What 15–30% Commission Really Costs Your Restaurant

The Real Cost of Third-Party Delivery Commissions

If your restaurant does $40,000 a month through DoorDash or UberEats, you're paying between $6,000 and $12,000 a month in commission fees. That's $72,000 to $144,000 a year — money that goes to a platform, not to your kitchen, your staff, or your rent.

Let that sink in.

The Math Nobody Wants to Do

Here's what commissions look like at different revenue levels:

Over a year, a restaurant doing $25,000/month in delivery is paying $45,000 to $90,000 in commissions. That's a full-time employee's salary. That's a kitchen renovation. That's the difference between breaking even and actually building a business.

Why Restaurants Accept It

The honest answer: discovery. DoorDash and UberEats bring in new customers who wouldn't have found your restaurant otherwise. That has real value — especially for new restaurants building awareness.

The problem is that once those customers become regulars, you're still paying 25% on every repeat order. Your loyal customer orders from you every Friday through DoorDash, and DoorDash takes a quarter of it. Every time. Forever.

A Better Approach

The smartest restaurant owners we talk to don't try to quit delivery platforms cold turkey. Instead, they use a two-channel strategy:

Keep DoorDash/UberEats for discovery. New customers find you there. That's fine. The commission is the cost of customer acquisition.

Push regulars to your direct ordering channel. Once a customer has ordered from you twice, they know your name, they know they like your food. There's no reason for them to keep ordering through a middleman. Give them a way to order directly — through your own website, your own ordering page — where you keep 100% of the revenue.

This is exactly why we built S4VOR. Every restaurant on our platform gets a free online ordering page. Your regulars order through S4VOR, you keep everything. No commission. The customer pays a small platform fee (less than $1 on a typical order), and that's it.

What You Can Do This Week

1. Look at your delivery platform reports. How much are you paying in commissions per month? Write that number down.
2. Identify your repeat customers. Most platforms show you this data. These are the customers you're overpaying to reach.
3. Give regulars a direct option. Whether it's S4VOR or another direct ordering tool, get your repeat customers off the commission treadmill.
4. Put your direct ordering link everywhere. Your Google Business profile, your Instagram bio, a sign at the register, a card in every delivery bag. "Order direct at [your link] — same food, better price."

The delivery platforms aren't going away, and they don't need to. But your regulars — the 20% of customers who drive 80% of your revenue — should be ordering directly from you.

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S4VOR gives every restaurant free online ordering with $0 commissions. Get started at s4vor.com/for-restaurants.