anybody. They solved a real problem faster than the industry did, and they charge what the market lets them charge.

The mistake is treating the commission as the whole price. Add the packaging, the repriced menu, the funded discounts, the minutes and the guest you never met, and then decide what share of your business you want on somebody else's terms.