How to Get Your Restaurant Off Third-Party Delivery Apps

You can move most of your orders off third-party delivery apps, but not by deleting them overnight. The realistic path is to stand up online ordering you own, make it the easiest option everywhere you touch a customer, and use the marketplaces only for discovery - so you keep the reach without paying commission on the orders you could have taken directly.

Updated August 31, 2026

Be honest about what the apps are good at

Marketplaces are a discovery channel. New diners find you there, and that has real value. The problem isn't that they exist - it's using them for repeat orders from customers who already know you, where you're paying 25-40% to a middleman for a sale you'd have gotten anyway.

So the goal isn't zero apps. It's moving the repeat business you already earned onto ordering you own.

40%

of an order you stop paying on every sale you take directly

The step-by-step

Stand up direct ordering you own - a fast website with its own pickup/delivery ordering and a dashboard, not a link that hands the order to another app.
Put it everywhere: your Google Business Profile, Instagram bio, receipts, table tents, takeout bags, and the on-hold message. The direct link should be the path of least resistance.
Make direct the better deal. Reserve your best price, loyalty, and promos for direct orders. Diners follow the incentive.
Capture the relationship. Because a direct order gives you the email and phone number, you can bring that customer back yourself - the thing the apps never let you do.
Keep the apps for discovery only. Leave them on for new-customer reach, but stop feeding them your regulars.

What it actually takes

This isn't free effort. Someone has to set up the ordering, put the link everywhere, and nudge regulars the first few times. What it doesn't require is a monthly platform bill or a per-order cut - which is the whole point. Done once, direct ordering keeps paying you back on every order that would otherwise have carried a commission.

The payoff is ownership, not just savings

Even if the fee were zero, owning the customer would still matter. Direct ordering gives you the email, the phone number, and the order history - the raw material for repeat business, and something you can never get back from a marketplace. The commission savings are real; the customer relationship is the part that compounds.