Delivery without losing the margin: your own checkout vs. third-party apps

The margin math, stated plainly

A delivery order taken through your own checkout and paid into your own Stripe account keeps the whole ticket — no commission comes off the top of a sale placed that way. A delivery order routed through a third-party app pays that platform a cut before you see a dollar of it. Neither path is wrong on its own; plenty of restaurants keep a presence on third-party apps for the reach it brings. The point of running your own delivery channel isn't to replace that — it's to give guests who already know you a way to order direct, where nothing gets skimmed off the ticket.

Set the zone you can actually reach

The most useful lever you have over delivery margin is refusing orders outside a zone you can actually serve well. Configure the ZIP codes you'll deliver to, and an order from an address outside that zone gets declined at checkout with a note pointing the guest to pickup instead — rather than a driver getting sent forty minutes out and eating an hour of labor on one ticket. A tight, honest zone protects your margin far more than a wide one you can't consistently hit on time.

Pricing delivery is your call, not something checkout does for you

Here's a detail worth being precise about: there's no separate delivery-fee line item computed automatically at checkout today. Tax and whatever service charge you've configured apply the same way to every order regardless of how it's fulfilled. If you want delivery priced differently than pickup — a flat add-on, pricing built into the menu for delivery orders, whatever makes sense for your kitchen — that's a decision you make and apply yourself, not a field the checkout fills in for you. Know that going in rather than assuming the platform is quietly handling delivery pricing on its own.

Driver logistics: the part that stays real-world either way

However you take the order, someone still has to drive it. If you're using your own staff, factor in mileage, insurance, and the time a driver is off the floor doing something other than serving tables. If you're using a hired or contract driver, the same math applies plus whatever you're paying them per run or per hour. There's no dispatch, no routing, and no driver app in the product — an order lands with the address and ZIP attached, and getting it to the door from there is on you, the same way it would be if you were running delivery entirely on paper.

Delivery is still taxed like everything else

One thing that doesn't change based on how an order is fulfilled: prepared food sold for delivery carries the same Texas sales tax as a dine-in or pickup order — 6.25% state, plus up to 2% in combined local taxes, for a maximum combined rate of 8.25%. Set your rate once for your address and it applies the same way across pickup, delivery, and dine-in tickets.

Where in-house delivery actually pays off

In-house delivery through your own checkout works best for the guests who already know you — regulars ordering from their phone instead of calling, or a neighborhood you can genuinely reach fast. It's not a wholesale replacement for third-party reach, and treating it that way sets you up to be disappointed. Treat it as a second channel that keeps the whole ticket on orders you were likely to get anyway, and let the zone and the pricing you set reflect what your own kitchen and your own drivers can actually deliver on.