Delivery orders that come through a third-party platform usually carry a fee for the restaurant. That fee comes out of the order total, so the same dish earns you less when a platform brings you the order than when a guest orders from you directly.
If guests are already asking to order from home, starting your own restaurant delivery service is worth considering. This guide is for restaurants in that position, not for founding a delivery company from scratch.
Setting it up takes work. You’ll need a way for guests to order, a way to take payment, a delivery area you can cover, and packaging that survives the trip. What you keep in return is the margin the platform would have taken.
Why Run Your Own Delivery?
Platforms bring you orders you wouldn’t get on your own, and most charge a commission on each of those orders in return. The rate is usually negotiated per restaurant and varies by platform and plan, so yours may not match the place down the street. It is normally taken from the order total, so it comes out before food cost, staff hours, and packaging are covered.
Guest contact details are the second thing to weigh. When an order comes through a platform, the platform is usually the one holding the guest’s name, address, and order history, and you receive what it passes on. That matters because a guest who has already ordered from you is usually the cheapest one to reach again, and reaching them directly is easier when you hold their details yourself.
None of this makes platforms the wrong choice. Reach and logistics are what the commission buys, and plenty of restaurants find that a fair trade. What you can decide is how many of your orders go through a platform and how many come to you directly, and that starts with a few basics.
What You Need Before You Start Your Own Restaurant Delivery Service
Before the first direct order comes through, four things need to exist so your own delivery service can be smoother.
1. Ordering channel
An ordering channel is a page or link where guests place the order, without an app in between. It can live on your website, behind a QR code on the table, or in a message you send to a regular. Whatever form it takes, this is the piece that replaces the platform.
2. Payment
Guests pay at the moment they order, the same way they would in any app. That means card and digital wallet payments are handled on the page, so the full order value reaches your account rather than a marketplace account first.
3. Delivery area and drivers
Work out how far you can deliver during a busy shift, and treat that as your limit. Then decide who drives it, whether that is staff between shifts, part-time drivers, or a local courier during your peak.
4. Packaging
Packaging decides what the guest actually receives, because the meal has to hold up between your pass and their table. Food that travels for 15 minutes is not the same as food served on a plate. Leak-proof containers and insulated bags usually cost less than the repeat orders lost to soggy fries and spilled sauce.
How to Set Up Your Own Delivery, Step by Step
If you’re ready to run delivery yourself, these steps turn those four basics into a working service. Work through them in order, because each one depends on the decision before it.
Draw your delivery area: Since a late arrival is what guests tend to remember, set the boundary by what your kitchen can reach on your busiest night. Most operators widen it later, once they know how their own runs actually go.
Pick the dishes that travel: Start from the dishes you’d be happy for a guest to open 20 minutes later, and leave the rest for the dining room. Price them to cover packaging and the driver’s time on top of ingredients.
Get your ordering page live: This is the address guests go to instead of opening an app. Keep it simple enough that someone can order in under a minute on a phone.
Switch on checkout: Guests should be able to pay on that same page, in the same minute they order. The fewer steps between choosing and paying, the more likely an order is to go through.
Tell your existing customers: The first people to use your ordering page are usually the ones who already eat at your restaurant, so put the web address where they will come across it. Receipts, takeaway bags, and your social profiles all reach that group without paid advertising.
Review the first two weeks: The first run of real orders is where you find out what the planning missed, which is why it’s worth treating as a test rather than a launch. Expect a dish that doesn’t hold up or an address further away than it looked on the map, and fix those before you widen the area.
Should You Run Your Own Delivery or Use a Platform?
There are two situations where a platform is the better place to start. The first is when you don’t know your numbers yet. A platform will show you how much delivery demand exists around you before you commit your own staff hours or money.
The second is capacity. Where drivers are hard to find, or nobody on the team has time to check every bag before it leaves, a platform’s logistics can be worth what it charges.
Own delivery works best once you have regulars. A guest ordering from you for the second time already knows what they want, so all they need is your ordering page, and that page doesn’t charge you commission.
Building Your Own Delivery Service with ORDERMONKEY
We created the ORDERMONKEY Web Shop for restaurants that want to run their own delivery service. Guests get to your own web shop from a QR code, your website, or a link you send, and it carries your name and your menu.
To keep payment simple, we built OMK Pay into it. Cashless payment with OMK Pay covers card and wallet on the same page, so guests never leave to pay and the money reaches you directly.
Both run from the same Back Office as your in-house ordering, so a price change updates on the delivery page and at the table at once. That also means one menu to keep up to date instead of two, which saves the double entry that makes a second ordering channel hard to maintain.
Start With the Guests You Already Have
Running delivery yourself is a trade. It takes more setting up than switching on a platform, and in return the commission and the guest relationship stay on your side of the counter.
Platforms can stay in the mix. The practical version for most restaurants is to let a platform do the finding, and to move the regulars onto your own page once they’ve ordered a few times.
Want to see how running your own delivery works with ORDERMONKEY? Request a demo.
