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

What Uber Eats really costs

Uber Eats sends you orders. Nobody disputes that. The catch is the commission, which usually runs between 25% and 35% on each order, and on a delivery sale that's a big bite out of a margin that was thin to begin with.

Take a restaurant doing £10,000 a month through Uber Eats. At those rates, £2,500 to £3,500 leaves every month before the food, staff or rent are paid for. It's the same the following month, and the month after.

The other cost is harder to put a number on. The customers who order are yours in every sense except the one that counts. Uber Eats holds their details, decides what they see next to your menu, and can change its fees or terms whenever it wants. If a customer loves your food, you still can't email them, text them or offer them anything.

So this guide is about building a direct ordering channel next to Uber Eats, so that over time more of your orders come through something you own.

What counts as direct ordering

Direct ordering means a customer places an order with you without a marketplace in the middle. Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo are the marketplaces most UK and Irish restaurants deal with. A direct channel can be:

  • your own website, with ordering built in rather than a PDF menu
  • an app under your restaurant's name
  • a QR code on a table, a bag or a flyer that opens your ordering page
  • the phone, including an AI system that answers and takes the order

The money works differently too. You pay a flat fee for the technology, not a slice of each basket. Once order volume is decent, that gap gets big quickly.

Why restaurants keep paying the commission

It's worth being fair about this, because the reasons are real.

Uber Eats puts you in front of people who've never heard of you. If you've just opened, that matters. The ordering, payment and delivery set-up already exists, so you aren't building anything. And it brings steady volume, especially to takeaways that depend on delivery.

None of this goes away when you open a direct channel. Nobody sensible quits Uber Eats overnight. The aim is to get the same customers to come to you the second and third time, when you no longer need to pay for the introduction.

Building the channel

Start with your own online ordering

Before anything else, customers need somewhere to order from you. That means a page where they pick items, pay and send the order to your kitchen. A menu on its own doesn't count.

Flipdish online ordering is a flat-fee system with no commission per order. You get a branded ordering page that works on desktop and mobile, sends orders to the kitchen, and connects to your POS, so staff aren't typing orders in a second time.

If you deliver with your own drivers, great. If you don't, begin with collection. It needs no driver, no delivery radius and no hand-off, and plenty of customers would rather collect and skip the delivery fee anyway.

Get an app on their phone

An icon on a customer's home screen is a different thing from a link they'd have to remember. Someone who has your app is one tap from reordering, and they never see a competitor's menu on the way.

Flipdish branded mobile apps go on the App Store and Google Play under your restaurant's name. Customers browse, order and pay inside your app. Uber Eats isn't in the picture.

Give people a reason to order direct

Most customers open Uber Eats out of habit. Changing that takes an incentive, and a loyalty scheme is the simplest one. Points for every direct order, or a stamp card that ends in a free dish, gives someone a reason to skip the marketplace on a Friday night.

The Flipdish marketing and loyalty tools cover points programmes, stamp cards and automated offers aimed at particular groups of customers. A lapsed customer who hasn't ordered in six weeks can get a nudge without anyone on your team writing it by hand.

Move the phone orders

If you still take a lot of orders by phone, you already know the problems. Calls land in the middle of a Saturday rush. Some get missed. Someone has to write the order down and walk it to the kitchen.

The Flipdish AI phone agent answers the call, takes the order, takes payment and sends it to the kitchen. No commission applies, and the call gets answered whether or not anyone's free.

Use the Uber Eats orders you already get

Every Uber Eats order is a chance to meet a new customer. Put a QR code on the bag or the receipt that goes to your ordering page or app. Put a small card in with the food saying the next order is cheaper if they come to you. Keep the offer specific, say 10% off or a free side, because people ignore vague invitations.

Do the same wherever you already have attention. Link your ordering page from your Instagram bio and your Google Business Profile. Put the QR code on tables and on the till.

The numbers

Say a restaurant sells £15,000 a month through Uber Eats at 30% commission. That's £4,500 a month in fees, or £54,000 a year.

Now say 30% of those orders move to a direct channel, and the direct channel costs a flat £200 a month. Here's what changes:

  • Orders moved: £4,500 a month
  • Uber Eats commission on those orders: £1,350 a month
  • Direct channel cost: £200 a month
  • Saving: £1,150 a month

That's £13,800 over a year, from moving less than a third of the volume. Increase the share you move or the starting volume and the figure rises. The £200 is an assumption for the example, so swap in your own quote when you do the sums for your restaurant. You can check current costs on the Flipdish pricing page.

Some of the saving gets eaten by discounts. If you give a customer 10% off to switch, that comes out of the £1,150. It's still a better deal than a 30% fee, and you only pay it once to win the customer, whereas the marketplace takes its cut every time.

Will orders drop if you push direct?

Not if you go gradually. A sensible order is:

  1. Set up the direct channel first: ordering page, app, loyalty.
  2. Tell existing Uber Eats customers about it, through the bag, the receipt and social media.
  3. Stay on Uber Eats for new customers while the direct share grows.
  4. Look at the split again after six to twelve months and decide what to do.

Uber Eats keeps doing what it's good at, which is finding new customers. You take over after that.

How long it takes depends on how hard you push and how loyal your customers already are. A restaurant with a strong local following will move faster than one that gets nearly all its orders from people who found it in the app. Check your own split every month and you'll see what's working.

If you stay on Uber Eats, make it less annoying

Running Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo means three tablets on the counter, three menus to update and three places where an order can be missed. Staff end up retyping orders into the till, and that's where mistakes creep in.

Flipdish has marketplace order aggregation that pulls orders from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo onto one POS screen. Kitchen tickets print automatically and you update menus in one place. Fewer tablets and less retyping means less labour spent on handling orders, and fewer wrong ones going out.

What Flipdish gives you

Everything above runs on one platform:

Because the pieces connect, an order from your app, a phone call or Uber Eats lands in the same place and the kitchen handles it the same way. That's the practical difference from patching together a separate website plugin, an app builder and a phone answering service.

The customer data

This part gets overlooked. When someone orders through Uber Eats, the customer relationship stays with Uber Eats. You don't get a way to contact them later.

When they order through your own page or app, you know who they are, what they ordered and how often they come back. That lets you do small, useful things. Send a note when you launch a new dish. Offer a discount to people who haven't ordered in a month. See that your Thursday night regulars always order the same two items and build a deal around them.

None of that is clever. It's what a corner shop does when the owner knows your name. A marketplace takes that away from you, and a direct channel gives it back.

What to check each month

Keep this simple. Track three numbers: how many orders came through Uber Eats, how many came direct, and how much you paid in commission. If direct orders go up and the commission bill goes down, it's working. If direct stays flat, the problem is usually that customers don't know about it. Put the QR code somewhere more visible, make the offer better, or tell people in the bag.

Also look at repeat customers. A direct customer who orders three times in a month is worth much more than one who ordered once through a marketplace and never came back.

The short version

Uber Eats isn't the problem. Relying on it for most of your orders at 30% is. A direct channel built on your own website, app, loyalty scheme and phone line lets you keep the customers you've already paid to win, and that's something Uber Eats can't take back.

For more on restaurant technology for direct ordering, visit restauranttech.co.uk.