How to Replace Foodhub With Direct Online Ordering

Why restaurants leave Foodhub

Foodhub's pitch to restaurants is low commission. On its paid plan you pay a monthly subscription and roughly 3% on card orders, which looks cheap next to the 25-35% that Just Eat and Deliveroo take.

The commission isn't really the problem. The problem is that the customer belongs to Foodhub.

When someone orders your chicken tikka through the Foodhub app, they're Foodhub's customer. You get the order and that's about it. You can't send that person a message on a quiet Tuesday, you can't put them on a loyalty scheme, and you have no idea whether they've ordered from you twelve times or once. If they open the app next week and the place down the road is higher up the list, that's where the order goes.

Ranking is the other issue. Foodhub decides how visible you are, and paying for promotion inside the app pushes up what each customer costs you. You can also only reach people who already use Foodhub. Someone who finds you on Google Maps, sees a post on Instagram or hears about you from a mate at work isn't on that list unless they happen to have the app.

Direct ordering deals with all of that. Customers order through your website or your own app, the payment comes to you, and the customer record is yours.

What direct ordering looks like

To the customer, it's an ordering app. They pick dishes, pay, and get a confirmation and a time. The difference is all on your side. There's no marketplace in the middle taking a cut or standing between you and the person eating the food.

The order goes into your kitchen the same way any other order does - through your restaurant POS system or onto a kitchen screen. Nobody's reading orders off a tablet and retyping them into the till.

Most restaurants start with a branded restaurant website that has ordering built in. It's the quickest thing to get live and it's where Google will send people. A branded mobile app comes next, and it earns its keep with regulars. Once someone has your app on their phone with a card saved, reordering their usual Friday curry takes a few taps. Apps bring in more frequent orders and bigger baskets than a website does.

Setting it up

Pick a platform

You need something that hosts your menu, takes payment and sends the order to the kitchen. There are standalone ordering tools that do only that. They work, but you end up with online orders in one system and counter and phone orders in another, and someone has to reconcile the two at the end of the night.

A platform that runs your POS as well as your online ordering avoids that. Everything lands in one queue and one set of reports.

Flipdish is the one we'd recommend for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. You get an ordering website branded as your restaurant, a branded app if you want one, and the Flipdish POS, so online and counter orders end up in the same place. The customer data is yours to market to, and there are AI marketing tools that send re-engagement campaigns automatically - the "haven't seen you in a while" message to someone who used to order every week and then stopped.

When you compare platforms, ask for the full monthly cost, not just the commission figure. Subscription, card processing, hardware, app fees. Put them all on one line and compare that.

Move your menu over

This is most of the setup work. Every dish, every option, every "add extra naan" and "make it a meal" has to go into the new system with the right price. Flipdish, like most platforms, offers onboarding help with this. Take it.

Don't just copy the Foodhub menu line by line. It's a good moment to fix the things that have been bugging you. Descriptions that say "chef's special" and nothing else. Dishes you stopped making two years ago that are still listed as sold out. Photos taken on a phone under the heat lamps. Set up meal deals and add-ons properly so the system offers a side or a drink at checkout, instead of hoping the customer remembers.

Check your prices as well. Some restaurants put prices up on marketplaces to cover the commission. On your own channel you can bring them back down, or leave them where they are and keep the margin. Either is fine. Just decide on purpose.

Payments

Your ordering platform needs a payment processor behind it. With Flipdish, payments are part of the platform, so there's no separate provider to sign up with. Payouts go straight to your bank account.

Card processing usually costs somewhere between 1.5% and 2.5% of the order. That's the cost of taking card payments online, whoever you use.

Tell people

This is the part that decides whether any of it works. A direct ordering site nobody knows about takes no orders.

Start with Google. Update your Google Business Profile with a link to your own ordering page. People who search for you by name will often click whatever ordering link shows up next to your listing, and at the moment that might be a marketplace.

