Just Eat Alternative for Restaurants: How to Grow Direct Orders

Do restaurants need Just Eat?

No. Just Eat is a channel, and most restaurants joined it for one reason: it sent customers from day one. You list your menu and the audience is already there. The catch is the bill, which grows every time your order volume does.

This guide covers how to build your own ordering channel so Just Eat becomes one source of orders instead of the main one, and which platforms are worth a look in the UK and Ireland.

What Just Eat costs restaurants

Fees depend on your contract, so check yours before you do any maths. In general, a restaurant on Just Eat pays:

  • Commission on each order, usually 14% or more
  • Marketing fees on top, which in a busy postcode start to feel compulsory if you want to show up near the top of the list
  • A per-delivery charge when Just Eat's couriers do the drop

At £10,000 a month, 14% is £1,400 in commission before you've spent anything on marketing.

The money isn't even the main problem. A Just Eat customer is Just Eat's customer. They don't join your loyalty scheme, they don't get your texts, and they probably couldn't tell you the name of the place they ordered from last week. Every order starts from zero, and to win the next one you pay for visibility again.

What direct ordering looks like

Customers order from your own website, your own app or a kiosk in the shop instead of a marketplace. A few things change when they do.

Payment processing usually runs somewhere between 2% and 5%, against 14% or more in commission. You see who ordered, what they ordered and when, so you can text someone who ordered every Friday until three weeks ago. The ordering page looks like your restaurant, not a list of forty other restaurants. And your visibility doesn't depend on how Just Eat decides to rank you this month.

The hard part is the first direct order. People who are used to opening the Just Eat app won't switch because you put a link on your website. Regulars are the easiest to move, because they already like you and only need a reason and a nudge. More on that below.

The best Just Eat alternatives for restaurants

1. Flipdish

Flipdish gives a restaurant its own ordering channel: a branded restaurant website, a mobile app and, if you want them, self-service kiosks. All of it connects to your restaurant POS, so direct orders land in the same place as everything else.

The customer relationship is yours. Anyone who orders through your Flipdish website or app is in your database with their contact details, order history and buying habits. That's the thing Just Eat won't give you, and it's what makes the rest of this work.

You also keep the margin. With no marketplace commission on direct orders, more of each sale stays with you. The worked example further down puts numbers on it.

Flipdish's marketing tools cover loyalty schemes, automated SMS campaigns, discount vouchers and promotions, all aimed at people who have already ordered from you. You can't do any of that on Just Eat. AI Marketing goes a step further and picks which customers to contact, what to offer them and when, so you're not building every campaign by hand.

Phone orders are the other gap for a lot of takeaways. The AI Phone Agent answers calls and takes orders around the clock, so nobody has to stop what they're doing in the kitchen to pick up the phone on a Saturday night.

And if you keep Just Eat running alongside your own channel, Flipdish's order management platform pulls orders from Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats into your POS. The kitchen works from one queue whatever the source.

It suits any restaurant, takeaway or QSR in the UK or Ireland that wants to cut marketplace commission and build a customer base it owns.

2. Hungrrr

Hungrrr is a UK online ordering platform that provides branded websites and apps for restaurants, with customers across UK hospitality. It makes sense if all you want is your own ordering channel and you're happy to handle POS and marketing separately.

Hungrrr is mainly an ordering product. Flipdish covers ordering, POS, kiosks, AI phone ordering, loyalty and marketing in one system, which matters if you'd rather not run four vendors.

3. Slerp

Slerp is a UK platform for online ordering and delivery management. It supports click-and-collect and delivery from your own website.

Its focus is the online channel. It doesn't come with a full POS, kiosks or AI tools. Flipdish ties the ordering channel into the rest of the restaurant, so a direct order, a kiosk order and a phone order all end up in the same system.

4. OrderYOYO

OrderYOYO offers branded websites and apps to independent restaurants and takeaways for a fixed monthly fee instead of commission. For a small operation with a simple setup, a flat fee is easy to budget for.

It's built for those simpler setups. If you want POS integration, kiosks and multi-site management alongside your direct channel, Flipdish fits better.

How to move customers from Just Eat to your own channel

  1. Build the direct channel first. Set up your Flipdish website and app, import your menu and place a few test orders yourself. Don't tell customers about it until the ordering flow works properly.
  2. Put the link where people already look. Add an "Order Online" button to your Google Business profile, your Instagram bio and your Facebook page, and put it near the top of your website homepage.
  3. Tell your counter staff. When someone collects an order, they should mention the app and say that ordering direct is simpler and often cheaper.
  4. Run a launch offer that only works direct. 10% off the first order through the app is a common one. It gives people a reason to try it once, and once is all you need.
  5. Move phone orders online. The AI Phone Agent takes calls and turns them into orders, which cuts missed calls and the labour spent on the phone.
  6. Give people a reason to come back. Once they're ordering direct, use Flipdish's loyalty and marketing tools for stamps, points and automatic reorder reminders. That's what keeps them from drifting back to Just Eat.
  7. Scale back Just Eat slowly. Don't pull your listing in the first week. Keep it live while the direct channel grows, look at the numbers every quarter and adjust what you spend on the marketplace.

If you plan to put flyers or stickers in Just Eat delivery bags, read your contract first. Some marketplace agreements have rules about promoting other channels, and you don't want to find that out after the fact.

What to say at the counter

Plenty of customers use Just Eat out of habit and not because they're loyal to it. A short line at pickup does more than most people expect:

"Did you know you can order directly from us on our app? You earn loyalty points and orders go straight to our kitchen so the wait time is accurate."

Say it every time, not just when you remember. Pair it with something small, like a stamp card or a free item on the fifth order, and the switch happens faster. Staff who say it consistently will usually see direct orders start to climb within a few weeks, though how fast depends on how many regulars you have.

The financial case

Take a takeaway doing £15,000 a month through Just Eat at 14% commission. That's £2,100 a month, or £25,200 a year, going to Just Eat.

Now say half of those orders move to your own channel, where you pay about 3% in payment processing:

  • Just Eat cost on £7,500: £1,050
  • Direct cost on £7,500: £225
  • Monthly saving: £825
  • Annual saving: £9,900

That covers the cost of a Flipdish platform with money left over. A busier restaurant saves more in direct proportion.

The saving you can't put in a spreadsheet is the customer list. Someone who returns because of a loyalty text costs you almost nothing to win back. Someone who returns through Just Eat costs you another 14%.

Keeping Just Eat while direct orders grow

You don't have to leave Just Eat, and for a lot of restaurants leaving would be a mistake. The marketplace puts you in front of people who have never heard of you. What you're changing is the split: fewer orders from regulars going through Just Eat, and more going through your own app.

Flipdish's order management tools let you run Just Eat, Deliveroo, Uber Eats and your own channel at once, with every order flowing into one POS kitchen queue from one dashboard. One screen in the kitchen instead of four tablets stacked on the pass.

So the marketplace keeps doing what it's good at, which is finding new customers, and your own channel does the job of keeping them.

Why Flipdish comes first on this list

Just Eat gives you volume but not margin, and customers but not their data. Flipdish is built the other way round. More of your orders come from people who know your brand, use your app and get rewarded for returning.

The Flipdish online ordering platform works with restaurants and takeaways across the UK and Ireland, and its ordering, POS, loyalty, AI and marketing tools sit in one place. One vendor, one login, one view of your customers.

For more restaurant technology comparisons, see restauranttech.co.uk.