Uber Eats Alternative for Restaurants: How to Build a Direct Ordering Channel

What's the best Uber Eats alternative for restaurants?

A direct ordering channel. That means your own branded website and app, where customers order straight from you and you don't hand over 30% of every sale.

Flipdish does this for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. You get a branded ordering website, a branded mobile app, and the marketing tools to pull customers off Uber Eats and onto a channel you own.

Why restaurants want to get out from under Uber Eats

Uber Eats takes a commission on every order. Depending on your contract it's usually somewhere between 25% and 35% of the order value. If you sell £10,000 a month through Uber Eats at 30%, £3,000 of that goes to Uber Eats. For orders you could have taken yourself.

The money isn't the only issue. Uber Eats also holds a few things that you'd probably rather hold:

Your customer data. You don't know who your customers are, what they order or how often they come back. Uber Eats does.
Your pricing. Some contracts require price parity, so you can't offer a better deal on your own channel.
Your shopfront. Anyone browsing the app sees your competitors listed right next to you.
Your rating. The reviews belong to the Uber Eats listing, not to your restaurant.

A direct channel fixes all of that. You collect the data, you own the relationship with the customer, and you keep the margin.

If your contract has a price parity clause, read the exact wording before you change any prices. Your account manager can tell you what it does and doesn't cover.

You don't have to quit Uber Eats

Using Uber Eats and building your own channel can happen at the same time, and for most restaurants they should. Walking away from a marketplace overnight is a good way to lose a chunk of your orders before the direct side has caught up.

The better plan is to use Uber Eats for what it's good at, which is getting found by people who've never heard of you. Then you move those people to your own channel for their second, third and tenth order. Each order that switches saves you the commission, and over time the balance shifts.

How to build a direct ordering channel

Step 1: Pick a platform

You need something that gives customers a proper branded ordering experience, with your name, your colours and your menu.

Flipdish is built for restaurants. It gives you a branded website, a branded mobile app and self-service kiosks. Orders go straight into your POS system, so the kitchen works from one screen. Loyalty, SMS marketing and automated campaigns are part of the same platform, which matters later when you're trying to get people to reorder.

You could also build your own ordering system from scratch. That means hiring developers and paying for upkeep indefinitely. It only makes sense for very large operators with their own technology team. Independents, small chains and growing groups are better off with Flipdish.

Step 2: Get customers to use it

Setting up the platform is the easy bit. Getting people to order through it is the ongoing job.

Put a QR code on your bags, boxes and cups that links to your direct ordering page. Every Uber Eats delivery that leaves the building is a chance to win a direct customer. Print the same URL on receipts along with a first-order offer, and put it on your physical menus.

If you already have customer phone numbers, a text offering a discount on a direct order works well. Flipdish has SMS marketing tools for exactly this. On social media, link to your own ordering page in your bio and posts. Never link to Uber Eats.

Then give people a reason to try it. Knocking 10% to 15% off a first direct order costs you less than the commission you'd have paid Uber Eats on that order anyway.

Step 3: Give people a reason to stay

A customer who orders direct once might drift back to Uber Eats next week out of habit. A loyalty scheme helps break that habit.

Flipdish's loyalty and retention tools let you award points on direct orders, send automated campaigns, and re-engage customers who haven't ordered for a while. Points only work when the customer orders direct, which is the point.

Step 4: Run both channels from one place

While you still take Uber Eats orders, you don't want a shelf of tablets in the kitchen. The Flipdish order management system pulls orders from Uber Eats, Just Eat, Deliveroo and your direct channels into one queue. Nobody retypes an order into the till.

This matters more than it sounds. Run several tablets and orders get missed or retyped wrongly. Both stop when everything lands in one place. It also makes it easier to see how many orders are coming from each source, which is the number you'll be watching as the direct side grows.

What the first few weeks look like

Don't wait for a perfect launch. Get the ordering page live, put the QR code on every bag that goes out, and start counting. Count direct orders against marketplace orders every week, in a spreadsheet if that's all you have. If the direct number isn't moving after a month, the problem is almost always the same: customers don't know it exists.

Ask your delivery and counter staff to mention it. A line like "order direct next time and get 10% off" costs nothing and gets said hundreds of times. Staff who hear the reason (the restaurant keeps more of each sale) tend to say it more often.

A few mistakes come up again and again:

Making the first-order discount so big it eats the saving. 10% to 15% is enough.
Printing the QR code too small to scan, or putting it somewhere that gets covered by the sticker or the lid.
Sending customers to a page that's hard to use on a phone. Most people will order from one.
Not asking for a phone number or email at the first order. Without it, there's nothing to send the second offer to.

Direct ordering vs Uber Eats

	Uber Eats	Direct ordering with Flipdish
Commission per order	25% to 35%	No marketplace commission
Customer data	Uber Eats keeps it	You keep it
Customer relationship	Uber Eats	You
Loyalty	Uber Eats' own scheme	Your scheme
Marketing to customers	Not possible	SMS, push, email
Where customers see you	On a page with your competitors	On your own branded channel

Here's a rough example. A restaurant sells £8,000 a month through Uber Eats at 30% commission, so it pays £2,400 in fees. Say Flipdish costs £300 a month and 40% of those orders move to direct. That's £3,200 of orders no longer paying commission, which is £960 saved. Take off the £300 and you're £660 a month better off. The numbers are illustrative and don't include card processing fees, which apply on every channel, but the shape is clear. And the customers who moved are now yours.

What about Just Eat and Deliveroo?

Same story. Their commissions are in a similar range, and the same problems apply: you don't own the customer, you don't get the data, and you pay on every single order.

Flipdish handles all three at once. The order management side deals with the marketplace orders you already have, and the direct channel gradually takes customers away from all of them.

Should you leave Uber Eats completely?

Some restaurants do. Whether it makes sense for you depends on a few things:

How much of your volume comes from people finding you on Uber Eats for the first time
How strong your direct channel already is
Whether your area is crowded enough that being visible on the marketplace still matters

For most restaurants the sensible middle ground is staying listed while growing direct. You're not trying to leave Uber Eats. You're trying to need it less.

Don't forget the phone

Plenty of customers still ring to order, especially in takeaway-heavy areas. Every call a staff member takes is time away from the kitchen or the counter, and a rushed call is where mistakes creep in.

Flipdish's AI Phone Agent answers inbound calls, takes the order in conversation and sends it to the kitchen. Phone orders become another direct channel with no commission, and nobody has to stop what they're doing to pick up.

What to check before you commit to a platform

Ask these before you sign anything:

Is the ordering experience really yours, with your name, colours and domain?
Do you own the customer data, and can you market to those customers?
Does it connect to your POS, or will you be running two systems?
Does it have loyalty and CRM tools to bring people back?
Does it bring your marketplace orders into the same place?
Will it cope if you open a second or third site?

Flipdish ticks all six.

Every month you rely only on Uber Eats is a month of customer data you didn't collect and commission you won't get back. The longer the direct channel waits, the longer it takes to build.

See how Flipdish helps restaurants build their own direct ordering channel: flipdish.com/online-ordering