Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel
The problem with relying on Uber Eats
Uber Eats put a lot of restaurants online and made delivery something customers now expect. It also takes a cut of every order. In the UK, commission runs from about 15% to 30% or more, depending on your agreement, the type of order and how much you spend on promotion inside the app.
On £10,000 a week in delivery sales, that's £1,500 to £3,000 gone before you've paid for food, staff or rent.
People searching for an Uber Eats alternative usually mean one of two things. Either they want a cheaper marketplace, or they want to take orders directly and stop paying a marketplace on every sale. This guide is mostly about the second, because owning the customer is what changes your margins. Swapping one marketplace for another just moves the commission to a different logo.
Why a direct order is worth more than a marketplace order
When a customer orders through Uber Eats, you get the order but not the customer. Uber Eats keeps the data, takes commission on every transaction and can show your competitors to the same person in the same app. Once the food is delivered you can't email them, text them or send a push notification. Your menu layout and pricing are partly governed by marketplace rules too.
A direct order works the other way round. The customer's details are yours, so you can send a voucher on a quiet Tuesday or tell regulars about a new dish. There's no per-order commission, only the platform subscription. The branding, menu and checkout are all your own, and you can run loyalty rewards and discount codes whenever you like.
Think about a customer who orders ten times. On a marketplace you pay commission ten times, and the app is free to suggest someone else on the eleventh. Ordered direct, that customer is a regular you can contact.
What a direct ordering channel needs
Five things, and they have to work together.
You need a branded ordering website with your menu, your domain and a checkout that doesn't confuse people. A mobile app is optional, but it puts your restaurant's icon on the customer's phone, which a website link doesn't. Online orders have to reach the kitchen through your POS, because retyping orders by hand slows service and causes mistakes. Payments should be built in, not bolted on from a separate provider. And customers need a reason to use your channel instead of the marketplace, which usually means loyalty points or a first-order discount.
You can buy each of these from a different supplier. Do that and you can end up with a website that doesn't talk to the POS, a payment provider with its own dashboard and an app nobody has time to update. One platform that covers all five is easier to run.
Flipdish: the Uber Eats alternative built for direct ordering
Flipdish is a direct ordering platform for restaurants, takeaways, cafés and QSRs in the UK and Ireland. Restaurants use it to take orders straight from customers without paying marketplace commission on each one.
What you get:
- A branded online ordering website on your own domain
- A branded mobile app with your name, logo and colours in the App Store and Google Play
- A restaurant POS, so orders from every channel show up on one kitchen screen
- Integrated payments
- Loyalty and marketing tools for moving customers off marketplaces and getting them to come back
- AI phone ordering for telephone orders
- Self-service kiosks for counter service
You don't have to leave Uber Eats to use it. Flipdish connects to Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo through its order management system, so marketplace orders arrive on the same POS screen as your direct ones. No separate tablets, no copying orders from one screen to another.
The plan is simple. Build the direct channel on Flipdish, use loyalty rewards to pull existing customers across, and keep the marketplace running as a way for new customers to find you. As direct volume grows, the commission bill shrinks. For most restaurants that takes 12 to 24 months, not a few weeks.
It suits any restaurant that's overpaying on Uber Eats commission and wants its own customer base. Takeaways, QSRs and delivery-first kitchens are the obvious fit, since delivery is where commission bites hardest.
Other tools you'll come across
Some other names come up when you search. None of them replaces what Flipdish does.
Deliverect pulls orders from Uber Eats, Just Eat and Deliveroo into a single tablet or POS connection. That tidies up a multi-marketplace setup. It doesn't give you a branded ordering channel, it doesn't cut your commission and it doesn't help you build a direct customer relationship.
Slerp does branded online ordering, mainly for independent restaurants and artisan food producers. It's thinner than Flipdish on POS integration, loyalty and running more than one location. A single site that only needs a basic ordering page might get by with it.
Hungrrr offers white-label ordering and apps for hospitality businesses. It covers a branded website, an app and loyalty, but with a smaller feature set and less support for multiple locations.
If you want the full direct-ordering setup with the POS, payments and marketplace orders in one place, Flipdish is the one to look at.
Staying on Uber Eats while you build
For most restaurants, leaving Uber Eats completely is a bad idea. Marketplace customers who've never heard of you are worth having, and switching it off overnight means losing them before the direct channel has any momentum.
Run both. Uber Eats brings in people who don't know you yet. Your own channel keeps the ones who do, at a much lower cost per order. Over 18 to 24 months the balance moves, and each month a larger share of your delivery sales skips the commission.
That's the model Flipdish is set up for, with marketplace order aggregation putting both kinds of order into one system.
What Uber Eats commission costs in a year
Here's the maths at a flat 25% commission:
| Weekly delivery revenue | Commission rate | Annual commission cost |
|---|---|---|
| £5,000 | 25% | £65,000 |
| £10,000 | 25% | £130,000 |
| £20,000 | 25% | £260,000 |
Now take the middle row. If 30% of that £10,000 a week moves to direct orders, that's £3,000 a week that no longer carries commission. At 25%, you keep £750 a week, or £39,000 a year. At 40% direct it's £1,000 a week, or £52,000.
A Flipdish online ordering subscription costs a fraction of those figures, so the sums work for any restaurant with real delivery volume. Check your own commission rate against the table - if you pay 18%, the numbers are smaller but the direction is the same.
How to move customers from Uber Eats to your own channel
Getting existing customers to order direct is the hard part. These things work.
Put a card in every delivery bag with a QR code to your ordering site and a first-order discount. It costs almost nothing and every customer sees it.
Print your direct ordering URL on receipts if your POS prints them, along with a loyalty offer.
Point your social accounts, and your Google Business Profile if you have one, at your own site instead of a marketplace listing. Anyone who finds you there shouldn't land on a page where you pay 25%.
Run a loyalty scheme where direct orders earn points and marketplace orders don't. This does the most work over time. Customers learn that ordering direct gets them something.
Tell your counter staff to mention the app when people collect in-store. It takes ten seconds and costs nothing.
Whatever you offer has to make direct the better deal for the customer. Uber Eats is more convenient by default because customers already have the app on their phone, so a free side or a double-points day is what tips them over. Flipdish's loyalty and marketing tools are built for this migration.
Mistakes that slow the switch
A few things go wrong again and again when restaurants try to build a direct channel.
The first is launching quietly. You set up the site, tell nobody and then decide direct ordering doesn't work. Customers only use a channel they know about, so the QR cards and receipt messages matter as much as the site.
The second is a clumsy checkout. If it takes more steps to order from your site than from Uber Eats, people will go back to Uber Eats. Place a test order yourself on a phone, with a bad signal, and see how it feels.
The third is letting the menu drift. If the direct menu is out of date or missing the popular items, customers notice fast. Keep it in step with what you sell everywhere else.
The last is treating it as a one-off job. Set a target share for direct orders, check it monthly and change the offer when it stalls.
Is Just Eat a better Uber Eats alternative?
Just Eat also charges commission, and many restaurants on it use their own drivers rather than a platform's. Depending on your contract, the fees can come out lower than Uber Eats. Neither one gives you a direct relationship with the customer, though, so you're renting an audience either way.
Use the marketplaces to get found and build the direct channel on a platform like Flipdish.
Where to start
Start with the website and the POS connection, so direct orders and marketplace orders land in the same place. Add loyalty next, then the app. Flipdish covers the branded website, mobile app, POS, payments, loyalty and marketing on one platform, with no marketplace commission on the orders you take directly.
Want to cut your dependence on Uber Eats? Book a Flipdish demo and see what a direct ordering channel looks like for your restaurant.