Your own website ordering vs. third-party delivery apps

What a delivery app genuinely buys you

The honest case for a delivery app is real: it puts you in front of someone who's already hungry, already browsing nearby, and has never heard of your restaurant. That's discovery you didn't have to build, and for a new location or a slow night, that matters. The trade is a cut of every order taken through the app — the exact percentage varies by platform and by which service tier you're on — plus a checkout, delivery, and guest relationship that all sit on somebody else's app. The person who ordered from you tonight is, as far as your own records are concerned, mostly a stranger. You don't get their phone number, their order history, or an easy way to reach them again without paying for another order through the same channel.

What your own ordering page buys you instead

A guest who orders through your own site got there some other way — a regular who bookmarked you, a search for your restaurant by name, a link from your Instagram, a table tent that says "order ahead" with your address on it. None of that traffic owes anyone a percentage. The order runs through your own Stripe account, so the money lands with you on your processor's normal schedule rather than someone else's payout cycle, and you keep the guest's order history and contact details to actually build on — a returning-guest profile, a "we saw you liked the queso" follow-up, whatever you choose to do with it. What it doesn't do is put your restaurant in front of somebody who's never heard of you. A perfectly built ordering page with zero traffic pointed at it sits there quietly.

The commission difference, honestly stated

It's tempting to put a number here and act like it settles the argument, but delivery app commission structures vary by platform, by tier, and by whatever deal you've negotiated — there's no single figure that's true for every restaurant reading this. What is consistently true is the shape of it: a delivery app takes its cut as a percentage of the order, every order, for as long as you keep using it, while your own site's cost is a flat platform subscription that doesn't move whether you sell ten orders a day or a hundred. Whether that trade favors the app or your own site for you specifically depends entirely on your actual order volume and whatever rate you're being charged — worth working out with your own numbers rather than someone else's rule of thumb.

Sales tax doesn't change based on the channel

Whichever way an order comes in, Texas taxes the food the same way: the 6.25% state sales tax rate, plus up to 2% in local city, county, transit, and special-purpose district tax, for a combined rate capped at 8.25% anywhere in the state. What can differ by channel is who's actually responsible for collecting and remitting it — some platforms fold tax handling into their own checkout, while an order on your own site puts that math, and the responsibility for filing it correctly, on you. Set your rate once under your own site's settings and it applies to every online ticket automatically; confirm separately, in writing, exactly what any third-party platform is and isn't handling on your behalf.

Where most restaurants actually land

In practice, the restaurants that do best over a few years don't pick a side — they run a delivery app for the discovery it genuinely provides, especially early on, and steadily build a habit among regulars, referrals, and search traffic to order direct instead. The direct channel doesn't need to replace the app on day one; it just needs to exist, with a menu and a cart that actually work, so that every guest who'd rather order straight from you has somewhere to do it. The restaurants that lose the most are the ones that never build the second option at all, and end up paying a toll on every single order indefinitely because the alternative was never there.