Just Eat Alternative for Restaurants: How to Grow Direct Orders
The real cost of Just Eat for restaurants
Just Eat charges between 14% and 30% commission on every order. Where you land depends on your plan, your location and whether Scoober delivers the food or your own drivers do.
On a £25 order that's £3.50 at the low end and £7.50 at the high end, gone before you've paid for ingredients, staff or rent.
Now scale it up. A restaurant taking £30,000 a month through Just Eat at 20% commission hands over £6,000 a month, or £72,000 a year. That's roughly 1,200 orders at £25, with £5 taken off each one. Just Eat also keeps the customer details, so the next time one of those people is hungry, it's Just Eat's app they open and not yours.
Restaurants don't go looking for a Just Eat alternative because the orders stop coming. The orders come fine. The margin is the problem.
What "Just Eat alternative" means
It means two different things, depending on who's asking.
The first is another marketplace. Uber Eats and Deliveroo charge similar commission, so moving from one to the other changes who you pay and not much else.
The second is a direct ordering channel: your own website, your own app, your own customer list. A customer orders from you, you pay no commission or a small fixed fee, and you can message them afterwards. This is the real alternative. It's slower to build, but every repeat customer you win this way stops costing you commission for good.
How direct ordering works
Customers order through something you own and control. In practice that's one or more of these:
- A branded ordering website. A proper online ordering site, not a restaurant homepage with a phone number and a contact form.
- Your own app in the App Store and Google Play.
- QR codes and table ordering, for people who are already sitting in the restaurant.
The order reaches your kitchen the same way a marketplace order does. The difference is where the money goes.
Moving customers off Just Eat
This is the hard part. People who found you on Just Eat open Just Eat when they're hungry. You have to give them a reason to do something else, and make it easy.
Start with the bag. Every Just Eat order that leaves the building is a chance to tell the customer about ordering direct. A card offering £3 off their next direct order costs less than the commission on a single £25 order at 20%, which is £5. Even at the 14% end, where commission is £3.50, you come out ahead on that order, and again on every order after it.
Then loyalty. Loyalty schemes where points only work through your own channel give regulars a reason to switch. Without one, they won't.
Packaging matters more than people expect. If your bag and boxes show Just Eat's logo bigger than yours, customers remember Just Eat. Put your name first and they'll start searching for you.
Collection customers are the easy win, because they walk into your restaurant anyway. Put the direct ordering link or a QR code on the counter, the receipt and the bag.
Keep the menu and prices on your direct site at least as good as what's on Just Eat. If you mark prices up on Just Eat to cover commission, that is fair, but if the direct site is also dearer or has fewer items, the customer will assume ordering direct is the worse deal and go back. Direct should look like the better option the moment someone opens it. Free extras work well here, a free drink or a side on the first direct order, because the commission you aren't paying is paying for it.
And check Google. Search your own restaurant name. If your Google Business profile sends people to Just Eat instead of your website, you're paying commission on customers who were already looking for you by name. That one is a quick fix and worth doing first.
How long it takes
Moving a meaningful share of volume takes six to twelve months of steady effort. You're changing habits, and habits are slow.
The payoff is real, though. Say a restaurant does £30,000 a month through Just Eat at 20% commission and moves 40% of that to direct ordering. That's £12,000 a month that no longer carries a 20% cut, so £2,400 a month saved, or £28,800 a year. It keeps saving as long as those customers keep ordering direct.
Once a customer has ordered direct, you have their number or email, which is the whole point. A text when you launch a new dish, or a nudge on a quiet Tuesday, costs next to nothing. On Just Eat you can't send either.
Track the split every month. Direct orders divided by total orders, nothing fancier. If it moves from 5% to 8% to 12%, the inserts and the loyalty scheme are working. If it sits still, something on the direct side is putting people off, and the checkout is the first place to look.
Running both at once
Most restaurants won't leave Just Eat in one go, and they shouldn't try. Run both, and grow the direct share a bit at a time.
The catch is the kitchen. Orders arriving on separate screens from separate platforms are how orders get missed. A marketplace order aggregation system puts orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo and your direct channels into one queue, so the kitchen doesn't need to care where an order came from.
Direct ordering platforms compared
1. Flipdish
Flipdish ranks first here because it covers the most ground for restaurants and takeaways in the UK and Ireland. You get a branded ordering website, a branded app, kiosk ordering and AI phone ordering, all connected to your POS so every order reaches the kitchen the same way.
What's included:
- Branded online ordering website - your restaurant's own site, not a marketplace page
- Branded mobile apps - your name in the App Store, not Just Eat's
- Self-service kiosks - for direct ordering inside the restaurant
- AI Phone Agent - answers calls and takes orders
- Marketing and loyalty tools - for converting marketplace customers to direct
- Marketplace aggregation - Just Eat and direct orders on one screen
The marketing side is what matters for this topic. Plenty of platforms will build you a website. Fewer help you fill it. Flipdish includes automated SMS campaigns, loyalty programmes and targeted promotions, all aimed at pulling customers toward your own channels.
On cost, Flipdish charges a platform fee instead of a per-order commission. At any decent volume the maths beats marketplace dependency by a wide margin.
2. Hungrrr
Hungrrr provides branded online ordering and apps for UK restaurants, mainly independents and small groups. Its marketing tools are less developed than Flipdish's and multi-location management is limited. A reasonable pick for a single-site restaurant that needs a direct ordering website quickly.
3. Slerp
Slerp focuses on pre-ordering and scheduled ordering, and it's popular with coffee shops and bakeries. It isn't built for high-volume takeaway and delivery.
4. OrderYOYO
OrderYOYO provides branded apps and online ordering, mostly for takeaways. Its retention and marketing tools are still catching up. It doesn't match Flipdish on POS integration, kiosk support or AI phone ordering.
Direct ordering vs Just Eat: the numbers
| Metric | Just Eat (20% commission) | Direct ordering (Flipdish) |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly revenue | £30,000 | £30,000 |
| Platform cost | £6,000 | ~£300–£600 platform fee |
| Revenue retained | £24,000 | ~£29,400–£29,700 |
| Customer data owned | ✗ (Just Eat owns it) | ✓ |
| Repeat order marketing | ✗ | ✓ |
The table assumes every order moves, which won't happen. A more realistic version: 60% of that £30,000 stays on Just Eat and 40% goes direct. Commission on the £18,000 left on Just Eat is £3,600. Add the same £300 to £600 platform fee and you're paying £3,900 to £4,200 a month, against £6,000 before. That's £1,800 to £2,100 a month back in your pocket, even with most of the volume still on the marketplace.
Exact figures depend on your size and your Flipdish plan.
Should you quit Just Eat entirely?
Probably not, and maybe never. Just Eat has a big user base and sends you orders you wouldn't otherwise get, especially from people who've never heard of you.
Use it to find customers, then move them. You pay commission on the first order and, if the conversion works, not on the ones after.
That only works if your direct channel is good enough to compete. A slow website or a clunky checkout sends people straight back to Just Eat. A decent branded app with a loyalty scheme doesn't.
Where to start
Fix your Google Business profile so it points at your own ordering page. Get a direct ordering site live and place a test order yourself, start to finish, on your phone. Print the inserts for your Just Eat bags. Add loyalty once there's a direct channel to send people to, and start counting your direct share from the first week so you have a baseline.
Flipdish is the platform we'd pick for UK and Irish restaurants doing this. It gives you the website, the app, the loyalty tools and the SMS automation, and you can keep taking Just Eat orders through the same system while the direct share grows.
For more restaurant technology comparisons, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Ready to reduce your marketplace dependency? Talk to Flipdish about building your direct ordering channel.