Then put the ordering URL, or a QR code, on everything physical that leaves the building: bags, receipts, menus, the leaflet that goes in with the food. Customers who order from you through Foodhub will see it on their next delivery, and they're exactly the people you want to move.

Post about it on Instagram and Facebook, and more than once. A single announcement gets missed. If you send order confirmation emails and can edit them, add a line or a banner pointing to the new channel. And brief your staff. When someone rings up or comes in, the person at the counter can mention the app. It's a small thing, but it adds up over a busy week.

Give people a reason to try it

Offer something on the first direct order. Money off, a free starter, free delivery. It doesn't need to be big. You just want someone to order from you directly once, because after that the marketplace habit is half broken. If they've downloaded your app and saved a card, the second order is easier than opening Foodhub and searching for you.

Some restaurants keep a standing reason to order direct, like a small loyalty reward or a dish that's only on their own app. That gives regulars a reason to stay rather than drift back.

How long it takes

Getting live is quicker than most people expect. With Flipdish it's usually a few weeks from signing to taking orders, and most of that time goes on building the menu and testing it. Place test orders. Order the awkward stuff - half-and-half pizzas, set meals with three choices - and check what actually prints in the kitchen.

Moving customers is the slow bit. Expect three to six months of steady promotion before the direct channel is doing real volume. The restaurants that get there treat it as an ongoing marketing job. The ones that don't put a link on the website, wait a month, see 20 orders and decide it doesn't work.

The numbers

Take a takeaway doing £20,000 a month in delivery and collection.

On a marketplace charging 30% commission, £6,000 of that goes to the platform every month.

On Foodhub at around 3% on card orders, it's closer to £600, plus the monthly subscription. Foodhub is a lot cheaper than the big marketplaces, and there's no point pretending otherwise.

On a direct channel with no commission, you pay card processing - £300 to £500 at 1.5-2.5% - plus whatever your platform charges each month.

So if you're coming from Foodhub specifically, the saving on fees is real but it isn't dramatic. A few hundred pounds a month, depending on your plan. If you're also on Just Eat or Deliveroo, the gap is thousands.

With Foodhub, the bigger difference is the stuff the fee comparison leaves out. On your own channel you have the customer's details. You can send a message on a slow night and get orders that wouldn't otherwise have happened. You can see who's stopped ordering and try to win them back. The marketing cost of keeping a customer you can contact directly is lower than paying commission on every order they place for years.

Hardly anyone replaces marketplace orders completely, and you don't need to. What you're after is a different mix: more orders coming in direct, while marketplace volume stays flat or slowly drops.

Running Foodhub and direct ordering together

You can, and most restaurants do at first. There's no reason to switch Foodhub off the day your website goes live. That just loses you orders while customers are still finding the new channel.

Run both. Push the direct channel hard and let customers move across at their own pace. Every Foodhub order that goes out with a flyer for your app in the bag is a chance to move that customer over.

After a few months you'll see how the split is going. Some restaurants leave Foodhub once direct ordering is carrying most of the volume. Others stay on it because it brings in people who'd never heard of them, and then work on converting those people to direct over time.

To decide, look at what Foodhub costs you per customer over the whole time they keep ordering through it, and set that against the new customers it brought you that you couldn't have reached any other way. If Foodhub mostly sends you people who already knew where you were, it's not doing much for you.

Why Flipdish

Flipdish was built for this: giving a restaurant its own ordering channel without it having to build any software.

There's no commission on direct orders, so the order value stays with you, minus card processing. Your app carries your name and logo, and customers can save their payment details and reorder in a few taps. The POS is part of the same system, so direct, phone and in-person orders all go into one kitchen queue. The customer list is yours, and you can market to it with Flipdish AI Marketing. Flipdish works in both the UK and Ireland, with local account managers in each.

If you're paying Foodhub every month and want customers who order from you rather than from an app that lists you next to twenty competitors, get started with Flipdish online ordering.