The 30% problem nobody is solving for restaurants

The math on third-party delivery doesn't survive a careful look. Most operators have seen the numbers and made peace with them. We think that's a mistake.

What you actually pay

The headline commission — 15% for "marketplace lite", 30% for full marketplace — is the start, not the end. Layer on:

• Marketing fees (sponsored listings): 3–7% of subtotal on platforms like DoorDash, often more on Uber Eats when you're trying to defend a position.
• Promo subsidies: buy-one-get-one, free delivery, 20%-off-everything — the platforms love to run these and you foot the bill.
• Refunds you can't dispute: "food was cold", "item missing", "rider was rude" — the platform issues a refund to the guest and deducts it from your payout. You find out after the fact.
• Cash advance fees if you accept the early-pay option, which most operators do because they need the working capital.

All in, we routinely see aggregator effective rates north of 35% of ticket. For a restaurant running a 65% food cost + labor + occupancy base, that puts delivery orders at slightly negative contribution margin once you factor in packaging.

Why the problem isn't "drop aggregators"

It's tempting to tell operators to just get off the platforms. Don't. Aggregators are real incremental demand. A percentage of those orders would never have come to you otherwise — and killing that volume hurts more than the margin drag on the orders themselves.

The problem isn't that aggregators exist. The problem is that almost no restaurant does the work to optimize their position inside them.

What actually moves the number

Three levers, in order of impact:

1. Menu surgery. Your marketplace menu should not be your dine-in menu. Remove low-margin items that skew your per-ticket economics. Reprice high-fixed-cost items (anything with expensive proteins, anything requiring lots of packaging). If a dish's food cost is 40% dine-in, it's 40% + 30% commission on delivery — that's not a menu item, that's a donation.

2. Channel-specific pricing. DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub each have slightly different commission structures, different "preferred partner" programs, and different guest demographics. Setting one price across all three leaves 5-8% on the table. Platforms increasingly allow different menus per channel — use it.

3. Promo ROI discipline. Running a 25%-off promo for two weeks that pays for itself in "new guests acquired" is a real thing. Running a 25%-off promo for two weeks because "everyone is doing it" during slow season — also a real thing, and the wrong thing.

The honest answer

The restaurants that have aggregator economics figured out have one thing in common: they have someone whose job it is to watch the numbers. In a 14-unit group, that's one analyst across all three platforms. In a single-unit, it's the owner at 11pm on a Tuesday.

This is exactly the kind of work the Restaurant OS takes off your plate. Not the hard decisions about what kind of restaurant you are — just the per-item, per-channel, per-week arithmetic that nobody has time for.

If you've never sat down with your aggregator statements and computed your real effective rate, do that this week. The number will be worse than you think. And then it becomes a problem you can actually solve.