Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build Your Own Ordering Channel
Why restaurants look for Uber Eats alternatives
Uber Eats is one of the biggest delivery marketplaces in the UK and Ireland, and for a lot of restaurants it brings in a steady stream of orders. It also takes between 15% and 35% of each one, depending on the contract and on whether Uber's couriers do the delivery.
Take a £25 order at 30%. That's £7.50 gone before you've paid for the food, the packaging or the person cooking it. Most restaurants don't have the margin to absorb that on every single order.
Nobody needs to drop Uber Eats. It's good at one thing: putting your name in front of people who've never heard of you. The real question is whether every delivery and collection order should pay that fee, including the ones from customers who already know you and would order from you directly if it were easy.
What a direct ordering channel means
A direct ordering channel is any way for customers to order from you without a marketplace in the middle. In practice that means some mix of:
- A restaurant website with ordering built in
- A branded mobile app for people who order often
- A QR code for in-venue ordering or collection
- An AI phone agent for customers who still prefer to ring
The big difference from Uber Eats is who holds the customer. On a marketplace, Uber has the name, the email and the order history. On your own channel, you do. You can send a text on a quiet Tuesday, reward your regulars, and see who stopped ordering three months ago. None of that costs you a percentage of the sale.
The commission maths
Say a restaurant does £20,000 a month in delivery orders, split evenly between Uber Eats and a direct channel. These numbers are illustrative, so swap in your own contract rate.
| Channel | Monthly orders | Commission rate | Commission cost | Revenue retained |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Uber Eats | £10,000 | 30% | £3,000 | £7,000 |
| Direct (Flipdish) | £10,000 | Low fixed fee | ~£200–£400 | £9,600–£9,800 |
That's a gap of £2,600 to £2,800 a month, or roughly £31,000 to £34,000 over a year, on half your volume. Move more orders across and the gap grows.
It also leaves room to be generous. Back to the £25 order. On Uber Eats at 30% you keep £17.50. If a customer orders direct and you give them £3 off, they pay £22 and you keep £22 before Flipdish's fee. They're happier, you're better off, and you've still got their email address.
Why Flipdish
Flipdish is built for restaurants that want to grow direct orders. Restaurants across the UK, Ireland and Europe use it, from single-site takeaways to multi-location groups.
Here's what's in it:
- A branded restaurant website with online ordering
- A mobile app for iOS and Android, with push notifications and loyalty
- Self-service kiosks for ordering in the venue
- AI phone ordering, so phone orders don't tie up your staff
- A POS that puts direct and marketplace orders in one place
- Customer data, loyalty and marketing tools for turning first-time customers into regulars
Because it's all one system, a customer who orders on your website, collects in store and later calls in is the same customer in your records. That matters more than it sounds, because the point of direct ordering is knowing who's ordering and being able to get them back.
Building a direct channel next to Uber Eats
Don't leave Uber Eats on day one. Use it to find customers, then give those customers a reason to come to you next time.
Start with the website
If someone searches for your restaurant by name, they should land on a page where they can order. Not a menu PDF, not a link to Uber Eats. A page with a basket and a checkout. Too many restaurants send their most loyal customers straight to a marketplace and pay for the privilege.
Flipdish builds restaurant websites with ordering already wired in, so you aren't bolting a widget onto a page that was never designed for it.
Then the app
Your regulars are the ones to aim at here. Anyone who orders more than once a month is a good candidate. An app sits on their phone, lets you send a push notification when you launch a new dish or want to fill a slow evening, and makes reordering a two-tap job.
Flipdish's branded apps include ordering, loyalty and in-app promotions.
Put a card in every Uber Eats bag
This one is cheap and it works. Every Uber Eats order leaves your kitchen with your food in it, which makes the bag the best advertising space you have. A small card saying "Order direct next time and get £3 off" with a QR code to your ordering page is enough. Keep the wording short. Nobody reads a paragraph on a card stapled to a bag.
Check your marketplace contract before you do this. Some have rules about how you promote direct ordering to marketplace customers, and it's better to know before you print 5,000 cards.
Don't lose the phone orders
Phone orders are quietly expensive. Someone has to stop what they're doing, take the order, type it in, and nobody captures the customer's details. Flipdish's AI Phone Agent answers calls, takes the order, can suggest extras and takes payment. The order data lands in your system like any other direct order.
Make loyalty a direct-only perk
Loyalty points earned on Uber Eats build Uber's relationship with the customer, not yours. If points and rewards only apply to direct orders, you've given people a concrete reason to skip the marketplace. Points on every order, a free side after five orders, whatever suits your menu. Keep it simple enough that a customer can explain it to a friend.
Just Eat and Deliveroo
Same story. Just Eat and Deliveroo both charge commission and neither gives you the customer's contact details to use as you like. If you're on all three, you're paying three fees and building three audiences you can't reach.
For most restaurants, one or two marketplaces for discovery plus a direct channel is plenty. Flipdish's order management brings Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo and direct orders onto a single kitchen screen. Your team works from one queue instead of juggling four tablets, and nothing gets missed on a busy Friday night.
Getting customers to switch
Setting up the channel is the easy part. Getting people to use it takes some nudging, and a few things do most of the work.
Packaging inserts come first. "Order direct and save £2" works better than you'd expect, mostly because it's a clear saving on something the customer already wanted to do.
Loyalty is next. When points only count on direct orders, the maths for the customer changes. Once they've got a few points banked, they have a reason to go to your app rather than Uber's.
Push notifications are something Uber Eats can't do for you. Once someone has your app, you can tell them about a Thursday offer or a new menu directly. No bidding for placement, no promoted listing fee.
Phone callers can be nudged too. If you use an AI phone agent, the call can end with a voucher code for their next online order.
And receipts. If someone collects in person, a printed offer on the receipt for their next online order costs almost nothing.
None of these need a big campaign. Pick two, run them for a couple of months, and look at how the split between marketplace and direct orders moves.
How to tell if it's working
Keep it to three numbers. First, the share of your delivery and collection orders that come in direct, which you want creeping up month by month. Second, how many direct customers order a second time. If people try you once and vanish, the problem is the follow-up, not the channel. Third, what you actually keep per order on each channel after fees and discounts.
That last one is where restaurants tend to get surprised. A £3 discount on a direct order sounds like a lot until you set it beside £7.50 of commission. Do the sum for your own menu and your own contract, then decide how much discount you can afford.
Look at the numbers monthly, not daily. Order patterns swing around with the weather, paydays and football, and a quiet week doesn't mean the channel isn't working.
The delivery question
Collection is the easiest order to move to direct. There's no courier involved, no delivery cost, and customers are often happy to collect if it saves them a few pounds.
Delivery is harder, because on Uber Eats the couriers come with the platform. If you take direct delivery orders, you need your own plan for getting food to the door, whether that's your own drivers or another arrangement. A sensible start is to push collection and in-venue ordering hard, then add direct delivery within a set radius once you know the volume is there.
It's worth being honest with yourself about this before you start. A direct channel that promises delivery you can't staff will lose you customers fast.
What it costs
| Option | Monthly cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Flipdish online ordering | From a low monthly fee | Website, app and POS integration included |
| Marketplace only | Commission on every order | No customer data, no way to market to customers directly |
Your direct ordering cost stays flat as orders grow. Commission doesn't. A restaurant doing 200 direct orders a month and one doing 2,000 pay broadly the same to run the channel, but the commission avoided on those 2,000 orders is ten times the amount. That's why the saving keeps growing the more you move across.
Uber Eats is a decent way to get found and an expensive way to serve people who already know you. Put a direct channel next to it, send your regulars there, and keep the marketplace for new customers.