Guide — restaurant online ordering
How restaurants can stop paying 30% delivery-app fees
A restaurant stops paying marketplace commission by taking orders on its own website. Delivery apps like DoorDash publish commission plans that top out at 30% of every order; an ordering page on the restaurant's own site replaces that with ordinary card processing — 2.9% plus 30 cents a charge at Stripe's published Canadian rate. The order, the payment, and the customer relationship all land with the restaurant instead of the platform.
Last updated: October 25, 2026
The math
What 30% actually costs
A worked example, with the assumptions on the table: a restaurant doing $20,000 a month in marketplace delivery orders.
| Marketplace app | Own ordering page | |
|---|---|---|
| Fee on $20,000 of monthly orders | 30% commission = $6,000/month | Card processing at 2.9% + 30¢ ≈ $640/month |
| Over a year | $72,000 | ≈ $7,700 |
| Who owns the customer | The platform | The restaurant |
| Who sets menu prices | You do — but many restaurants mark marketplace prices up to cover the fee | You do, at the prices you actually want |
| Competitors beside your name | Yes — the app lists every nearby option | No |
Example only: the marketplace figure uses the top published plan rate of 30%; the processing figure uses Stripe's published Canadian rate of 2.9% + 30¢ and assumes an average $40 order. Even on a 15% marketplace plan, the same restaurant pays $3,000 a month in commission — several times the cost of owning the ordering page.
How it works
Direct ordering, step by step
- The ordering page lives on your own website — your menu, your prices, your brandingYour domain
- Customers order and pay online; the order lands in your kitchen the way your current orders doNo commission
- Delivery is your driver, pickup, or a flat-fee courier — never a percentage of the orderYour choice
- Repeat customers get moved over: a flyer in every marketplace bag, your link on receipts, your Google profile, and your socialsEvery order, kept
- You can keep the apps for discovery while your regulars — the orders that repeat every week — come directBest of both
Webstead builds the ordering page as part of a website build, quoted fixed in writing before work starts. The Commerce build (from $4,995, 40% to start and 60% at launch) covers online selling with payments, taxes, and pickup/delivery rules configured; care plans from $79/month keep it hosted, secure, and updated. See what a website costs in Waterloo Region for the full price list.
Before you ask
Delivery-fee questions, answered straight
The big marketplaces publish commission plans that top out at 30% of the order. DoorDash's published plans, for example, run 15%, 25%, or 30% per marketplace order depending on the plan. On a $40 order, that is $6 to $12 taken before food costs, labour, or rent.
Normal card processing. Stripe's published Canadian rate is 2.9% plus 30 cents per successful charge. On the same $40 order that is about $1.46, instead of $6 to $12 in marketplace commission. The restaurant also pays for its website and care plan — fixed, published costs instead of a percentage of every sale.
No. Many restaurants keep the marketplaces for discovery — a new customer finding you there once is worth something — and move repeat customers to direct ordering with a flyer in the bag, a code on the receipt, and the ordering link everywhere the marketplace apps appear. Every repeat order that moves over is one that stops paying commission.
Three options, and they mix: your own driver for the orders you take directly, pickup (which many regulars prefer), or a flat-fee courier service that charges per delivery instead of a percentage of the order. The ordering page handles the order and payment; delivery is arranged however suits the restaurant.
The customer relationship becomes yours. You see who ordered and what they like, you can email or text them an offer directly, your menu and prices are exactly what you set, and there is no list of competing restaurants one tap away. On a marketplace, the customer, the data, and the repeat order belong to the platform.
Online ordering is built as part of a website build and quoted fixed, in writing, before work starts. Webstead's Commerce build — an online store with payments, taxes, and pickup/delivery rules configured — starts at $4,995 one-time, 40% to start and 60% at launch, with a live target of 20 to 25 business days. Care plans that host and look after the site run $79, $149, or $299 a month. Start with the free Website Health Check.