Direct ordering vs DoorDash and Grubhub: the long-term math

Every restaurant operator we talk to in the US has the same gut feeling about marketplaces: the orders are real, the volume is real, and the margins are not. Yet most operators keep paying 15% to 30% per order to DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats because they think the alternative is zero orders. That binary is wrong. Direct ordering is not a replacement for marketplaces — it’s the channel you build underneath them so the same customer eventually becomes yours instead of theirs.

The commission math, with real numbers

The big three marketplaces publish their commission tiers on their own merchant pages. DoorDash Marketplace sells Basic (15%), Plus (25%) and Premier (30%) tiers, with discoverability and DashPass exposure scaling with the tier. Grubhub Marketplace publishes a base marketing commission starting at 15% and a delivery commission of 10%, plus optional “sponsored listing” upgrades that push the all-in take past 30% and, in some configurations, toward 40%. UberEats lists three tiers — Lite, Plus and Premium — at 15% to 30% commission depending on visibility and delivery responsibility. Take a $50 order. Here’s what actually lands in your bank account on each channel:

• DoorDash Marketplace (30% commission tier): $50 gross, minus $15 commission, minus ~$1.50 in payment processing the marketplace passes through. You keep ~$33.50.
• DoorDash Storefront / Basic tier (15%): $50 gross, minus $7.50 commission, minus payment fees. You keep ~$41.00— but you don’t get marketplace discoverability, so you’re paying for a checkout, not for customers.
• Direct ordering (your storefront, manual payment or your processor): $50 gross, minus 2.9% + $0.30 if you process a card yourself, plus zero commission. You keep ~$48.25.

That’s a $14.75 swing on every single $50 order. Run 80 orders a week through direct instead of DoorDash and that’s about $61,000 a year you don’t hand to a third party. For most independents, that’s the difference between “tight month” and “hire another line cook.” (See FoodyOS vs Grubhub for a side-by-side breakdown of the same math at the platform level.)

Customer data is the bigger story

Commissions are the obvious cost. The hidden cost is that the customer you served isn’t your customer— they belong to the marketplace. You don’t get the phone number. You don’t get the email. You can’t text them next Tuesday with a slow-night offer. You can’t see that they’ve ordered the same Pad Thai 11 weeks in a row and proactively send a free spring roll on visit 12.

Marketplaces deliberately hold that data. It’s their core asset. DoorDash spent the last decade building a logistics business on top of your food, and the part they kept was the relationship. Direct ordering inverts that: every order writes the customer’s phone, email and order history into your CRM, where you can use it for retention, win-back and dine-in upsells without paying a per-message toll to a third party.

What the marketplaces’ own “direct” products are really doing

DoorDash, UberEats and Grubhub all noticed that operators were trying to escape commissions and shipped their own “direct” products: DoorDash Drive / Storefront, UberEats Webshop / Uber Direct, and Grubhub Direct. The pitch is the same in each case — run a commission-free site under your own URL, we just handle the delivery driver and (sometimes) the payments.

On paper this looks like the answer. In practice it’s a soft trap. The customer record still flows back into the marketplace platform, the delivery layer is locked to a single courier network you can’t price-shop, and the per-delivery fee on Drive-style products typically lands at $7–$12 plus a percentage — which means a $30 ticket can still bleed 25%+ to the platform even though you technically “own” the channel. We break the trade-off down in detail in in-house delivery vs DoorDash Drive. The short version: a marketplace-owned direct product solves the commission problem for the marketplace, not for you.

The tell is the data layer. With a true direct stack, your customer list, item-level order history and delivery preferences all sit in a database you control and can export at any time. With Storefront, Webshop and Grubhub Direct, “your” customer file is commingled with the platform’s identity graph — the same one that powers competing restaurants in the marketplace feed. The day you decide to leave the platform, the export you get back is materially thinner than what they hold internally. Operators who’ve migrated off these products describe it as renting a checkout button, not owning a channel.

Per-order economics are the second tell. A marketplace-run direct product still routes the delivery through the marketplace’s own courier network at a fixed per-drop fee, with no ability to swap in a cheaper local courier on slow nights or to dispatch your own driver on dense routes. A standalone direct stack lets you pick the courier per zone, batch deliveries, or run dine-in pickup at zero variable cost. That flexibility is where the real margin lives, and it’s precisely what the marketplace direct products are designed to prevent.

Marketplace cannibalization is real but overstated

The argument from DoorDash reps is always: “Customers don’t even know you exist without us. We bring you incremental orders.” That’s true the first time a customer orders. It is not true the third, fifth, or fifteenth time.

