What marketplaces are actually good at
Getting you in front of people who've never heard of you. That's a real service and the commission pays for it. The problem is paying that commission forever on customers who already know you.
What direct ordering is good at
Repeat business at full margin, with the customer relationship in your hands.
- No marketplace commission
- Customer contact details you own
- Loyalty points on online orders
- Your menu, your prep times, your rules
Moving customers from one to the other
Put a direct ordering card in every delivery bag. QR code on the packaging. A small incentive for the first direct order. It's a slow migration that compounds over months.
Integrate whatever you keep
Any channel that stays should push orders into the POS. Tablets that require re-keying are where wrong orders come from during a rush.
Menu consistency across channels
Keeping prices and item availability in sync between the marketplace app, your website and the in-store menu avoids the awkward moment of a customer ordering something that's already been 86'd.
Delivery logistics: yours or theirs
Marketplaces bring their own delivery fleet, which is often the real reason to keep a foot on the platform even after direct ordering grows — running your own delivery drivers is a separate operational cost most small businesses don't want to take on.
Watching the numbers by channel
Break out sales, order count and average ticket by channel monthly. If a marketplace's share of orders keeps growing while margin keeps shrinking, that's the signal to push the direct-ordering incentive harder.
When to drop a marketplace entirely
Some businesses reach a point where a marketplace's order volume no longer justifies its commission once direct ordering has scaled. That's a numbers decision, not an ideological one — run the math per marketplace, not as a blanket rule.