Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build Your Own Ordering Channel
Why restaurants look for Uber Eats alternatives
Uber Eats brings customers to your kitchen. It also takes a cut of every order they place.
Commission usually lands between 15% and 30% of the order value, depending on your agreement and how much marketing support you buy. A restaurant doing £10,000 a month through Uber Eats could be paying £1,500 to £3,000 to the platform. Every month, not once.
Then there's everything around it. The extra tablet on the counter. A second menu to keep up to date. And the customer details, which sit with Uber Eats and not with you. If someone orders your chicken wrap four times in a month, you still can't send them a text.
Operators who do the sums tend to land in the same place. Marketplaces are good for finding new customers and expensive as your main channel. A direct ordering channel is what fills the gap.
What a direct ordering channel means
Customers order from you without a marketplace in the middle. In practice that's an ordering website with your branding on it, connected to your POS, and a mobile app if you have enough regulars to make one worth having. Every direct order also goes into your own customer records, so you know who ordered, what they ordered and when.
You keep the order value minus payment processing, which usually runs around 1.5% to 2.5% depending on the provider. There's no 25% commission and no marketplace algorithm deciding whether you show up on page one.
What the commission costs in pounds
| Monthly order volume | Uber Eats at 25% | Direct ordering at 2% processing |
|---|---|---|
| £5,000 | £1,250 | £100 |
| £10,000 | £2,500 | £200 |
| £20,000 | £5,000 | £400 |
| £50,000 | £12,500 | £1,000 |
Take a restaurant doing £20,000 a month on Uber Eats. At 25% that's £5,000 in commission. Move £8,000 of those orders to direct and the commission on them drops from £2,000 to about £160 in processing fees. That's £1,840 back every month, or a little over £22,000 a year, and the restaurant is still serving the same food to the same number of people.
Those are round numbers, so check them against your own agreement. The point holds either way: a few points of commission on a lot of orders adds up quickly.
How to build a direct ordering channel
Start with a website that takes orders
Your site needs ordering built in, not a button that sends people to a marketplace. Flipdish lets you launch a branded ordering website where customers order and pay without leaving it.
What the site needs to do:
- Load fast on a phone, since that's where most people will use it
- Look like your restaurant and not a generic template
- Send orders straight to the kitchen through your restaurant POS system
- Handle promotions, discount codes and loyalty points
- Take an item off the menu automatically when you run out of it
That last one sounds minor until a customer pays for a dish you stopped making an hour ago.
Add an app if you have regulars
A branded app suits restaurants where the same people order every week. It gives them a one-tap way to reorder, and it sits on their phone with your logo on it instead of a marketplace's.
Flipdish offers branded mobile apps with your logo and colours, running on Flipdish's technology. If most of your trade is one-off visitors, the website matters more and the app can wait.
Connect it to your POS
Direct orders should reach your restaurant POS the same way counter orders do. No second tablet, no retyping orders, no separate screen for the kitchen to watch.
Flipdish's POS takes online ordering and kiosk orders natively, so the kitchen works from one queue wherever the order came from. When staff stop copying orders between screens, you also stop getting the mistakes that come with copying.
Get customers to switch
Nobody moves to direct ordering because it exists. You have to tell them, and give them a reason. These work:
- Put a card in every Uber Eats bag. Something like "Order direct next time and save 10%" costs pence to print and gets read, because the customer is holding the bag when they see it.
- Send an SMS to customers whose numbers you already have. Flipdish's SMS marketing tools let you do that from inside the platform.
- Check your Google Business Profile. The order link should point to your own site, not a marketplace.
- Offer a first-order discount on direct. It removes the small bit of friction that stops people changing habits.
Pick a discount you can afford, and do the sum first. A £30 order on Uber Eats at 25% commission leaves you £22.50. The same order direct with 10% off is £27, less about 54p in processing, so £26.46. Even after the discount you're about £4 better off on every order.
Give them a reason to come back to you
A marketplace rewards loyalty to the marketplace. If a customer likes your food, Uber Eats still gets the credit and the next order might go to the place down the road. Your own loyalty and retention programme is the only way to give people a reason to come back to you specifically.
Flipdish's built-in loyalty tools connect to your ordering data, so you can see who your best customers are, how often they order and what they spend. Once you can see that, you can send your top twenty customers something nice and mean it.
Should you stop using Uber Eats entirely?
For most restaurants, no. Not straight away, anyway.
Uber Eats still finds customers you wouldn't reach otherwise. Someone who discovers you there might order direct next time if you give them a reason, which is what the card in the bag is for. So run both, and shift the balance over time as direct orders grow.
What you want to avoid is depending on a marketplace for everything. If Uber Eats controls your visibility, your pricing and your customer relationship, a change to their fees or their search ranking becomes your problem overnight, and you can't do much about it.
How to tell if it's working
Keep it simple. Once a week, write down how many orders came through each channel and what you paid in commission and processing. After a month you'll see whether the cards in the bags and the SMS messages are moving anything.
If the direct share is flat, look at the basics before spending more. Is the order link easy to find on your Google profile? Does the site load quickly on a phone? Is the discount big enough to notice? Small fixes like these usually matter more than a new campaign.
If the direct share is growing, you can start asking harder questions about Uber Eats. Which of your menu items sell there at a price that still leaves you a margin? Are the promotions you pay for bringing in new customers, or just discounting orders you'd have had anyway? Answer those and you'll know how much of the marketplace you actually want to keep.
Running both channels without doubling the work
The worry most operators raise is the admin. How do you keep an Uber Eats menu and a direct ordering menu up to date without doing everything twice?
Marketplace order management deals with it. Flipdish integrates with Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo, so orders from all three show up on the same POS screen as your direct orders. You manage one menu centrally and changes push to every channel at once.
So adding a direct channel doesn't add a new screen or a new routine. It runs through the system you already use.
Uber Eats alternatives compared
| Option | Commission | Customer data | Brand control | POS integration |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uber Eats | 15–30% | Uber Eats owns it | Limited | Separate tablet |
| Just Eat | 14–30% | Just Eat owns it | Limited | Separate tablet |
| Flipdish direct ordering | ~2% processing | You own it | Full | Native |
| Self-built website | ~2% processing | You own it | Full | Requires dev work |
A self-built site can work if you have a developer on hand. Most restaurants don't, and keeping a custom ordering system running is a job that never finishes.
How Flipdish handles direct ordering
Flipdish covers the whole direct ordering setup: a branded website, a mobile app, POS integration, loyalty, marketing and reporting. All of it sits in one place, so you're not stitching together a website from one supplier, a loyalty app from another and a POS from a third.
It also keeps managing your Uber Eats and other marketplace orders through the same system. You don't have to pick between channels on day one.
The Flipdish AI marketing tools can spot customers who order through marketplaces and prompt them to switch to direct with automatic campaigns. You don't have to build each one by hand.
Phone orders matter too. A busy kitchen misses calls, and a missed call is an order that ends up on a marketplace instead. The AI phone agent answers when customers call to order, so that revenue stays with you.
Start building your direct channel
You don't have to switch off Uber Eats to do this. You're adding a channel you control, and moving orders onto it as customers get used to it.
Talk to Flipdish about setting up your direct ordering website and connecting it to what you already run.