Just Eat alternatives: what changes when the order comes to you

A Just Eat alternative is any way of getting an order into your kitchen that does not go through a marketplace. That covers a rival app, an ordering page in your own name, or both running at the same time. Most takeaways end up with the third.

The choice is easier to make once you stop comparing logos. A marketplace introduces you to people who have never heard of your shop, and takes a share of every order it carries, including the two hundredth order from somebody who now knows your name by heart. Your own page introduces you to nobody. What it does instead is keep the whole basket and the customer record attached to it. This article is about what actually changes when an order arrives your way rather than theirs, and what you have to build for that to be worth doing.

What people mean by a Just Eat alternative

Ask ten owners and you get three answers.

Another marketplace. Deliveroo and Uber Eats sit beside Just Eat in most British towns, with smaller regional apps underneath them. They work the same way, so moving between them changes which listing you appear in and does not change who owns the customer afterwards.

An ordering page you own. A web address with your name on it, a link you send, a code you print. No queue to appear in and no strangers arriving on their own. Every order that does arrive is whole, and the name and number stay with your business.

Both. Keep an app switched on for the people who have never heard of you. Put your own page in front of everybody who already has. Nothing needs to be cancelled on a Monday morning to start.

That third route is why the phrase online food delivery platforms is worth separating into two jobs. One job is finding new customers. The other job is serving the ones you already found. Very few businesses do both jobs well with one tool, and a takeaway that treats the two as rivals usually ends up doing one of them badly.

The number to work out before you change anything

You do not need a spreadsheet full of guesses. You need one figure from your own account: what a month of marketplace orders was worth to the customer, and what actually landed in your bank. The gap is the price of the introduction service. Nothing in this article can tell you whether that price is fair, because it depends on how many of those orders were genuinely new people.

The second figure is the one nobody checks. Of the orders you paid a share on last month, how many came from someone who had ordered from you before? A share paid on a first order is a marketing cost. The same share paid on a regular's twelfth order is rent on a relationship you already own.

The market has had plenty of attention from people whose job is to look at exactly this. When the Competition and Markets Authority cleared Amazon's 16% investment in Deliveroo in August 2020, it did so only after a full Phase 2 investigation into whether competition would suffer. Delivery apps are big enough to be examined by a regulator. They are not a favour, and their pricing is not a mystery to be resented. It is a service with a bill.

What the apps are genuinely good at

It is worth saying plainly, because an article that pretends otherwise is not useful to anyone. A marketplace puts your shop in front of a hungry person at eight o'clock on a Saturday who has never heard of you. It runs the payments and the refunds so you do not have to staff that. On the nights your own driver is missing, it has couriers.

Those are real services and they cost real money to run. The question is not whether to hate them. The question is whether every order forever should carry the price of an introduction that already happened.

What your own page has to do to be worth using

This is where going direct usually dies. A menu PDF and a phone number is not an alternative to an app. The order has to be as easy to place as the one the customer just left, and the evening has to run without anybody typing anything.

Get Menu is built for that job specifically. Here is what carries the weight.

Your own address. Your storefront lives on a web address of your own on getmenu.ae, included from the first day, with 12 page layouts and a colour theme so it looks like your shop rather than a template.

The order lands in WhatsApp. When somebody checks out, 3 messages go where they need to go without a person in the middle: a confirmation to the customer with the estimated delivery time you set, a ticket to the managers' group, and a dispatch message to the riders' group carrying the GPS pin. Your team reads them in the groups they already have open. The customer also gets a status page for that order that needs no login.

The rider needs no app. The dispatch message carries a link. One tap marks the order delivered, the customer is told, and the link stops working after the run.

Prices cannot drift. Every line is re-priced from your live menu at the moment of checkout, so the price shown is the price charged. A double tap cannot create two orders. Opening hours are enforced, so nobody buys at four in the morning and rings you about it at nine.

Stock is real. Counts per item fall as orders come in, and per option too, so running out of one sauce does not remove the whole dish. At zero the item greys itself out on its own.

