Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel
Why restaurants look for an Uber Eats alternative
Uber Eats isn't going anywhere, but leaning on it for most of your orders gets expensive. Commission in the UK runs from 15% to 30% per order, depending on your deal and the type of order. On a £30 order that's somewhere between £4.50 and £9 gone before you've paid for ingredients, staff or rent.
You don't have to drop Uber Eats to fix this. Build a direct ordering channel next to it, then move your regulars across one order at a time.
Below is how to do that with Flipdish, step by step.
What a direct ordering channel is
It's any way a customer can order from you without a marketplace taking a cut. In practice that means:
- A website with ordering built in
- A branded mobile app
- QR codes in the venue or on your packaging
- Phone orders, including ones answered by an AI phone agent
Two things change when orders come this way. You stop paying commission on each one, and you get the customer's details, which Uber Eats keeps for itself.
What the dependency costs
Most owners know the headline rate. Fewer have added it up over a year.
| Marketplace order | Direct order | |
|---|---|---|
| Commission | 15-30% | None (platform fee only) |
| Customer data | Stays with Uber Eats | Yours |
| Marketing access | Restricted | Email, SMS, push |
| Brand control | Limited | Full |
| Repeat order cost | Full commission every time | No commission, so repeat orders are where you gain most |
Take a restaurant doing £20,000 a month through Uber Eats at 25%. That's £5,000 a month in commission. Move half the volume to direct orders and commission on that half disappears, which is £2,500 a month before the platform fee. Even after the fee, you'd expect to keep £2,000 or more.
A smaller example. A café doing £6,000 a month on Uber Eats at 20% pays £1,200 in commission. Over a year that is £14,400. If a third of those orders went direct, you'd stop paying about £400 a month on them. It isn't life-changing for any single month, but it adds up, and it's money you currently hand over for orders from people who'd probably have come to you anyway.
The data matters as much as the money. With direct orders you can see who your best customers are, email the ones who haven't ordered in a month, and run a loyalty scheme. None of that works when the customer belongs to the marketplace.
How to build a direct ordering channel
Step 1: Get a website with ordering built in
A website that shows your menu and a phone number isn't enough. Someone who searches for your restaurant should be able to order without leaving the page.
The Flipdish restaurant website and online ordering product gives you a branded, commission-free website with ordering included. Orders go to your kitchen, or straight to your POS, with no marketplace in the middle.
Once it's live, put the link everywhere people already look for you: your Google Business Profile, your Instagram bio, the footer of your emails.
Step 2: Launch a branded mobile app
An app gives your best customers a reason to come to you rather than open Uber Eats. They download it once and reorder in a few taps. You can send push notifications and run in-app offers.
Flipdish builds and maintains branded mobile apps for restaurants. They're native iOS and Android apps published under your name, not a shared marketplace app, so the customer relationship is yours.
Step 3: Add QR code ordering
Put QR codes on tables and on takeaway packaging. Customers scan, pick their items, pay, and the order lands in your kitchen system.
Dine-in and collection are the easiest orders to move first, since there's no courier involved and the customer is already standing in your restaurant. It also takes pressure off front-of-house staff, and every order leaves a record you can use for marketing later.
Step 4: Set up a loyalty programme
Loyalty is the quickest way to pull repeat customers off the marketplace. Keep the reward simple: points for every pound spent, or a free item after a set number of orders. Then tell people about it, especially the ones who've ordered through Uber Eats.
Flipdish's marketing and loyalty tools sit in the same platform as your ordering, so loyalty data is tied to order data. You can see who's one order away from a reward and message them at the right moment.
Step 5: Take phone orders through your own system
Plenty of restaurants still get a lot of orders by phone. An AI phone agent like Flipdish's answers the call, takes the order, takes payment and sends it to the kitchen. Nobody on your team has to stop what they're doing to pick up.
A phone order handled this way is a direct order. The customer data is yours and there's no commission.
Getting Uber Eats customers to order direct
Building the channel is the easy half. The harder bit is telling people it exists.
Put a card in every Uber Eats bag with a QR code and a reason to use it, such as £3 off their first direct order. That sounds like giving money away, but compare it with the commission. On a £30 order at 25%, Uber Eats takes £7.50. A £3 discount costs you less than half of that, and the customer who orders again next week costs you nothing in commission at all.
Other places to mention it:
- Receipts and takeaway bags
- Social media posts, with the ordering link in the bio
- A line on the menu in the restaurant: "Order direct and skip the app"
- Your email or SMS list, once you've started collecting it
It's worth reading your Uber Eats agreement to see what it says about promoting other channels to marketplace customers. Some of this is clearly fine, like QR codes on your own packaging and posts on your own social accounts.
Should you leave Uber Eats entirely?
Probably not straight away. Uber Eats brings in people who are searching for food nearby and have never heard of you. That's worth something.
The better plan is to treat it as a place to be found, while your own channel handles the customers who already know you. As your direct base grows, Uber Eats shrinks as a share of your orders without you doing anything dramatic. Some restaurants eventually leave. Others stay on but keep it small. Either way you've got the choice, which you don't have when most of your orders come from one app.
Running marketplace and direct orders together
Switching channels shouldn't mean running three tablets next to the till. Flipdish's order management system pulls orders from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo into the same kitchen view as your website, app and kiosk orders. Your team works from one screen.
That means you can keep Uber Eats running while direct orders grow. You don't have to pick a day to switch.
| Order channel | Commission | In Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Uber Eats | 15-30% | Aggregated into POS |
| Just Eat | 14-25% | Aggregated into POS |
| Deliveroo | 15-30% | Aggregated into POS |
| Flipdish website | 0% commission | Native |
| Flipdish app | 0% commission | Native |
| Flipdish kiosk | 0% commission | Native |
| AI phone orders | 0% commission | Native |
What to expect after launch
Expect a slow start. In the first few weeks direct orders will be a small slice, and Uber Eats will still be your biggest channel. How fast that changes depends on your location, your cuisine and how hard you push the new channel. A restaurant with a loyal local crowd and a QR code in every bag will move faster than one that launches a website and says nothing.
Direct orders tend to have a higher average value, because you're not discounting to match marketplace promotions. Loyalty helps retention once it's running.
Most of the work comes at the start. You set up the website, the app and the loyalty scheme, write the bag inserts and brief the team. After that it mostly runs itself, though you'll still want to look at the numbers.
Three to track each month:
- Direct orders as a share of all online orders
- Commission paid to marketplaces
- How many customers have ordered more than once
If the first number goes up and the second goes down, it's working.
Why one platform beats several
You can build all of this from separate tools: a website builder, a different app company, a third provider for loyalty. Each one might be cheaper on its own. Together they mean separate logins, separate customer lists and separate support numbers. When ordering breaks at 7pm on a Saturday, you want one number to ring.
Flipdish covers the website, app, kiosk, phone ordering, loyalty, marketing and POS in one system. Customer data sits in one place and reporting comes from one dashboard. For a restaurant trying to get less dependent on Uber Eats, that's the setup that's simplest to run.
Getting started with Flipdish
Flipdish works with independent restaurants, takeaways, cafés, QSRs and large multi-location groups, from a single site up to hundreds of locations.
Start by working out what you currently pay Uber Eats each month. Pull the last three months of statements, add up the commission, and you've got the figure a direct channel has to beat.
Request a Flipdish demo to see how it works with your menu and your kitchen setup.