Looking for a Just Eat alternative? Start with the commission arithmetic

# Looking for a Just Eat alternative? Start with the commission arithmetic

You already know the figure. It sits near the bottom of the weekly remittance, between what your customers spent and what actually reached the bank, and in most takeaways it is the third-biggest cost in the business after food and wages. The uncomfortable half is that the app earning it genuinely did bring you orders, plenty of them from people who had never heard of your shop. Working out what to do about that is not really a software decision. It is a sum, with a question about ownership sitting underneath it.

What counts as a Just Eat alternative?

A Just Eat alternative is any route that gets an order from a customer into your kitchen without a marketplace taking a share of it. Three exist in practice: a rival marketplace, an ordering page you own outright, and both of them running side by side — and the third is where most independent takeaways land after a year of trying the other two.

The difference that matters is not the logo on the bag. It is who holds the customer record when the food has been eaten. A marketplace rents you demand and keeps the name, the number and the order history that came with it. A page in your own name costs you that borrowed demand and hands you the record instead. Every other point below follows from that single split.

What does Just Eat commission cost a takeaway in pounds?

UK marketplace commission usually runs between 14% and 30% of order value, the lower end for orders your own driver carries and the upper end for orders delivered by the platform's courier network. Card handling and service charges typically sit on top, so the rate you actually feel is a point or two above the headline one.

Put your own trading through it. A shop doing £20,000 a month across the apps at 25% hands over £5,000 a month, which is £60,000 in a year, on food you cooked in a kitchen you pay rent on. On the friendlier 14% self-delivery rate that same £20,000 still costs £2,800 every month. Read it one basket at a time and it looks smaller and hurts more: a £24 Friday order at 27% leaves £17.52 on the ticket before you have bought an onion.

Now be fair about what the money buys. It buys a listing that surfaces in Birmingham at eight o'clock on a Saturday to somebody who does not know your name, a payments and refunds operation you do not have to staff, and a driver pool on the nights yours is a man short. Those are real services with real costs behind them. The honest question is narrower: are they worth a quarter of every order forever, including the two-hundredth order from a regular who would have come straight to you if you had ever given her somewhere to go?

Which online food delivery platforms are the realistic alternatives?

The realistic online food delivery platforms for a UK independent are Deliveroo and Uber Eats beside Just Eat, plus a thinner layer of regional aggregators serving single cities. All of them charge on the same shape of model, so switching moves your rate by a few points and your visibility by rather more, while leaving the ownership question exactly where it was.

The second route is an ordering page carrying your own name: a link you send and a code you print, both opening your menu with your photos and your prices. There is no marketplace queue to appear in, so it wins you no strangers at all. What it wins instead is the whole basket and the person who filled it.

The third route is neither, and it is the one worth planning for. Keep a marketplace switched on for discovery, put your own page in front of everybody who has already found you, and let the mix drift as the second lane grows. Nobody has to be cut off on day one.

Why do most independents run two lanes rather than choose?

Because the two channels are good at opposite jobs, and dropping the marketplace on a Monday usually costs more in lost first-time orders than the commission it saves. The app is an introduction service. Your own page is a re-order service. A takeaway that treats them as rivals normally ends up doing one of them badly.

"Every owner I sat with in a delivery kitchen could name the commission to the penny and could not name a single customer. That is the trade written plainly — you rent the queue and you never get to keep anybody from it. We built the second lane so the regulars have somewhere of yours to come back to." — Anzul Aqeel, founder of Get Menu

The practical version is unglamorous. Put a card in every bag with a QR code that opens your own menu and a small reason to use it next time. Reply to the customers who already message you with a link rather than taking the order down by hand. Within a few months the split usually reads something like 3 in 10 orders arriving direct, and every one of those arrives whole instead of three-quarters of the way there.

What does your own ordering page have to do to earn the switch?

It has to be as easy to order from as the app the customer just left, and it has to run the evening without anyone typing. That is a much higher bar than a menu PDF and a phone number, which is why most attempts at going direct quietly die in the second month.

The parts carrying the weight are ordinary ones. Every line is re-priced from your live menu at checkout, so a stale page can never sell yesterday's price, and the cart asks for a name and a number before checkout rather than after. Stock counts fall as orders land, and a dish that runs out greys itself off at zero without anyone watching a screen. Opening hours are enforced, so nobody buys a kebab at four in the morning and rings you about it at nine. The whole menu can be built by upload from a spreadsheet instead of being typed item by item, and photos are compressed automatically so the page still opens on a bus.

Then the messages, which are the real labour a takeaway does not notice until it stops doing them. One order sends three messages in about two seconds: a confirmation to the customer the moment they order, a ticket to your kitchen group, and a dispatch to the driver with a pin — rider links that work without an account, so nobody installs anything. Every message is logged with whether it arrived, and sending pauses itself if failures start climbing rather than hammering a dead number all evening. Where a shop has a few seats as well as a hatch, a printed code on every table opens the same menu, generated for you.

