Delivering Without DoorDash: What Your Own Ordering and Driver Tracking Involves

Delivery apps solved a real problem. They put your menu in front of hungry people, found drivers and took the payment. They also take a commission on every order, commonly somewhere between 15 and 30 percent, for as long as you use them. For a restaurant, bakery or shop with thin margins, that is not a marketing cost. It is a permanent share of your revenue.

We have already written about commission-free online ordering for restaurants, which covers taking orders on your own site. This piece goes one step further: delivering them. What it takes, what it costs and what to do first, honestly including the parts that make it harder than it looks.

What a delivery app does for you, and what it costs to replace

A delivery platform does four jobs. It markets you to people who have never heard of you. It takes the order and the payment. It finds and manages the drivers. And it tracks the delivery so the customer knows when to expect it. Replacing it means taking over the last three. The first, discovery, is the one you cannot easily replicate, which matters for the next section.

Keep the app for discovery, and move your regulars

The most useful reframing is this: you do not have to choose between your own system and the platforms. The platforms are good at finding new customers. Your own system is good at keeping the ones you already have. A sensible strategy uses both: stay listed so strangers can discover you, and give your regulars a reason to order direct, such as better prices, a loyalty reward or simply the better experience.

Every order that moves from an app to your own site is an order on which you stop paying commission. You do not need to move them all for the numbers to matter.

What delivery actually requires

Running your own delivery involves more than a page with a Buy button. Here are the parts.

Each of these is straightforward alone. The work is making them behave as one system, and testing the failures: the driver who loses signal, the order that arrives while the kitchen is closed, the customer who enters an address outside your zone.

Your own drivers or a courier service?

The delivery itself needs people, and there are two broad options. You can use your own drivers, which gives you control of the experience and works well if you already have staff who deliver. Or you can use a courier service that fulfils deliveries for your own orders and charges per delivery. Some do this for businesses with their own ordering. It avoids hiring and insurance questions, and it costs a fee per drop, so check the numbers against your volume.

Whichever you choose, count the cost of the delivery itself. Pay, fuel, wear on a vehicle and insurance are real, and they belong in the comparison. A commission saving that is wiped out by driver costs you did not previously carry is not a saving.

The arithmetic, with made-up numbers

Suppose, for illustration, that you take 300 delivery orders a month through apps, at an average of $32, and the apps take 20 percent. That is $1,920 a month in commission. Suppose you move 40 percent of those orders, 120 of them, to your own system. The commission you stop paying on them is 120 times $32 times 20 percent, which is $768 a month.

If you already have drivers who would otherwise be doing the apps' deliveries or sitting idle, the extra delivery cost is small. If you would have to add driver costs, subtract them. At $5 per delivery that is $600, and most of the saving disappears. The same sums can come out very differently depending on one assumption, which is why we would rather you run them with your own figures than rely on ours.

The calculator on our delivery and driver tracking system lets you change every number, including the extra delivery cost, and tells you plainly when the result does not pay for itself.

What it costs to run

Beyond the build, three ongoing costs are worth knowing about. Card processing applies to every order, on your own system as it does on apps. Mapping services usually charge by usage, which matters if you show live driver locations. And text messages cost a small amount each. None of these is large at modest volumes, and all of them scale with your orders, so they belong in your estimate. We list them on every system page, and you can see our approach to pricing in how much a custom web app costs.

Do you need an app in the App Store?

Almost certainly not at the start. A web app that customers open from a link and add to their phone's home screen does nearly everything a store app does for ordering, with no store approval and no store fees. A store listing can come later if you find customers want it. We quote that separately, and we would rather you launch sooner and decide with real customers than build it speculatively.

A sensible order to do it in

Doing it in this order means each stage pays for itself before you commit to the next, and you learn how your customers actually behave before you invest in the more elaborate parts.

Who this is not for

If you rely on delivery apps mainly to be found, and your regulars are a small share of your orders, the commission is the price of the introductions and an owned system will not change much. If you deliver a handful of orders a week, a phone and a simple ordering page are enough. And if you have no one to drive, the system does not solve that problem. We would rather tell you than sell you something that does not fit.

Making the decision

Write down three things: how many delivery orders you take, what the apps charge you, and what a delivery would cost you if you did it yourself. Those three tell you most of what you need. If the numbers are promising, start with ordering and let delivery follow.

If you would like to talk it through, contact us. We will tell you plainly whether a system, a smaller add-on or simply a better menu page is the right next step for your business.