The short answer: SkipTheDishes, DoorDash and Uber Eats are great at getting new customers in front of you — but they take 15–30% off the top of every order (often 30–40% once you count all the fees), and that is brutal against a typical restaurant margin of 3–9%. The smart move is not to delete the apps. It is to use them for discovery, then move your repeat customers onto your own website's direct ordering, where you keep the margin and own the customer's details.
If you run a restaurant in Kamloops or anywhere in the BC Interior, you have probably done a version of this calculation in your head while staring at a delivery-app statement: "How much of this did I actually keep?" The honest answer is usually "less than you think." Let me lay out the real economics, because once you see them clearly, the case for a direct ordering channel on your own website stops being a tech decision and becomes a survival one.
What the apps actually cost you
The commission rates are advertised as 15–30% per order. That is the headline number. The problem is that the headline number is rarely the real number.
By the time you add the various service fees, payment-processing charges, promoted-listing costs and the discounts the platforms nudge you into running to stay visible, the effective cost commonly lands between 30% and 40% of each order's revenue. That is not a typo. On a busy month, a third or more of your delivery sales can disappear before you have paid for food, staff or rent.
Now put that next to the other number that matters: a typical independent restaurant runs on a net margin of roughly 3–9%. That margin is what is left after everything. When a platform takes 25% off the top of an order, it is not nibbling at your profit — it is eating several times your entire margin on that order. You can genuinely sell more food and make less money.
The math, laid out simply
Here is an illustrative example. The numbers are round and clearly made up to show the shape of the problem — your real figures will differ, but the gap holds.
Say your restaurant does 200 delivery orders a month at an average ticket of $35. That is $7,000 a month flowing through the apps.
- At a 25% commission, the platform keeps about $1,750 every month — roughly $21,000 a year.
- A first-party ordering system on your own website typically runs a flat ~$300 a month (often less), regardless of order volume — call it $3,600 a year.
So on the same 200 orders, you are looking at roughly $21,000 a year in app commissions versus $3,600 a year for your own channel — an annual gap of about $17,400.
And notice the structure of those two costs. The app's cost is a percentage, so it grows every single time you get busier. Your own channel is a flat fee, so the more you grow, the cheaper each order effectively becomes. The busier and more successful you get, the worse the apps look by comparison.
You will not move all 200 orders over — some customers will only ever order through the app they already have. But you do not need all of them. Shifting even a third of repeat orders to direct ordering can put four or five figures back in your pocket each year.
The cost you cannot see on the invoice: the customer
The commission is the cost you can measure. The bigger long-term cost is the one that never shows up on a statement.
When someone orders through SkipTheDishes or DoorDash, the app gets the customer relationship — you do not. You usually do not get their name, their phone number, their email, or their order history in any usable form. The platform does. So the next time that person is hungry, the app — not you — decides which restaurant to put in front of them. You rented that customer for one order and handed the relationship back when the food arrived.
When someone orders directly through your own website, the opposite happens. You capture their name, phone, email and full order history — and you own it. That is the raw material for everything that actually builds a restaurant: a loyalty programme, a "we miss you" text, a slow-Tuesday offer, a new-menu announcement. You cannot remarket to a customer the app is hiding from you. You can remarket to one who ordered from your own site all day long.
So should you ditch the apps? No.
Here is the balanced version, because the all-or-nothing pitch is wrong.
The apps genuinely do something you cannot easily replicate on your own: discovery and reach. Millions of hungry people open SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats with no particular restaurant in mind, and being on those platforms puts you in front of them. That is real marketing, and for a new or lesser-known spot it is hard to match.
So treat the apps as what they are good at — a customer-acquisition channel — and stop treating them as your permanent ordering system. The play that works for a lot of independents looks like this:
- Use the apps for discovery. Let them introduce you to new people. Pay the commission on those first orders as a marketing cost — that is roughly what it is.
- Convert repeat customers to direct ordering. Once someone has tried you and liked you, give them a reason to skip the middleman next time: a small loyalty perk, a printed insert card in the bag, an "order direct and save" sticker on the packaging, a discount code that only works on your own site.
- Build the direct channel alongside the apps, not instead of them. The goal is to own your regulars while the apps keep feeding you newcomers.
Over time, your most valuable customers — the regulars who order every week — migrate to the channel where you keep the margin and you own the relationship. The apps keep doing the one job they are genuinely good at.
Where Google quietly fits in
There is one more lever, and it is free. A lot of "order online" demand starts on Google, not in an app — someone searches your restaurant's name, or "[your food] delivery near me," and lands on your Google Business Profile.
If that profile's ordering link points to your own direct ordering page instead of (or alongside) the apps, you capture that high-intent searcher and own the transaction — no commission, full customer data. If it points only at the apps, you have just handed a customer who was already looking for you straight to a platform that charges you 30% to reconnect you with them. Getting that one link right is one of the highest-leverage things a restaurant can do, and it costs nothing but a few minutes.
What this means for a Kamloops restaurant
Put it together and the strategy is simple to state, even if it takes a bit of work to build:
- Stay on the apps for what they are good at — getting found by new people.
- Stand up direct ordering on your own website, where each order costs a flat fee instead of a fifth of your revenue.
- Capture every direct customer's details and actually use them — loyalty, texts, offers.
- Point your Google Business Profile's ordering link at your own site so high-intent searches stay yours.
None of this is about being anti-technology or anti-app. It is about not letting a platform own the customers you worked hard to win — and keeping the margin that, on a 3–9% business, you cannot afford to give away order after order.
Thinking about taking ordering onto your own site? The free website review is a 30-minute, no-pitch look at what it would take for your restaurant — and what you'd save.
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