Delivery fee calculator

What a delivery really costs

Two things, and only one of them is obvious. The obvious one is fuel. The one that decides everything is the rider's time, because you buy it by the hour and you use it by the drop. A rider costing 25 an hour who completes five deliveries costs you 5 a delivery; the same rider on a quiet Tuesday completing one and a half costs you nearly 17. Nothing about the rider changed. The fee that was comfortable on Friday is a loss on Tuesday, and no fee set once can be right for both.

That is why the input above is deliveries finished per hour rather than a flat cost per drop. Measure it over a real week, including the quiet hours, and use the average you actually get rather than the one you get at eight on a Friday.

The fee that breaks even

It is the cost, exactly. Charge that and the delivery pays for itself and contributes nothing; charge less and the difference comes out of the margin on the food. Neither is automatically wrong - a fee below cost is a discount, and discounts are a legitimate way to buy volume. The mistake is not knowing which one you are running.

Where free delivery goes wrong

A free-delivery threshold is usually copied from an aggregator, and the aggregator is solving a different problem with somebody else's margin. The number you need is the floor: the cost of one delivery divided by your gross margin on the food. Below it, the food on the order cannot pay for the drop, so the order loses money on arrival. If a drop costs you 12 and your margin is 65%, that floor is about 18.50 - and if it costs you 12 and your margin is 55%, it is nearly 22. The margin moves the floor as much as the cost does, which is why guessing at it goes wrong in both directions.

Above the floor, free delivery is still a discount and still costs exactly the fee you gave up. The calculator prints that as a share of the gross profit on the order, because a fifth of the profit is a real number and “free delivery over 100” is not.

Own riders or an aggregator

The calculator gives you a cost per delivery. Set it beside the commission an aggregator would take on the same order, typically quoted somewhere between 25 and 35 percent. The shapes are different in a way the headline rate hides: your own riders are a fixed cost that gets cheaper per drop the busier you are, while commission is a variable cost that never gets cheaper and takes its share of the food as well as the delivery. An aggregator can still win on a slow week and on discovery. It cannot win on a busy one.

What to do with the answer

Two changes usually beat a fee rise. Raise the minimum order so fewer drops start below the floor, and tighten the delivery radius so the round trip and the rider's time both fall - a two-kilometre radius is not half the cost of a four-kilometre one, it is better than half, because the rider gets back sooner and finishes more drops an hour.

The third change is not a delivery change at all. If the order arrives through an aggregator, the commission is charged on the whole basket, so the same delivery costs you far more than the rider does. Taking your regulars direct is what makes the numbers above the ones that matter, and that is what Get Menu does - your own ordering page, your own riders, 0% commission on every order, and payment staying where it already is, cash or the card machine at the door, so no card details exist anywhere in the system. See what it costs.