Is Just Eat worth it for your takeaway?

Nobody can answer this for you, and anyone who does is guessing. The answer depends on your rate, your volume, and how many of those orders are people who would have found you anyway. What follows is the sum, in the order worth doing it.

You need one thing before you start: your last full month's statement from each platform you are on.

Step one: what did it cost you

From the statement, write down for the month:

• Total order value that went through the platform.
• Total commission and fees taken off it.
• The number of orders.

Divide the fees by the order value and you have your real effective rate, which is usually not the headline number in your contract. Fees, promotions you opted into and service charges all land in there.

Keep that figure. It is the only rate that matters for this decision.

Step two: how many of those customers were theirs

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that decides the answer.

Go through the orders and sort them:

• New customers. A first order from an address you have not seen before.
• Repeat customers. The same address or name ordering again.

If you cannot tell from the platform's own reporting, take one busy week and do it by hand. A rough split is enough.

Now the honest framing. On the new customers, the commission bought you something: an introduction to someone who did not know you existed. On the repeats, it bought you nothing. You are paying a finder's fee, monthly, forever, for a customer who was already yours.

Step three: the two numbers that decide it

Cost of discovery. Commission on new-customer orders, divided by the number of new customers. That is what the platform charges you to meet someone. Compare it to what a leaflet drop, a local sponsorship or a Google listing costs you per new customer. Often the platform wins this one, and that is worth admitting.

Cost of habit. Commission on repeat orders. That is the number with no service attached to it. Annualise it, because that is the figure that changes minds. Our commission calculator will do this part with your own inputs.

If cost of discovery looks reasonable and cost of habit looks painful, the answer is not "leave". The answer is "keep the listing, move the regulars".

Step four: the things the arithmetic misses

Who holds the customer. The platform has the phone number, the address and the order history. You have a name on a bag. That has a value you will only feel when you want to tell two hundred regulars you have a new menu, and cannot.

Your prices on the app. Many operators raise marketplace prices to absorb the commission. Fair enough, but it makes your own channel look expensive by comparison, and your regulars notice.

Their drivers. If you do not have your own, the platform's delivery fleet is a real service you would otherwise have to buy or build. Do not net that off to zero.

Ranking. You are one tile in a grid, competing with everyone else, including whoever is paying for promotion this week.

Step five: the decision

Three outcomes, and only the middle one is common.

The platform earns its keep. Mostly new customers, rate you can live with, no drivers of your own. Stay, and do nothing else.

Both, deliberately. Discovery from the platform, repeats direct. This is where most takeaways land, and it is not a compromise. Each channel does the thing it is good at.

Time to reduce it. Overwhelmingly repeats, a rate that hurts, your own drivers already. Build your own channel properly first, move the regulars, and then decide about the listing once you can see what moved.

The one thing not to do is leave in a temper before your own ordering works. You lose the discovery and you have nowhere for the habit to go.

A word on negotiating

You can ask for a better rate, and operators with volume sometimes get one. Worth a phone call. But a smaller percentage of every order forever is still a percentage of every order forever, and it does not change who holds the customer. Treat it as a way to reduce the bill while you build the direct channel.

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Tekeats is the direct channel: your own ordering site and apps, card payments into your own account, and a fixed fee per site with nothing taken from any order. We have no drivers, so if you need someone else's, that is what the platforms are for. Book a demo and we will tell you honestly whether it fits.