Restaurant Ordering Apps, Honestly Compared

The Australian food delivery market changed shape in November 2025, and a lot of venues have not adjusted their thinking to match.

Menulog stopped accepting orders at midnight on 26 November 2025, ending a twenty-year presence. Its parent company exited the market entirely; around 120 employees were affected. Menulog’s share had fallen from roughly 80% in 2014 to under 25% by the end.

What that leaves is a duopoly. Two platforms, more pricing power between them, and a venue’s negotiating position weaker than it was a year ago.

That is the context for every decision below.

The three ways a venue takes an order online

A marketplace. Uber Eats, DoorDash. They bring you customers who were not looking for you. You pay commission — commonly quoted around 30% on delivery orders, with pickup substantially cheaper at roughly 6–7% and self-delivery in between. Rates vary by plan and have been moving upward; Uber Eats raised its lower-tier delivery commission in March 2026.

Direct ordering on your own site. Your website, your menu, your customer. Typically a monthly fee or a small percentage, plus payment processing of roughly 1.75% + 30c. Some platforms — including one run by a marketplace — offer no-commission direct ordering, because the platform would rather have your data than your margin.

Your own app. A branded app customers install.

The number that actually decides it

Take a $40 order.

On a marketplace at 30%, you keep about $28 before food cost. On direct ordering at 1.75% plus 30c, you keep about $39. That is roughly $11 a transaction, every transaction.

At 20 orders a week the gap is about $11,000 a year. At 50 a week, about $28,000.

Which makes the marketplace look indefensible until you ask the question that actually matters: would that order have happened at all?

A marketplace order from someone who has never heard of you is worth $28 you would not otherwise have. A marketplace order from your Friday-night regular, who used to ring, is worth $28 instead of $39 — the platform charged you a third of the margin to process a relationship you already had.

★ Insight ------------------------------------- That distinction is the entire strategy and almost nobody measures it. The marketplace bill is one number covering both acquisition and cannibalisation, and only the first half is a purchase. Ask your platform for the share of orders from first-time customers. If most orders are repeat, you are paying an acquisition commission on retention — and the fix is not leaving the platform, it is giving those regulars somewhere cheaper to go. -------------------------------------------------

Who owns the customer

The commission is visible. This part is not, and it lasts longer.

On a marketplace, the customer belongs to the platform. You generally do not get their email address or phone number, you cannot market to them, and if you leave, they do not leave with you. You are renting access to people who think of themselves as customers of the app.

On direct ordering, they are yours. You have the contact details, the order history, and the ability to bring them back without paying for the privilege.

That difference compounds over years in a way a per-order commission does not. A venue three years into marketplace-only ordering has three years of transactions and no list.

What actually works: both, deliberately

The pattern we see working is not choosing one. It is using each for what it is good at.

Use the marketplace for discovery. Accept that you pay for new customers. Do not fight it.

Put something in every marketplace bag that gets the next order direct. A card with a discount code for ordering through your site. That is the only moment you ever hold a marketplace customer’s attention, and it converts an expensive acquisition into a cheap repeat.

Make the direct path genuinely better. Cheaper, or faster, or with something they cannot get on the app. If your own site is worse than the marketplace, nobody will switch and you have built a second ordering system for nothing.

Check your pickup rate. Pickup commission is a fraction of delivery. Venues that make pickup visible and easy on the marketplace move a meaningful share of orders into the cheaper band.

When a custom app is the answer

Rarely, and we build apps.

When ordering is a small part of a larger relationship. A venue with a membership, a loyalty programme with real value, table booking, events. The app has reasons to be opened on days nobody is ordering, which is the only way an installed app survives.

When you are a group, not a venue. Multiple sites, one brand, one balance, one customer record. That is a genuine product.

When the ordering model is unusual. Subscription meals, prepaid accounts, corporate ordering with approval steps. Off-the-shelf ordering systems model a cart; anything structurally different gets worked around by hand.

For a single venue doing ordinary takeaway, an app is the most expensive way to serve customers who would have used your website. Installation is a real cost the customer pays, and a single restaurant rarely earns it.

What the duopoly changes

One more consequence of the November exit, and it is the strategic one.

With three platforms, a venue had leverage — you could threaten to leave for the other two, and the platforms competed for supply. With two, that leverage is thinner, and both remaining platforms know it.

The visible effect so far has been upward pressure on rates, with one of them raising its lower-tier delivery commission during 2026. The less visible effect is on everything else negotiable: promotional placement, the terms of a trial, how disputes over refunds are handled.

None of that is a reason to leave a marketplace that brings you real new customers. It is a reason to stop treating the marketplace channel as permanent infrastructure and start treating it as a supplier whose price will move.

The practical response is unglamorous and it is the same one as for any single-supplier dependency: have a second channel that already works. Not as a plan — running, with real orders going through it, so that if the terms change you are adjusting a mix rather than building something from nothing under pressure.

A direct ordering page with 15% of your volume on it is insurance. A direct ordering page you have never launched is not.

The check worth running this month

Get two numbers from your platform dashboard: total commission paid last month, and the share of orders from first-time customers.

Multiply the commission by the repeat share. That figure is what you paid last month to process relationships you already had.

If it is small, the marketplace is doing its job. If it is most of the bill, you do not have a commission problem — you have a direct-ordering problem, and it is cheaper to fix than to leave.

Platform rates and market facts checked against public sources, September 2026. Commissions vary by plan and change; confirm your own rate with the platform.

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Awesome Apps is an app developer in Sydney building custom iOS and Android apps for Australian businesses. Restaurant websites and direct-ordering pages come from Cosmos Web Tech, and we are part of Ganda Tech Services.