Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel

Why Uber Eats gets expensive

Uber Eats brought a lot of restaurants orders they wouldn't have got any other way. If you had no customer list and no website anyone would order from, that was worth a lot. The catch is that you keep paying for it on every single order.

Uber Eats takes a commission on each order. The rate depends on your contract and your market, so there's no point guessing at yours here. What you'll see in plenty of busy kitchens is a high volume of app orders and not much profit left from them. The delivery and service fees customers see in the app are a separate thing from what Uber Eats charges you.

The commission isn't the only problem.

You don't own the customer. The person who orders from you every Friday night is Uber Eats' customer, not yours. You can't email them, text them or send them a voucher to bring them back.

You also can't build loyalty. There's no way to put an Uber Eats customer into your own loyalty programme until they've ordered from you directly. And your presence on the app runs on Uber's rules: how your restaurant appears, how the menu is laid out, which promotions you're allowed to run.

Then there's the drift. The longer a big share of your orders comes through one marketplace, the harder it gets to cut back without a dip in volume.

None of that means you should delete the app tomorrow. It sends you new customers, especially if you're still building a base. Keep using it. Just build a channel you own next to it.

What a direct ordering channel is

It's any way for customers to order from you without a marketplace in the middle. Your own website, your own mobile app, or a kiosk in the restaurant.

When someone orders that way:

You keep the full order value, minus payment processing
You get their contact details
You can send them a discount next week
You can sign them up to your loyalty programme
You can reach them by SMS, push notification or email

A customer who orders direct once, has a good experience and gets a loyalty offer is much more likely to order direct again. Direct customers tend to order more often and spend a bit more, mostly because you can actually get in touch with them. That's what the marketplace doesn't give you.

What Flipdish gives you

Flipdish is the platform to use if you want to build direct ordering in the UK and Ireland. It covers the whole job of moving customers from a marketplace to your own brand, and you don't need to stitch together five different suppliers to do it.

Start with the restaurant website. Customers order from your menu on a site that carries your name, not Flipdish's and not a marketplace's. Orders go straight to your kitchen.

The branded mobile app puts your restaurant on a customer's home screen. When they open it they see your menu and your offers, with no competitors listed underneath.

In the restaurant, Flipdish kiosks let people order without queueing at the counter. Kiosk orders go to the kitchen, and the kiosk suggests extras on its own, so average order value goes up without a member of staff having to ask.

All of these feed into the same POS system as your counter orders. The kitchen sees one queue, whether the order came from the website, the app or a kiosk.

For loyalty, Flipdish's loyalty tools let you run a points programme for direct customers. Every direct order earns them something, and gives you a reason to message them again. SMS marketing handles the messaging, and AI-powered marketing spots customers who haven't ordered for a while and sends them a campaign automatically. Nobody on your team has to build the list by hand.

Phones are the other gap. The Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers calls, takes the order and takes payment, so nobody has to stop what they're doing mid-service to pick up.

And you don't have to choose between direct and marketplace. Flipdish order management pulls Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo orders into the same system as your direct ones. One screen, both channels. You keep the marketplace orders coming in while you build the part you own.

Getting marketplace customers to order direct

The first direct order is the hard one. Once a customer has done it and it went well, they tend to keep doing it.

Receipt inserts work well for collection. When someone picks up an Uber Eats order, hand them a card with your direct ordering URL and a code for money off their first direct order. They're holding your food and thinking about your restaurant, which is the best moment to ask.

Delivery is the same idea. Put a small card in every bag. Something like "Order direct at [your website] and get a reward". It reaches people while they're eating. Not everyone will act on it, but a decent number will over time.

In the restaurant, put QR codes on the counter, on tables and at the door, and say clearly that ordering through your app earns loyalty points.

Check your Google Business Profile too. The order link on your listing should go to your own ordering website, not a marketplace. Plenty of people find restaurants on Google and click the first order link they see.

Finally, give people a reason to switch. A discount or a free item on the first direct order is usually cheaper than the commission you'd pay on that customer's next few orders.

Does the maths work?

It depends on your margins, your commission rate and how many orders you do, so here's an example with made-up round numbers. Say your average order is £25 and the marketplace takes 30% of it. That's £7.50 gone before you've paid for the food or the packaging. Put the same £25 order through your own website and you pay card processing, which is a small fraction of that. On 200 orders a month the gap is well over a thousand pounds. Plug in your own commission rate and see what you get.

The direction is the same for everyone. Each order that moves from the marketplace to your own channel costs you less to take.

The platform pays for itself once direct orders replace a real share of your marketplace volume. That takes months, not weeks. Receipt cards, bag inserts and loyalty offers each win you a few customers at a time, and it adds up slowly. Track the split between marketplace and direct orders every month. If the direct share isn't creeping up, the problem is usually that customers don't know the option exists, not that they don't want it.

Where to start

Don't try to do everything in one go. A rough order that works:

Get the ordering website live and make sure your Google listing points to it
Print cards for every collection receipt and delivery bag, with a first-order code
Switch on the loyalty programme so the first direct order earns something straight away
Add the app and the kiosks once direct orders are coming in steadily

Menu pricing is worth a thought too. Some restaurants price higher on marketplaces to cover commission, which makes the direct menu look like the better deal without any discount at all. Whether that suits you depends on your area and your competitors, but it's a cheap way to nudge people towards your own site.

Running Uber Eats and direct ordering together

Most restaurants with a strong direct channel still use Uber Eats. It finds new customers for you. A sensible way to run it:

Let the marketplace bring in new customers
Get first-time marketplace customers to order direct next time
Keep them with loyalty offers and targeted messages
Lean less on the marketplace as your direct base grows

Flipdish is built for this. Marketplace and direct orders land in one kitchen queue, and you can watch the direct share grow.

Why one platform matters

Plenty of restaurants end up with a website from one supplier, an app from another, a POS from a third and a separate tool for texts. Every extra system is another login, another bill and another place where an order can get lost on its way to the kitchen.

Flipdish is built for food businesses and puts ordering websites, mobile apps, kiosks, POS, loyalty and marketing in one place. It's used by independent restaurants and multi-location groups in the UK and Ireland, so the same set-up works whether you run one site or twenty. Pricing for online ordering is on the website.

Uber Eats is good at finding you a first order. Keeping the customer after that is your job, and it's much easier with a branded website, an app and the marketing tools already connected to your kitchen. You keep more of each sale, and the customer list belongs to you.

Talk to Flipdish about building your direct ordering channel →