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

Uber Eats takes somewhere between 15% and 30% of every order, depending on your contract. On a £20 order that's £3 to £6 gone before you've paid for the food, the staff or the rent.

If a big share of your sales runs through the app, the yearly total is large. Nobody's saying you should delete your listing. Uber Eats does send customers who wouldn't have found you otherwise. The real question is whether it should be your main channel, let alone your only one.

This guide covers what an Uber Eats alternative looks like in practice, what it saves, and how to move your regulars over without losing the customers who found you on the marketplace.

What Uber Eats gives you, and what it keeps

Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo all do a few things well. They already have big audiences. You don't pay to show up in results. They take the payment and handle basic customer service, and getting listed takes very little technical work.

What they keep is the customer. When someone orders from you on Uber Eats, you get a name and a delivery address. You rarely get a verified email. So you can't contact them again, reward them for coming back or retarget them. A customer who orders from you every two weeks is building a habit with Uber Eats, not with your restaurant. And when Uber Eats pushes the place down the road next week, that customer sees it too.

Moving to Just Eat or Deliveroo doesn't fix any of this. Same commission model, same missing customer data. An alternative that helps is one where the order comes through something you own.

What the numbers look like

Take a restaurant with £25,000 a month in delivery orders and a 25% average commission. That's £6,250 a month, or £75,000 a year.

Now say a fifth of those orders, £5,000 a month, come through your own website or app. The commission on that £5,000 would have been £1,250. Over twelve months it's £15,000 you keep. You pay a subscription for the direct platform, but the orders themselves carry no commission, so the saving grows as your direct share grows.

A smaller example. A takeaway doing £8,000 a month on Uber Eats pays £1,200 at 15% or £2,400 at 30%. Same food, same drivers, same orders. The only variable is the contract, and the gap between best and worst case is £14,400 a year. Check which number you're on before you decide how much any of this matters to you.

The other gain is slower. Every direct order adds a customer to a database you can actually use. A marketplace order adds nobody.

What a direct ordering channel is

Customers order from you, on your site or in your app, and you keep the full order value. It needs four things:

• A branded ordering website, so the customer sees your name and not Uber Eats'
• A branded mobile app, which puts your icon on their phone
• POS integration, so direct orders land in the kitchen without anyone retyping them
• Marketing tools - SMS, email, push notifications and loyalty rewards - to bring people back

Flipdish online ordering covers all four.

Flipdish as your Uber Eats alternative

Flipdish is built for restaurants that want to cut their dependence on Uber Eats and the other delivery platforms. Here's what comes with it.

You get a branded restaurant website that takes orders at zero commission, and a mobile app for iOS and Android under your restaurant's name. Both connect to your restaurant POS, so direct orders and marketplace orders end up in the same kitchen queue. The order management tools pull in Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo orders next to your own, which means no stack of tablets by the pass.

For getting customers back, there are loyalty tools that reward direct orders, SMS marketing to message your customer list, and automated marketing that goes after lapsed customers for you. AI Marketing spots customers who are drifting away and acts before they're gone.

Two more channels sit alongside the website and app. Self-service kiosks take orders in store and tend to lift the average order value. AI phone ordering answers the phone and takes the order, and no commission comes off it.

The difference from Uber Eats is simple. Every direct order through Flipdish adds to your customer database. You can market to those people, reward them and bring them back without paying a cut each time.

You also don't have to drop Uber Eats to use it. Flipdish runs next to your marketplace listings, so you keep the discovery customers while you work on moving the regulars across.

Where direct orders come from

Most of the work is on the customer side, so it helps to know where direct orders actually come from.

Some come from people who already know you. Regulars, locals, anyone who's eaten in. They don't need Uber Eats to find you, they just use it because it's on their phone. These are the easiest to move, and the ones worth most to you.

Some come from your own marketing - a post, a flyer, a link in your Google listing. Send those customers to your own ordering page rather than your marketplace profile. If your website and Google listing still point at Uber Eats, you're paying commission on customers you already won.

And some come from the order itself. Once someone has ordered direct, you have their details and can message them. That's the part Uber Eats can't give you, and it's why the first direct order matters more than the tenth.

Should you stop using Uber Eats?

For most restaurants, no. The marketplaces bring in people who'd never have found you otherwise, and that's worth paying for. What you want to change is the split.

A restaurant doing 80% of its orders through Uber Eats and 20% direct is leaving money on the table. Go from 80/20 to 60/40 and commission drops sharply, and you haven't turned away a single discovery customer. On the £25,000 example above, that shift is the £15,000 a year.

Don't aim for 100% direct. Aim for the point where your Uber Eats orders are mostly new customers, and your repeat customers are ordering from you.

How to move customers from Uber Eats to direct

Customers won't switch because it's better for you. Direct has to be better for them.

1. Print your direct ordering URL on every bag, box and receipt. Make it big enough to read, and short enough to type.
2. Offer a first-order incentive. "Order direct and get 10% off" works well on people who already know your food from Uber Eats.
3. Use loyalty to reward direct orders specifically. Points that only build on direct orders give regulars a reason to stop using the app.
4. Send an SMS. Someone who's ordered from you before will usually read a message from you, and a well-timed offer gets a response.
5. Keep your prices the same as on the marketplace. Don't undercut yourself on direct. Make it more rewarding through loyalty and offers instead.

None of this needs a big campaign. A sticker on the bag and a loyalty offer will do most of the work, and the SMS list picks up the rest.

Tracking whether it's working

Pick one number and watch it: the share of your delivery and collection orders that come through direct channels. Write it down at the start, then check it once a month. If you're at 15% now and 25% three months later, you're moving the right way and you'll see it in your commission statement.

Ask new direct customers how they found you, too. If most say "I've ordered before on Uber Eats", the printed URLs and offers are working. If they say Google or Instagram, the website is doing the job and you can lean on that. Either answer tells you where to put the next bit of effort.

Read your Uber Eats contract while you're at it. Look for any terms on pricing or menu content before you make changes, and ask your account manager if something isn't clear. It's a five-minute job and it saves surprises.

Uber Eats and direct ordering side by side

Uber Eats charges 15% to 30% on every order. A direct channel through Flipdish charges none per order.

On Uber Eats you see limited customer data, and you control only part of how your menu appears. With Flipdish you have the full customer record and full control of the menu.

Uber Eats has no loyalty scheme you can run yourself, and no way to send your own SMS or email to its customers. Flipdish has loyalty, SMS, email and automated repeat-order campaigns built in. The experience is branded as yours, and it plugs into your POS.

Build your direct ordering channel

Every repeat order that comes through Uber Eats this month could have come through your own platform instead - at full margin, and adding a name to your customer list.

Flipdish online ordering gives you the website, app and marketing tools to set that up, and it gets more valuable the longer you run it.

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

Get a Flipdish demo to see how it works.