Retention is the half that pays the subscription back. A loyalty stamping system counts stamps automatically as orders complete, tiers give your regulars a discount as they climb, and rewards expire so they actually get used. Cards sit in the phone the customer already carries, with a designer for the colours and logo — Google Wallet works today and Apple Wallet is built, awaiting a certificate. Promotions run beside it: coupons with caps and expiry dates, bundles, buy-one-get-one, abandoned-cart nudges, win-backs for a regular who has gone quiet. Discounts never land on top of each other by accident, because only the best one applies. Behind all of it sit VAT invoices carrying your registration number, a sales dashboard by day, item and channel, and an export to a spreadsheet whenever you want one.

How do customers pay if the order is not going through an app?

Cash or your card machine at the door — Get Menu takes no payment online, deliberately, and that is the trade you are agreeing to. There is no checkout asking for card details, which also means no card details exist anywhere in the system for anyone to steal, and there is nothing to configure or reconcile before you can start.

Say plainly who this suits. It suits independents and takeaways whose drivers already carry a card terminal, and dark kitchens delivering into a known set of streets and buildings where somebody reaches the door anyway. It does not suit an operator whose model depends on collecting money before the food is cooked. In UK takeaway trading, where a driver hands over a bag and takes a payment on the step every night of the week, the gap is narrower than the objection sounds — and the customers who abandon a basket at a card form never abandon this one.

How do you test the switch without risking a Friday night?

Run the second lane for one month beside the marketplace and measure it, rather than arguing about it. Nothing has to be switched off for the test to be valid, and the marketplace listing carries on doing precisely what it did before.

Build the menu once. Upload it from a spreadsheet, drop the photos on, and check the required choices and limits your kitchen relies on so tickets arrive complete.
Print the route in. A card in every bag and a code by the counter, both opening your own page. Give a first-order reason to use it — a free side beats a percentage off, because it costs you less and reads as bigger.
Point your existing conversations at it. The customers already messaging you get a link instead of a spoken order. This alone moves more volume than any advertising a small shop can afford.
Count two numbers at month end. How many direct orders arrived, and what those same orders would have cost in commission on the app. The second figure is the honest saving, and the only one worth putting in front of an accountant.
Let the mix move on its own. Most kitchens keep the marketplace running for discovery long after direct becomes the bigger half. The 15 free days need no card, so the test costs you the month and nothing else.

What do you keep that the marketplace never gives back?

The customer list, and the right to speak to it. Names, numbers and order history belong to your restaurant, exportable on any day including your last, and old order detail is cleared automatically after 120 days so the book stays clean rather than sprawling.

That ownership is the part that compounds. A marketplace regular is a stranger you rent again every time she orders; a direct regular is somebody you can send a Tuesday offer to, cap at one message a week so nobody is pestered, and greet by name on her ninth visit. Commission saved is the number that gets the meeting called. The list is the thing still worth something in three years.

Frequently asked questions

Is Get Menu a Just Eat replacement?

Not on its own, and any tool claiming otherwise is selling you something. Just Eat brings strangers who are browsing for dinner with no shop in mind, and no ordering page can manufacture that. Get Menu replaces the part where you pay a percentage on customers you had already earned, which for most takeaways is the larger and quieter half of the bill.

How much commission does Get Menu take on an order?

None. It is a flat monthly subscription with 0% commission, so the amount you owe does not move when you have a good month, and the current plans live on the pricing page rather than in an article where a figure would go stale. A busy December costs the same as a slow February.

Can I run my own ordering page and stay on the apps?

Yes, and that is the normal pattern rather than the exception. The two channels do not conflict in any way that matters to a small operator: the marketplace keeps its listing and its rate, and your own page quietly takes the re-orders. Most shops let the balance shift over six to twelve months instead of making one hard switch.

What happens to my WhatsApp number and my existing customers?

Nothing is replaced. Your own number connects by scanning a code and the automatic messages send from it, so a customer sees the shop they already know rather than an unfamiliar sender. People who currently order by phone or message carry on doing exactly that, with a link doing the typing instead of a member of staff.

Do my customers have to download anything?

No. The menu is a normal web page opened from a link or a QR code, and the loyalty card goes into the wallet already on the phone, with no app to install at any point. That matters more in the UK than it sounds, because an install is where most direct-ordering attempts lose the customer they had just won back.

Sources

CMA clears Amazon's 16% investment in Deliveroo | GOV.UK — The UK Competition and Markets Authority's own review of the Deliveroo market is an independent, non-marketplace analysis of the same UK food delivery platform landscape the article is about.