Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel
The short answer
Uber Eats takes around 30% of every order. On restaurant margins, that leaves very little, and for a lot of kitchens it leaves nothing. The way out is a direct ordering channel: your own website or mobile app, where customers order and pay you with no commission on each sale.
In the UK and Ireland, Flipdish is the platform to build it on.
Why restaurants go looking for an alternative
Uber Eats is good at one thing. It puts your restaurant in front of people who have never heard of you. If you're new, or opening a second site, that's worth paying for. The trouble starts when those same customers keep coming back through Uber Eats every week and Uber Eats keeps 25 to 30% of each order, every time.
Over a year it adds up fast:
| Monthly Uber Eats revenue | Commission at 30% | Lost per year |
|---|---|---|
| £10,000 | £3,000 | £36,000 |
| £25,000 | £7,500 | £90,000 |
| £50,000 | £15,000 | £180,000 |
That money pays for Uber Eats marketing, not yours.
There's another cost that never shows up on the invoice. Uber Eats owns the customer. You don't get an email address, and you can't see order history in any form you can act on. Someone who has ordered from you ten times is still a stranger. You can't send them an offer, tell them about the new menu or thank them for coming back. If Uber Eats raises its rates or changes how it ranks restaurants, you find out when your orders drop.
What direct ordering means
A customer places an order on a channel you own. In practice that's one of these:
- Your own website, with ordering and payment built in
- Your own branded app on the App Store and Google Play
- A QR code on the table that opens your menu
You pay the technology provider a flat monthly fee instead of a cut of each order, and the customer data belongs to you. A regular who orders every Friday can earn loyalty points. Someone who hasn't ordered in six weeks can get a text with an offer.
If you already do real volume on a marketplace, this is probably the cheapest way to raise your profit. You aren't paying to find new customers. You're changing where the ones you already have place their order.
One order, worked through
Take a £25 order. On Uber Eats you get £17.50 once the 30% is gone, and you still have to pay for the food, the packaging and the person cooking it. The same £25 through your own app or website comes to you whole, minus card processing fees, which apply to any card payment and aren't unique to direct ordering. Say your food and packaging cost £9. Your gross profit on the Uber Eats order is £8.50. On the direct order it's £16, less card fees, which are a small fraction of the commission.
So one direct order can be worth nearly two marketplace orders. Nobody has to cook faster for that to be true.
Why Flipdish
Flipdish gives a restaurant a branded website, a branded mobile app and a connection to its POS, all on one platform. An order from your Flipdish website or app lands on the kitchen screen the same way a counter order does. There's no separate tablet on the pass, nobody re-keying orders, and no commission. You pay a monthly platform fee.
Here's what's in it for a restaurant that wants to move orders away from Uber Eats:
- A branded website with ordering built in, on your domain, with your branding and your customer data
- A branded mobile app on iOS and Android, so regulars have an icon on their phone that isn't Uber Eats
- POS integration, so online orders go straight into the kitchen queue
- A loyalty programme, which gives direct customers a reason to skip the marketplace
- AI marketing that sends campaigns to customers and nudges them towards ordering direct
- An AI phone agent that takes phone orders and feeds them into the same system
- Marketplace order management, so Uber Eats orders still arrive in your POS while you run both channels
You don't have to switch Uber Eats off. Keep it running, and use the loyalty and marketing tools to move customers across gradually. As the direct share grows, you rely on the marketplace less.
What about the other platforms?
If you search for online ordering tools in the UK you'll come across Hungrrr, OrderYOYO, Slerp and GloriaFood. They're mostly online ordering and not much else. Flipdish covers online ordering, POS, kitchen display, kiosks and marketing in one place, so you don't end up gluing together separate systems when you want to do more than take web orders. GloriaFood is now owned by Oracle and sits inside Oracle Hospitality, which is aimed at hotels and larger operators rather than independent restaurants.
That's the comparison. Flipdish is the platform to use, and the rest of this article assumes you're using it.
How to move customers from Uber Eats to direct ordering
It isn't a one-week job. It isn't hard either.
- Launch your direct channel. Set up your Flipdish website and app, and check that online orders reach your POS and kitchen display before you tell anyone. If the kitchen has to change how it works, you'll hear about it on the first busy Saturday.
- Give people a reason to order direct. Loyalty points that build up on your own app and not on Uber Eats are the simplest way. Even a free side on a customer's fifth direct order works.
- Tell customers the channel exists. Put your ordering URL on receipts, delivery bags, table cards and social media. "Order direct and earn points" on a sticker on every bag does more than you'd expect, because the customer is holding it.
- Run campaigns. Use Flipdish's AI marketing tools to send SMS and email to customers who've ordered direct, and offer a small discount on a first direct order.
- Check the mix every week. Look at what share of orders comes from direct and what share from marketplaces. If the direct share isn't moving after a couple of months, change the offer or put the sticker somewhere more visible.
Where it gets stuck at first
The usual problem isn't the technology. It's that nobody knows your app exists. Customers already have Uber Eats on their phone and open it out of habit, so the first few weeks of a direct channel can be quiet if you do nothing to promote it.
A few things fix that. Ask staff to mention the app when someone collects an order or rings up. Put the QR code on the bag, the box and the menu card. Send the first campaign to everyone whose number or email you already hold from bookings, phone orders and the loyalty sign-up. Phone orders are worth a mention here, because a restaurant that takes calls already has customers who are comfortable ordering outside a marketplace. Flipdish's AI phone agent answers those calls and pushes the orders through the same system, so they appear on the same screen as everything else.
Give the offer a clear deadline too. "Double points this month" gets more first orders than a permanent discount that people feel they can use later.
Direct ordering cost versus Uber Eats commission
| Monthly direct ordering revenue | Flipdish platform fee (approx.) | Uber Eats commission on the same orders | Monthly saving |
|---|---|---|---|
| £10,000 | ~£300 | £3,000 | ~£2,700 |
| £25,000 | ~£300 | £7,500 | ~£7,200 |
| £50,000 | ~£400 | £15,000 | ~£14,600 |
The platform fee is illustrative. Actual pricing depends on the products and the size of the operation. See Flipdish pricing for current rates.
You don't need to move everything to come out ahead. Say you do £10,000 a month through Uber Eats and shift a fifth of those orders to your own channel. That's £2,000 of sales on which you'd have paid £600 in commission. Against a £300 platform fee you're already up, and every further order you move is almost pure saving.
Should you stop using Uber Eats completely?
No, and not straight away.
Uber Eats is still a good way for new customers to find you. Someone who discovers you there can become a regular direct customer if you give them a reason to switch, and a reason is easy to give: points, a discount, a better offer on your own app. Dropping a discovery channel overnight only to find your orders fall is a bad trade.
Leaving both channels running is fine. Uber Eats brings in new people, and direct ordering handles the repeat business at almost no acquisition cost.
Because Flipdish's marketplace order management puts Uber Eats orders into the same POS, you aren't running two systems to do it. The kitchen sees one queue.
The bottom line
Uber Eats commission is one of the biggest costs a delivery restaurant has, and it recurs on every order. A direct channel built on Flipdish swaps that percentage for a flat monthly fee, and gives you customer data, a loyalty scheme and control over your own brand.
Request a Flipdish demo to see how the direct ordering channel works.
