Why pizzerias should own their online orders
The problem with delivery platforms is not the commission. It is that the customer is theirs. You cannot email the person who has ordered from you forty times, because you do not know who they are — and that is a deliberate feature of the arrangement, not an oversight.
What you give up that is not money
- The customer's identity. Name, phone, email, order history. The platform holds all of it.
- The relationship. You cannot tell your regulars you are closed for a fortnight in August, or that the new special is on.
- The pricing. Many platforms have views on what you charge, and your prices there often have to absorb the commission.
- The reviews. They accrue to a profile inside someone else's app.
- The knowledge. Which pizza sells on a Tuesday, who orders at eleven, which postcode is worth delivering to.
Commission is a price. These are not priced at all, which is what makes them easy to hand over without noticing.
The asymmetry, in one table
| Platform order | Direct order | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost of a £28 order | £8.40 at 30% | ~£0.62 |
| You know who ordered | No | Yes |
| You can contact them again | No | Yes |
| You set the price | Constrained | Yes |
| Review belongs to | The platform | You |
| If they raise the rate | You absorb it | Not applicable |
Uber Eats UK published rate for platform-delivered orders; card processing around 1.5% + 20p on a direct order.
What "taking it back" actually looks like
Not a launch. A slow transfer of habit, which is unglamorous and works:
- Put the address on the box. It is the one piece of your packaging that is guaranteed to be looked at.
- Put a card in every platform bag. This is the only moment you get to speak to a customer the platform owns. Say what is cheaper or better about ordering direct, specifically.
- Make direct worth it. A free garlic bread over £25 costs you maybe 60p and beats a 10% discount for shifting behaviour.
- Ask for the email, once, at the right moment. With the order confirmation, not before it.
- Use it rarely. Two emails a year that people are glad to get beats a monthly newsletter that trains them to ignore you.
What a third looks like in money
A pizzeria doing 150 platform orders a month at £28 pays about £15,000 a year in commission at 30%. Moving a third of that volume direct saves roughly £5,000 — without losing a single customer, because they were already yours.
The uncomfortable part
Direct ordering only works if the direct experience is good. A clunky ordering page that loses the basket sends people straight back to the app, and rightly — the platforms are very good at the checkout, which is most of what you are competing with.
So the honest sequence is: make it genuinely easy first, then ask people to change their habit. Doing it the other way round is how a direct-ordering push quietly fails and gets blamed on customers.