Just Eat Alternative for Restaurants: How to Grow Direct Orders
A Just Eat alternative that doesn't take a cut
The best alternative to Just Eat is a direct ordering platform. That means your own branded website, app or kiosk, taking orders with no marketplace commission on top. Just Eat charges up to 30% on every order, and that number is the reason most operators start looking.
Flipdish provides that platform for thousands of restaurants, takeaways, QSRs and multi-location groups across the UK and Ireland.
Almost nobody drops Just Eat on day one, and this guide doesn't suggest you should. It covers what Just Eat costs, why operators get fed up with it, who else is out there, and how to move your regulars onto a channel you own.
What Just Eat costs a restaurant
Just Eat takes a commission on every order that goes through its platform. The rate depends on your contract and region, but UK operators typically pay between 14% and 30% of the order value.
On a £25 order, that's £3.50 to £7.50 gone before you've paid for the food or the person cooking it.
Take a busy takeaway doing 200 orders a week at £25. That's £260,000 a year in sales. At 14% commission, £36,400 goes to Just Eat. At 30%, it's £78,000.
Marketing fees, listing upgrades and, in some cases, payment processing fees get added to the base commission. Go through a statement line by line sometime. The headline rate often isn't the whole bill.
The deal makes sense at the start. You're paying for access to people who are already hungry and already have the app open. It gets harder to justify once the same people order from you every week, because at that point you're paying for an introduction you got years ago.
Why restaurants look for alternatives
Margin is the first reason, and usually the loudest. After commission, food cost and labour, a Just Eat delivery order can leave you with close to nothing, and sometimes less than nothing. The same order placed directly, with no commission, looks very different.
Then there's the data. Just Eat owns the customer relationship. You don't get email addresses or phone numbers from those orders, so you can't message someone who has ordered from you twenty times. You can't thank them, offer them anything or tell them when you launch a new menu.
Pricing is the third. Plenty of restaurants put higher prices on Just Eat to cover the commission. That leaves you running two price lists for the same food, one of which exists purely to pay a fee.
And there's dependency. If a big chunk of your revenue comes through one platform, a change in its fees, its ranking algorithm or its position in the market changes your income. You get no vote on any of it.
The main alternatives to Just Eat
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is a direct ordering platform for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. It lets you take orders from customers without paying commission to a marketplace.
What you get:
- A branded ordering website with your logo, colours and menu
- A branded mobile app, on iOS and Android, in your name and listed in the app stores
- Self-service kiosks for dine-in and collection, which also help with upselling
- POS integration, so orders from every channel land in the kitchen the same way
- Loyalty and marketing by email, SMS and push notification, aimed at your own customer list
- AI phone ordering, which answers the phone and takes orders with no commission attached
The customer relationship is yours. You collect email addresses, phone numbers and order history, and you can use them for loyalty schemes, targeted campaigns and win-back offers to people who've stopped ordering.
The savings are easy to work out. On a £25 order, every direct order saves £3.50 to £7.50 compared with the same order through Just Eat. A restaurant that moves 50 orders a week from Just Eat to direct saves between £9,100 and £19,500 a year.
Most Flipdish customers run both channels. They keep Just Eat for finding new customers and work to move repeat customers over to direct ordering with loyalty rewards, vouchers and marketing.
In practice that looks like a voucher in every Just Eat delivery bag: "Order direct next time and save £2." A welcome email goes to every new direct customer. A loyalty points scheme applies only to direct orders. Over six to twelve months, a good share of your repeat Just Eat customers can end up ordering from you directly. Flipdish marketing tools automate a lot of that.
2. Deliverect
Deliverect is middleware. It pulls orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo into a single feed going to your POS. It doesn't replace Just Eat, it just means your staff aren't juggling three tablets.
That makes it useful if your problem is operational mess across several delivery apps. It won't help if your problem is commission, because the orders are still marketplace orders.
