Every restaurant that takes online orders has made a choice between a marketplace and its own site, and most made it by accident. The marketplace brings customers and takes a cut of every order, including from the regular who would have phoned you anyway. Your own site brings nobody and keeps the margin. The interesting question is not which is better, it is which orders belong in which.
What a marketplace charges, and on which orders
The commission is the headline and the ordering is the detail. A marketplace charges on every order that comes through it, including the ones from customers who already knew you and searched your name. Those are the orders your own site is for: not new demand, but the demand you already had, arriving without a cut taken out. Count what proportion of your marketplace orders are repeat customers before deciding what your own ordering page is worth.
What an ordering system has to hand the kitchen
An online order is only useful if it arrives where the kitchen already looks. That means the same queue as walk-ins, in the order things are due out, on the same printer or screen. The common failure is an ordering system that emails you or lights up a tablet in the office, which turns into somebody walking orders to the pass on paper, which is worse than the phone it replaced.
Menu, hours and the things that go wrong at nine
Your online menu has to be the same menu, and it has to close when you do. Two things break in every rollout: an item that sold out at seven is still orderable at eight, and the ordering page takes an order fifteen minutes after the kitchen shut. Both are settings and both are worth checking on the demo, because both produce a refund and a bad review rather than a shrug.
What it costs against what it keeps
Published UK tiers for ordering on your own site ran from £99 a month to £199 for the multichannel plan on Storekit's pricing page, read on 2026-09-06. Against that, work out what a marketplace takes from the repeat orders you could serve yourself. For most rooms the sum is decided by that one number, and it is a number you can get out of your own statements this afternoon.
Collection slots, and the kitchen’s real capacity
An ordering page that offers every fifteen-minute slot as if the kitchen were empty will sell a slot the kitchen cannot make. The setting that matters is orders per slot, set from what the pass can plate in fifteen minutes with a full room, and lowered on the nights the room is full. When a slot is taken it closes and the next one is offered, so the promise on the confirmation is one the kitchen agreed to. The same setting is what stops the eight-fifteen collection landing on top of the eight o'clock rush of table mains; it is capacity, not marketing, and it is worth setting before the first order rather than after the first complaint.
A month’s orders, sorted by where they came from
Export a month of orders from the marketplace and a month from your own page, and put three columns side by side: the count, the average order, and the commission or fee paid. Then mark the marketplace orders whose customer had ordered before. That marked share is the number the whole decision turns on, because those are the orders that would have come to your own page had it existed and had the customer known. Most rooms find it is a third or more, and a third of a month's marketplace commission is a figure that pays for an ordering page many times over. The sheet on this site takes those figures as inputs and publishes no benchmark of its own.
Questions people ask about restaurant online ordering system
Will my own ordering page actually get used?
By your regulars, yes, if it is linked from everywhere they already find you and the prices match. It will not win new customers the way a marketplace does. Those are two different jobs and it is a mistake to judge one by the other.
Should the prices be the same as on the marketplace?
They usually cannot be lower on the marketplace by contract, and making them higher there is common and legal in most agreements, but read yours. What is certain is that a customer who notices a difference will assume the worse of it.
Do I need a new website for this?
No. Most ordering products give you a page you link to, which is enough. A full site is a separate decision and a much larger one.
Should the ordering page take payment up front?
Yes, for collection and delivery. A prepaid order is one the kitchen can cook without waiting for a person to turn up, and a no-show costs nothing but the food. Pay-on-collection produces the bag on the shelf that nobody comes for, and it produces it on the busiest nights.
How do refunds work on my own ordering page?
Through the card processor behind the page, as a refund against the original payment, recorded on the order so the record shows what was refunded and why. It is faster than a marketplace dispute and it is yours to decide; the record is what stops the same order being refunded twice.