How to reduce delivery platform commissions

Delivery platform commissions represent between 25% and 35% of the amount of each order. For a restaurant with a food cost of 30% and operating expenses of 25%, there remains a net profit margin close to zero on delivery orders. Reducing these commissions is therefore a vital issue for profitability. Here are the most effective strategies.

Strategy 1: Negotiate directly with the platforms. This is the most direct and often the most effective method. Uber Eats and Deliveroo have local sales teams whose mandate is to keep restaurants active. If you generate more than 50 orders per week, you have a real negotiating leverage. Prepare your file with precise data: order volume, average order value, customer rating, tenure on the platform. Mention your presence on a competing platform as supplementary argument.

Strategy 2: Ensure your own delivery. Platforms offer reduced commission rates (between 12% and 20%) if you use your own delivery drivers instead of the platform’s drivers. This requires employing or subcontracting delivery drivers, which has a cost, but the calculation is often favorable above 30 orders per day. A scooter driver costs approximately 12 euros per hour. If they make 3 deliveries per hour with an average basket of 25 euros, the cost per order is 4 euros, or 16%, compared to 30% platform commission.

Strategy 3: develop direct ordering. This is the most profitable strategy in the medium term. A clean online ordering website or a click & collect system completely eliminates platform commissions. You only pay payment fees (around 1.5%) and potentially a subscription to the ordering solution (between 30 and 100 euros per month). Fooderise offers tools for direct ordering that allow you to build your own channel without commission.

Strategy 4: Optimize your menu for delivery. Platforms charge a percentage on the total amount. By increasing your average order value, you dilute fixed costs (packaging, preparation) over higher revenue. How? By offering set menus and complete meals instead of individual items, by adding high-margin supplements (drinks, desserts, extras) and by strategically positioning the most profitable items at the top of your menu.

Strategy 5: Reduce refunds. Platforms charge the restaurant for each customer refund. These refunds can represent 3 to 8% of your delivery revenue, adding to commissions. Many of these refunds are unjustified: the customer claims an item is missing when it was in the bag, or reports a quality issue to obtain a refund out of generosity. The solution: document each order with photos before delivery and use a tool like Fooderise to automate disputes.

Strategy 6: Use promotions intelligently. Platforms offer marketing tools (sponsored placements, targeted promotions) that cost extra money. Use them strategically: focus promotions on off-peak hours to fill your kitchen without exceeding your capacity, and pause them during peak hours or when you are already full. Analyze the ROI of each campaign with the analytics of your aggregator.

Strategy 7: Consolidate your operations with a consolidator. A command aggregator like Fooderise allows you to centralize all your orders on a single screen, which reduces errors (and therefore refunds), optimizes preparation times, and gives you a unified view of your performance by platform. The cost of the aggregator (generally between 50 and 150 euros per month) is largely offset by the savings realized on errors and avoided refunds.

By combining several of these strategies, a restaurant can reduce its platform’s effective cost from 30-35% to 15-20%, which transforms a delivery channel from a loss-making one to a profitable one. The most important thing is to measure: track your actual commissions, refund rates, average order value per platform, and cost of return per order. Without data, there is no optimization possible.