Delivery knows the address. The customer drops a GPS pin and picks their building and unit from a list. You set a delivery fee per building and a free delivery threshold of your choosing. Nobody phones to ask which entrance.

The customer list is yours. Names, numbers and order history belong to your business, and you can export the whole thing to a spreadsheet on any day, including the day you leave. Detailed order contents clear themselves automatically after 120 days, so old personal data does not pile up while your sales figures stay.

You can see what sold. A sales dashboard shows the day broken down by item and by channel, and the invoices your accountant needs carry your own details.

Getting the same customer back without paying twice

"Every owner I sat with could tell me the commission line to the penny, and not one of them could tell me a customer's name. That is the whole trade in one sentence. We built the direct side so the regulars have somewhere of yours to come back to."

— Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

The practical version is not glamorous. Put a printed code on the bag and on the receipt, pointing at your own menu, with a small reason to use it next time. Get Menu generates that code and a print pack you can send straight to a printer.

Then give the second visit a reason to happen. Loyalty stamps are added per order automatically, and nobody has to mark an order delivered for a stamp to count. You can stamp per order, per pound spent, or only on the one dish you want to sell more of. Regulars grow into tiers, and a tier can carry a discount of its own. The card sits in Google Wallet on the customer's phone and updates itself, with the colours and the logo from a designer you control and no app for anyone to install. Apple Wallet is built and waiting on a certificate.

Around that sit the offers. Ten kinds of upsell, coupons with caps and expiry dates, bundles where three items go for one price, and win backs for a regular who has gone quiet. Discounts never stack by accident, because the best single one wins.

Marketing messages travel in their own queue that can never delay an order, with a weekly cap per customer so nobody is pestered, and overlapping campaigns held back for you to approve.

What you give up by going direct

An honest list, because you will find these out anyway.

You give up discovery. Your own page wins you no strangers. Everybody who orders from it is somebody you or your code already reached.

You give up card payment at checkout. Get Menu is cash or your card machine at the door. There are no online payments in the system at all, which many owners like, because it also means no card details exist anywhere to be stolen. If taking payment up front matters to your trade, this is the point to weigh.

You keep the delivery problem. Your own drivers, or none. The rider link, the GPS pin and the per building fee make that easier to run, and they do not conjure a courier out of nothing.

And Get Menu is not a cash register. It does not run a counter terminal, cash drawer or card processing. It is your ordering page, your WhatsApp messages, your menu, your stock and your loyalty. Most takeaways keep whatever they already ring sales into and add this beside it.

Trying it without a decision

The trial runs 15 days and needs no card details to start. After that it is a flat monthly price with 0% commission, so the amount you owe does not change when you sell more. That flat shape is the actual difference between the two models, and it only shows up once your direct orders start climbing.

A sensible first fortnight: upload the menu from a spreadsheet if you have one, connect WhatsApp so tickets land in the group your kitchen already reads, print the bag codes, and leave the apps exactly as they are. Then watch two weekends and see how many people come back the short way.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a Just Eat alternative that charges no commission?

Yes, but it is a different kind of product. An ordering page of your own takes no share of your orders, because it is not selling you an audience. Get Menu charges a flat monthly price and 0% commission. What it does not do is put you in front of people who have never heard of your shop, so most takeaways keep an app running alongside it for a while.

Can customers pay by card on my own ordering page?

No. Payment is cash or your card machine on delivery or at the counter. Nothing is charged through the page, so no card numbers are stored anywhere in the system.

Do I have to leave Just Eat to start taking direct orders?

No, and it is usually a bad idea to leave on day one. The two channels do different jobs. Run your own page beside the apps, put the code on every bag, and let the balance shift as your regulars learn the short route.

Do my customers need to install anything?

No. Your menu is a normal web page opened from a link or a printed code. The loyalty card goes into the Google Wallet already on their phone.

Who owns the customer details from a direct order?

Your restaurant. Names, numbers and order history sit in your account, and you can export the full list to a spreadsheet whenever you want, including on your last day with us.