Flat-fee vs. commission pricing for restaurant online orders
Short answer
Commission pricing costs nothing until an order comes through, then takes a percentage of every single one — cheap when your online order volume is low, expensive once it isn't. A flat fee costs the same whether the kitchen fires ten online orders a month or a thousand, so it gets cheaper per order the busier you actually are. There's a real crossover point where flat fee starts winning, and for a restaurant with steady online demand, it usually arrives sooner than most owners expect.
Why commission pricing feels safe at first
Commission-based ordering is genuinely appealing for a restaurant that isn't sure how much online demand it even has yet, because there's no fixed cost sitting there whether an order comes in or not. A slow week with barely any online orders costs you nothing extra under a commission model — you only ever pay against revenue you actually took in. That's a real advantage for a brand-new online ordering setup, or a dining room where walk-ins still make up most of the business. The downside doesn't show up until online orders start arriving steadily, at which point "you only pay when you earn" stops sounding as good, because now you're earning a meaningful amount online and paying against every dollar of it.
Doing the actual crossover math
Take a concrete, made-up example, not a real rate: suppose an ordering platform charges a 15% commission, and a flat-fee alternative runs $100 a month. At an average online ticket of $30, a 15% commission works out to $4.50 per order. Divide $100 by $4.50 and you get roughly 22 — meaning once you're taking around 22 online orders a month, the flat fee has already become the cheaper option, and every order past that is money the commission model would keep taking that the flat fee wouldn't. For a restaurant doing even a handful of online orders a day, that threshold arrives inside the first week or two of the month. Run the same math with your own average ticket and whatever rate you're actually being charged; the shape of the answer holds even when the exact numbers change.
Where commission pricing keeps making sense
Commission pricing isn't a bad model — it fits a specific situation: low or unpredictable online order volume where a fixed monthly cost would sit mostly unused. A restaurant just starting to test online ordering, or one where the dining room is genuinely the whole business and online is an afterthought, has a legitimate case for paying only against orders that actually land. The mistake isn't choosing commission pricing to start; it's staying on it long after online orders became a real, steady part of how the restaurant makes money.
Where flat-fee pricing takes over
Flat-fee pricing wins the moment online order volume becomes steady rather than occasional, because a commission never stops taking its percentage — it scales with revenue forever — while a flat fee stops scaling entirely once you've paid it. For a restaurant doing regular lunch and dinner online volume, or one running online ordering across more than one location, the difference compounds fast: an owner running two or three rooms under a percentage model pays that percentage in every one of them, while a flat per-site subscription doesn't multiply the same way.
The one thing pricing model alone doesn't tell you
Neither pricing model, by itself, tells you what you're actually getting for the money — a menu with real option groups, a delivery zone that actually refuses an address outside it, a ticket that reaches the kitchen the moment it's paid for. A cheap commission on a platform that doesn't do those things isn't actually cheap; you're paying for the shortfall somewhere else, usually in a missed order or a delivery driver turned around at the door. Compare pricing models on the assumption that the underlying ordering system already does its job correctly, and only then decide which payment structure fits how much you're actually selling online.
Questions
Is a card-processing fee the same thing as a commission?
No. A processing fee — typically a couple of percent plus a small flat charge per transaction, through Stripe or a similar processor — is the cost of moving the money, and it applies no matter what pricing model you're on. A commission is an additional cut of the order itself, taken by whatever platform facilitated it. Flat-fee ordering software still involves a processing fee; it just doesn't add a commission on top of it.
At roughly what order volume does flat fee start winning?
It depends on the exact commission percentage and the flat fee in question, but the math is straightforward to run with your own numbers: divide the flat monthly fee by the commission percentage times your average ticket size to find the order count where the two cross over. For a restaurant doing steady online volume, that crossover point tends to land well within a single month, not months out.
Does commission pricing ever make sense for a real restaurant?
It can, for genuinely low or unpredictable online order volume — a dining room that only takes a handful of online orders a week because most business walks in the door. Once online orders become a steady, meaningful slice of revenue rather than occasional, the math tends to move toward flat fee, because a commission never stops scaling with revenue and a flat fee always stops scaling at all.
Sources
- LuperIQ Restaurant — online ordering — checked 2026-08-30
Take the order yourself
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