Restaurants Bleed 25–30% of Delivery Revenue to Third-Party Apps with No Easy Direct-Ordering Alternative

Summary

Restaurants are forced to hand over 25–30% of every delivery order to platforms like DoorDash—a pizzeria doing $8k/month through apps loses roughly $2k—even though most of those orders come from regulars who would gladly order direct if a frictionless option existed. The core pain is that restaurants have no simple, affordable way to capture their own repeat customers directly: building an app or ordering system is technically hard, expensive, and disconnected from their existing POS (e.g., Clover), so they stay trapped paying commissions. Existing solutions are either too costly, too complex for a small operator, or fail to integrate with the kitchen register. This is a severe, recurring financial drain on SMBs that remains largely unsolved and is highly worth paying to fix.