Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel

The problem with relying on Uber Eats

Uber Eats takes between 15% and 35% commission on every order, depending on your contract and market. On a £25 delivery order, that's anywhere from £3.75 to £8.75 gone before you've paid for packaging, a driver or a single ingredient.

If your margins are thin and your volume is high, that adds up fast. And the customer isn't yours. You can't email them, retarget them or give them a loyalty card. Each order is a transaction with Uber Eats, and the person who ate your food goes straight back into Uber's pool of customers, where your competitors down the road can reach them too.

That's why a lot of UK and Irish restaurants now run their own ordering channel next to the marketplaces, or in place of them.

What a direct ordering channel is

It's any way for a customer to order from you without going through Uber Eats, Just Eat or Deliveroo. In practice that means some mix of these:

  • Your own ordering website
  • A mobile app with your restaurant's name on it
  • A self-service kiosk in the shop
  • QR code ordering at the table
  • Phone orders, including calls answered by an AI phone agent

You take the order, you keep the margin, and you get the customer's details.

Why direct ordering beats Uber Eats on cost

Uber Eats charges a percentage of every order. A direct ordering platform charges a monthly fee, or a small flat fee per transaction. The gap widens as you sell more.

Say your restaurant does £20,000 a month in delivery through Uber Eats at 25%. Uber keeps £5,000. A direct platform on a fixed fee might cost £200 to £500 a month, so you keep somewhere between £4,500 and £4,800 that would otherwise have gone to the marketplace. That's a rough illustration, not a quote, and your own commission rate and sales will change the figures. Work it out with your real numbers.

It helps to look at a single order too. A £25 order at 25% commission costs you £6.25. Over a year, a customer who orders twice a month hands Uber £150 of your money. If that same customer ordered from your own website, you'd keep most of it, and you'd know their name and what they like to eat.

The money isn't the only difference.

Customer data is the other big one. With Uber Eats you get little you can use. With your own channel every order adds to your customer list, and you can send a loyalty reward, a Friday offer or a message to people who haven't ordered in a month.

Branding changes too. Someone ordering through Uber Eats thinks of it as an Uber Eats order. Someone ordering from your site or app sees your logo, your photos and your menu.

Then there's control. Marketplaces can change how your menu appears, run promotions you didn't ask for, and limit what you list. On your own channel the menu and the prices are yours.

Flipdish as your Uber Eats alternative

Flipdish is the platform to use if you want to build a direct ordering channel. It covers a branded website, a branded mobile app, self-service kiosks and an AI phone agent, and all of them are connected to the same POS system.

That connection matters more than it sounds. An order from your website, your app, a kiosk or a phone call lands on the same kitchen screen. Nobody on your team is watching three tablets and typing orders from one into another.

What you get with Flipdish:

You also don't have to quit Uber Eats on day one. Flipdish has marketplace order management, which brings Uber Eats orders into the same system as your direct ones. The spare tablet on the counter can go in a drawer.

If you want to cut your reliance on marketplaces, Flipdish is the one to build on.

Should you leave Uber Eats completely?

Probably not, at least not straight away. Uber Eats still brings in people who've never heard of you. The aim is to stop it being your main channel.

Here's one way to do it:

  1. Launch your own channel. A website and app first, a kiosk if you have a busy counter.
  2. Give people a reason to use it. A discount on the first direct order, free delivery over a certain spend, or loyalty points they can't earn on Uber.
  3. Keep every customer's details from direct orders and use them.
  4. Leave your marketplace listings up for new customers, but stop pushing them.

Over a few months the balance moves. A customer who found you on Uber Eats and then switches to your site is worth more on every order after that, because you're no longer paying commission on them.

Getting customers to switch

This is where most restaurants stall. Building the website is the easy bit. Getting people to use it takes some effort.

Start with the packaging. Every Uber Eats bag that leaves your kitchen can carry a flyer or a sticker: "Order direct next time and get 10% off." Customers who already like your food are the easiest people to convert, and you're already in their hands.

Put a QR code on the flyer that goes straight to your ordering page. Do the same on table cards, on the till screen and on the front window. If someone is eating in your restaurant and has a phone, they can join your loyalty scheme before they leave.

Use email and SMS once you have the details. A message on a wet Tuesday night with a free side of fries gets orders. Flipdish's marketing tools are built for this, so the offers and the loyalty rewards sit in the same place as the orders.

Don't make the discount too small. If the direct price is the same as Uber's, nobody has a reason to change their habit. You can afford a decent offer because you're not paying 25% on the order anyway. Giving away 10% still leaves you ahead.

Phone orders

Plenty of restaurants still get a lot of orders by phone, especially at weekends. They're a pain. Someone has to stop what they're doing, pick up, write it down, read it back and key it in. Mistakes happen, and calls get missed during the rush.

The Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers the call, takes the order in a normal conversation and processes the payment. There's no commission per order. The order goes into the same system as everything else, so the caller ends up in your customer list and your loyalty scheme like anyone ordering online.

People who prefer to ring still get served. You just get their order data as well.

Where kiosks and QR ordering fit

Delivery isn't the only thing eating margin. In-store ordering has its own queues and its own lost sales.

A self-service kiosk takes pressure off the counter at busy times, and it suggests extras on every order, which is easy to forget when the queue is out the door. QR ordering at the table works the same way for sit-down restaurants. The customer scans, orders and pays, and the kitchen gets the ticket straight away.

Both feed the same customer list as your website and app. So a person who ordered at a kiosk on Saturday can get an offer for a delivery on Wednesday.

Mistakes to avoid

Launching and then not telling anyone. A direct ordering site that nobody knows about won't take a single order from Uber Eats. You have to promote it in the shop, on the bags, by email and by SMS.

Offering no reason to switch. People default to the apps on their phones. A first-order discount, free delivery or extra loyalty points gives them a reason to try something new.

Collecting data and doing nothing with it. The customer list is the best thing about direct ordering. If you never send a message, you've paid for a channel and ignored the main benefit.

Running ordering and POS as separate systems. If direct orders don't flow into your POS, you swap one tablet problem for another. Pick a platform where ordering and POS are one thing, which is what Flipdish does.

Getting started

Work out what Uber Eats cost you last month. Take the commission line from your statement and multiply it by 12. That's the budget you're competing against.

Then set up Flipdish with your website and app, connect your Uber Eats orders so they arrive in the same place, and put a flyer in every delivery bag. Add a kiosk or the AI phone agent when the first channel is running smoothly.

Uber Eats gives you volume, and you pay for it in margin and in losing the customer. A direct channel gets both back.