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

Is there a real Uber Eats alternative for restaurants?

Yes, and it's your own ordering channel. A branded website and app where customers order straight from you, with no 30% cut going to a marketplace.

Flipdish builds exactly that: an online ordering website and a customer app under your own name. You decide the menu and the prices. The orders, the customer details and the margin stay with you.

You don't have to quit Uber Eats to do this. Most restaurants shouldn't, at least not straight away. Keep the listing for the customers who haven't heard of you, and work on moving the ones who already like you onto a channel you own.

What Uber Eats costs a restaurant

Uber Eats takes a commission on every order. Depending on your contract and market it usually lands somewhere between 25% and 35%. It's charged per order, so it grows every time your sales do.

Here's what 30% looks like on a £25 average order:

Monthly Uber Eats ordersAverage order valueTotal salesCommission at 30%
400£25£10,000£3,000
800£25£20,000£6,000
1,500£25£37,500£11,250

That's before any promotions Uber Eats asks you to fund, and before the cost of packaging and the extra staff time on busy nights.

Now put it against your margin. If you make 20p profit on every £1 of food you sell, a 30% commission wipes that out and then some. Plenty of restaurants have grown their Uber Eats volume year after year without checking this, and ended up with a kitchen that's flat out and a bank balance that isn't.

Take the middle row. A restaurant doing 800 Uber Eats orders a month pays £6,000 in commission, which is £72,000 over a year. That's roughly a full-time salary for a chef, handed over to a company that doesn't cook anything. Even if you only move a quarter of those orders to your own channel, you keep £18,000 a year.

Why so many restaurants end up relying on it

Three reasons, mostly.

Uber Eats already has customers browsing your area every evening. You don't pay to find them in advance. Customers also trust its checkout and its refund process, so they'll order from a restaurant they've never tried. And if you don't have your own ordering site or app, there's nowhere else to send people.

The first two are real advantages, and you pay for them. The third is the one you can fix. A customer who has ordered from you once on Uber Eats knows who you are. The job is to give them a better reason to order next time somewhere you keep the margin.

How to build a direct ordering channel

Setting one up is a lot less work than it was a few years ago. There are five parts to get right.

A branded ordering website

A restaurant ordering website on your own domain lets customers place orders with you directly. You choose the menu, the delivery fees (or none) and how it looks. You also keep the customer's name, email and order history, which Uber Eats doesn't hand over.

Flipdish builds and hosts the site, and it connects to your POS and kitchen. Customers see a fast, simple menu and a checkout that takes a minute.

A branded app

An app with your name on it sits on the customer's home screen, next to the Uber Eats icon rather than inside it. That's a big deal for repeat orders. Someone who's craving your burgers on a Friday doesn't need to search anywhere. They tap your icon.

Flipdish provides iOS and Android apps as part of the platform.

POS and kitchen integration

Direct orders have to arrive in the same place as everything else. If your ordering site emails you the order and someone has to re-key it into the till, it will go wrong the first Saturday night you're busy. With Flipdish, direct orders go to the kitchen display system or the printer, in the same queue as your dine-in and takeaway tickets.

Loyalty and marketing

Marketplace customers belong to the marketplace. Direct customers belong to you, but only if you do something with them. A loyalty programme and a few automated messages are usually enough: a points reward after the third order, a text when someone hasn't ordered for a month, a push notification on a quiet Tuesday.

Flipdish has loyalty points, SMS and push campaigns and customer segments built in, so you aren't stitching together three other tools.

Phone orders

If you take a lot of orders by phone, those calls tie up staff during your busiest hour and mistakes creep in. Flipdish's AI Phone Agent can take the order and feed it into the same system as your online orders, or point the caller to your website.

Moving customers from Uber Eats to your own site

You can't message Uber Eats customers. The platform owns that relationship and doesn't share contact details. What you can do is give people reasons to come to you directly.

A discount that only applies on your website or app is the simplest one. Take 10% or 15% off direct orders and you're still keeping more than you would after a 30% commission. Loyalty points that only count on direct orders work the same way, and they give people a reason to keep coming back instead of a reason to try you once.

Put a card in every delivery bag. A QR code that goes to your ordering page, with a first-order discount printed on it, costs a few pence per bag. Tell your staff to mention the app when someone collects an order or sits down in the restaurant. If a customer is already standing in front of you, that's the cheapest chance you'll get.

Paid search helps too. Plenty of people type your restaurant's name into Google before they open a delivery app. If your ordering site shows up first, they'll use it. If it doesn't, they'll land on Uber Eats.

The aim isn't to drop Uber Eats overnight. It's to shift the share of orders that come through your own channel. If 25% of your delivery orders move over, and you're doing £20,000 a month on Uber Eats, that's £5,000 of sales no longer paying £1,500 in commission. Every month.

Mistakes that slow this down

Hiding the link is the common one. If your Instagram bio, Google profile and website all still point to Uber Eats, customers will keep using it. Change every link you control to your own ordering page first.

Discounting too deep is the next. A 30% discount on direct orders gives away the whole saving, and you've gained nothing except a busier kitchen. Start at 10% and see whether it moves people.

Delivery needs a plan as well. Uber Eats brings its own drivers, and a direct channel doesn't automatically. If you don't have your own riders, start with collection orders, which cost you nothing in delivery, and add delivery once you know how many orders to expect. Regulars will often pick up if the price is lower.

And don't judge it after a week. Direct ordering builds slowly. The first month will probably look small next to Uber Eats. Check the share of orders coming through your own channel every month, because that's the number that matters.

What about Just Eat and Deliveroo?

Same story. Just Eat and Deliveroo charge commission at similar levels and neither lets you contact their customers.

If you stay on all three, Flipdish's order management pulls those orders into one place and sends them to the same kitchen queue as your direct ones. That gets rid of the row of tablets on the counter, each beeping at a different time.

What Flipdish includes

Restaurants across the UK and Ireland use Flipdish to run direct ordering. The platform covers:

If most of your online sales come through Uber Eats today, you can start with the website and app and leave everything else as it is. Marketplace orders keep arriving through Flipdish while the direct share grows, so nothing drops off during the switch. Pricing is on the Flipdish pricing page.

What Uber Eats is actually good for

It's good at getting your name in front of people who've never heard of you. If you've just opened, or you're trying to reach a new part of town, that's worth paying for.

It's a poor deal for serving people who already know you. Your regulars would happily order from you directly, and every time they open Uber Eats instead you pay 30% for a customer you didn't need to find.

So use Uber Eats to meet new customers, then get them onto your own app or site. Flipdish gives you the website, the app, the kitchen connection and the loyalty tools to do that in one place.

Request a Flipdish demo to see how direct ordering would work for your restaurant.