Third-Party Delivery Commission

Third-party delivery commission is the fee a platform charges per order. The standard tiers on DoorDash and Uber Eats run roughly 15% (limited reach, no marketing), 25% (broader reach), and 30% (broadest reach plus promoted placement). Grubhub, ChowNow, Postmates, and regional players run similar structures.

The commission is taken off the customer-paid total — including delivery fees and service fees. On a $40 ticket at 30%, the platform keeps $12 and the restaurant gets $28. After 30% food cost on the $28, contribution margin is roughly $20 versus $28 on a comparable direct order.

Whether to be on these platforms is a per-restaurant question. The honest framing: third-party platforms are a marketing channel that cannibalizes 25-30% of every order, but they bring incremental volume from customers who would not otherwise order. The right way to evaluate is incrementality, not gross volume — what percentage of those orders would have come direct anyway?

Operators who work the math sometimes find that two-thirds of their third-party orders would have ordered direct if the platform did not exist, in which case the marketing premise is roughly false and the channel destroys margin. Other operators find genuinely incremental customers and the math works.

Third-party delivery is the largest hidden cost in most takeout-heavy restaurants. A restaurant doing $800k of third-party at 28% blended commission is paying $224k a year for marketing — much of which is not incremental. Even a small shift toward direct orders pays back enormously.