3. Hungrrr
Hungrrr is a UK white-label online ordering platform. You get a branded website and app, similar to what Flipdish offers, at a smaller scale.
It suits independents and small chains in the UK. It doesn't have the wider restaurant management platform, the AI tools or the marketing automation that Flipdish does.
4. OrderYOYO
OrderYOYO is a direct ordering platform with marketing tools, available in the UK. The catch is that it charges commission on direct orders. That eats into the exact margin you were trying to win back by leaving Just Eat, so run the numbers before you commit.
It's aimed at independent restaurants and small chains.
5. Slerp
Slerp is a UK direct ordering and delivery platform. You get branded online ordering with delivery fulfilment built in.
That's the draw if you want direct ordering and someone else handling the delivery side. It has a smaller client base and fewer features than Flipdish.
Run your own numbers first
Before you change anything, work out what Just Eat actually costs you. Pull the last three months of statements and add up commission, marketing fees, listing upgrades and any processing charges. Divide by the number of orders. That's your real cost per order, and it's the number to beat.
Here's a rough example. A restaurant does 120 Just Eat orders a week at £25 each, at a 25% commission. That's £6.25 per order, £750 a week, £39,000 a year. If a third of those customers, 40 orders a week, start ordering direct, the restaurant keeps £250 a week, or £13,000 a year, that it was handing over before.
Direct orders aren't free to run. You pay for the platform and for card processing, so compare on your own volumes. Flipdish pricing is published, which makes that easy to do.
How to cut Just Eat dependency without leaving it
Very few restaurants can leave Just Eat overnight, and most shouldn't. The audience is real, and it brings you customers you'd never reach otherwise. The idea is to use Just Eat to find a customer once, then get them ordering from you directly.
Start by building somewhere for them to go. Customers can't switch to a channel that doesn't exist, and Flipdish online ordering gets your branded website and app running and connected to your POS.
Next, give people a reason to switch. They use Just Eat because it's easy and the app is already on their phone. A first-order discount, loyalty points, a free item on the next order, or just a lower price because you aren't marking the menu up to cover commission will all do the job. Pick one and make it obvious.
Use the bag. Every Just Eat delivery puts something physical in a customer's hands. A card, a sticker or a printed note about ordering direct costs pennies, and a QR code pointing to your ordering site can be tracked, so you'll know whether it works. Read your Just Eat contract for anything about promoting other ordering channels before you print a thousand of them.
Then use the data you collect. Your direct platform builds a customer database, and it's only useful if you act on it. Flipdish marketing automation can message customers who haven't ordered in 30 days, congratulate someone on their fifth order, and split campaigns by location, order history and spend.
Finally, measure it. Each month, track direct orders as a share of your total delivery orders. A common target is 40 to 60% direct within 18 months of launching a direct ordering platform. If the share isn't moving after a few months, change the incentive before you change anything else.
Just Eat vs direct ordering
| Factor | Just Eat | Direct ordering (Flipdish) |
|---|---|---|
| Commission per order | 14% to 30% | Zero |
| Customer data | None | Email, phone, order history |
| Loyalty programme | Just Eat's, not yours | Your brand, your customers |
| Marketing | Very limited | Full CRM and automation |
| Pricing | Often inflated to cover commission | Your price, the same everywhere |
| App branding | Just Eat | Yours |
| New customer acquisition | Strong | Needs marketing spend |
The last row is the one to be honest about. Just Eat is good at bringing in new customers and a direct channel isn't, at least not without marketing money behind it. So the sensible setup is both: marketplaces to get found, direct ordering to keep the customers you've already won.
Getting started
The earlier you launch a direct channel, the earlier customers start collecting points in your loyalty scheme instead of Just Eat's. Every month without one is another month of full commission on customers who'd happily order from you directly if they knew how.
Explore Flipdish online ordering to see how a direct channel works in practice, or view pricing for online ordering and apps.
For independent comparisons of restaurant ordering platforms, visit restauranttech.co.uk.