Operators who switch on direct ordering and then audit their order histories consistently find a meaningful chunk of marketplace volume is repeat customers — people who already know the restaurant and would happily order direct if a direct option existed and were visible. Those orders are not incremental discovery — they’re the marketplace taxing your existing regulars. We don’t have a clean public number to cite for “what % of marketplace orders are repeat,” because the marketplaces don’t share it; the directional point is what matters.

Regulators have already picked a side

Major US cities are increasingly skeptical that 30% marketplace commissions are economically sustainable for independent restaurants. New York City made its pandemic-era third-party delivery fee cap permanent through Local Laws 52 and 88 of 2021: marketplaces can charge no more than 15% for delivery and 5% for all other fees per order, with transaction fees capped at 3% (pass-through allowed if documented). San Francisco and Seattle have similar permanent or rolling caps. California passed AB 286 in 2021, which forces delivery platforms to itemize the breakdown of what they charge restaurants and customers, prohibits markups above the restaurant’s menu price without consent, and requires 100% of tips to flow to the courier — closing several of the games marketplaces used to play with prices and gratuities.

None of this fixes the underlying commission economics outside the capped cities, but it tells you which way the wind is blowing: even legislators who don’t love regulating prices have decided 30% commissions are extractive. Building a direct channel now is the operator-side version of that same conclusion — and it works in every state, with no waiting for a city council to act.

Worth noting: the marketplaces have been actively litigating these caps. DoorDash, Grubhub and UberEats sued New York City over Local Law 88 and lost the most recent rounds, with the permanent caps upheld. That’s a useful tell about how durable marketplace commissions actually are when an independent regulator looks at the math, and it’s another reason to assume the long-run direction of travel is downward pressure on the marketplace take rate — not a return to the pre-cap status quo.

The long tail belongs to whoever owns the relationship

A regular orders 30 times a year. At an average ticket of $40, that customer is worth $1,200 in revenue. On DoorDash at 30%, you net about $840 from that customer over the year. Direct, you net about $1,160. That’s $320 per regular per year — and a single restaurant has dozens to hundreds of regulars.

The play isn’t to ban DoorDash. The play is to build a direct channel so when that customer orders for the second time, they have somewhere to go that doesn’t cost you $12.

How direct and marketplace coexist

The framing that works: marketplaces are an acquisition channel, direct is a retention channel. You pay DoorDash a finder’s fee for the first order, then you pull the customer onto direct as fast as possible. Tactics that work in practice:

• Insert in every marketplace bag:a printed card that says “Order direct next time, save 15% with code DIRECT15.” That code is a fraction of what DoorDash charges you, and it converts.
• Loyalty tied to your direct channel only: points accrue when they order from your site or WhatsApp, not from DoorDash.
• Slightly higher prices on marketplaces: 10–15% markup, legal in most US states. The price difference is itself an advertisement for your direct channel.
• QR code at every dine-in table that goes to your direct ordering page, not a Yelp listing or marketplace.
• WhatsApp / SMS reorder linkin the receipt: the fastest path from “they ate” to “they reorder direct.”

What success looks like at 12 months

Operators who run this play seriously usually start at 80% marketplace / 20% direct and end up around 40% / 60% inside a year. That shift on $1M in annual delivery revenue saves roughly $60,000–$90,000 in commissions — without losing any marketplace customers, because the marketplace channel is still running.

Direct ordering doesn’t kill DoorDash. It just stops you from paying DoorDash for customers who were already yours. The full playbook for migrating volume off marketplaces lives in how to stop paying third-party delivery fees, and the all-in cost of running direct is on our pricing page — flat per location, no per-order commission.

Sources

1. DoorDash, “Marketplace pricing & commission tiers” — merchants.doordash.com/en-us/products/marketplace
2. Grubhub, “Marketplace for restaurants” (commission and sponsored listing tiers) — get.grubhub.com/products/marketplace
3. Uber Eats Merchants, “Pricing — Lite / Plus / Premium (15%–30%)” — merchants.ubereats.com/us/en/pricing
4. NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection, “Third-Party Food Delivery Services” (Local Laws 52 & 88 of 2021, permanent 15% / 5% / 3% caps) — nyc.gov/site/dca/businesses/3rd-party-food-deliverers.page
5. California Legislature, AB-286 — Food delivery: purchase prices and tips (2021) — leginfo.legislature.ca.gov — AB-286