Just Eat Alternative: How Restaurants Can Take More Direct Orders
Why restaurants are looking for a Just Eat alternative
Just Eat is one of the biggest food delivery marketplaces in the UK and Ireland. If you run a takeaway or a delivery-heavy restaurant, it puts you in front of a lot of people who would never have found you otherwise. That part works.
The problem is what it costs. Just Eat takes commission on every order, usually somewhere between 14% and 30% depending on your contract and whether they handle the delivery. Say you put £12,000 a month through the platform. That's £1,680 to £3,600 gone every month, or roughly £20,000 to £43,000 a year. That money doesn't go back into your kitchen, your staff or your own marketing.
Commission isn't the only complaint. When someone orders through Just Eat, Just Eat has the customer. You get the order and a delivery address. You can't email them next month, you can't run a loyalty scheme off their order history, and you can't build much of a relationship with someone you never really get to talk to.
Commission also grows with you. It's a percentage of revenue, so a busier month means a bigger bill. A fixed software fee stays the same whether you do 200 orders or 2,000.
Then there's the fact that you're trading on someone else's platform. If Just Eat changes how it ranks restaurants, puts its fees up or rewrites its policies, your order numbers can move overnight and there isn't much you can do about it. And plenty of customers will say they "got a Just Eat" on Friday rather than naming your restaurant.
What a Just Eat alternative actually looks like
Swapping Just Eat for Deliveroo or Uber Eats doesn't fix much. You'd be paying similar or higher commission to a different company. The real alternative is a direct ordering channel: your own website, your own branded app, or both, sending orders straight to your kitchen with no marketplace in the middle.
| Ordering channel | Commission | Customer data | Loyalty possible | Who owns the relationship |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Just Eat | 14-30% | No | No | Just Eat |
| Direct website | None | Yes | Yes | Your restaurant |
| Branded mobile app | None | Yes | Yes | Your restaurant |
| Deliveroo | 25-35% | No | No | Deliveroo |
| Uber Eats | 15-35% | No | No | Uber Eats |
Most restaurants shouldn't pull off Just Eat tomorrow. The aim is to get your regulars, the people who already know your food, ordering direct, and keep the marketplaces for finding new customers. This is usually called marketplace displacement. You pay commission on fewer and fewer orders over time without giving up the reach.
The best Just Eat alternatives for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish is restaurant software for food businesses that want more of their orders coming in direct. You get your own branded ordering website and mobile app, both connected to a restaurant POS system, so an online order shows up on the kitchen screen the same way an order taken at the counter does.
There's no commission on orders through your Flipdish channel. You keep the full value of the order. Flipdish charges a fixed platform fee instead, so the cost doesn't go up every time someone orders a curry.
A few things put it ahead of the others on this list.
- The AI marketing platform spots customers who haven't ordered in a while and sends them campaigns to bring them back through your own website or app. Nobody on your team has to build each campaign by hand.
- Website and app orders go straight into the Flipdish POS, so the kitchen works from one queue instead of a counter full of tablets.
- Loyalty is built in. Points, rewards and offers all run from the same platform, which gives customers an actual reason to order from you instead of opening Just Eat out of habit.
- If you have more than one site, you can manage menus and see reporting for all of them in one place.
Flipdish is used by restaurants across the UK and Ireland, from single independent takeaways to large multi-location groups. If you want the website, app, POS, loyalty and marketing from one supplier, it covers more of that than anything else here.
2. Slerp
Slerp is a UK direct ordering platform for food and drink businesses. You get a branded ordering website, and it connects to payment processors. It suits smaller operations. There's no branded mobile app, no full POS integration and no AI marketing, and those gaps start to matter once you're trying to move a real share of orders off the marketplaces.
3. StoreKit
StoreKit does online ordering and QR code ordering at the table. It leans towards table service more than delivery and takeaway. If you're trying to replace marketplace revenue, there are pieces missing, because you don't get the full set of website, app, loyalty and POS working together.
4. Deliverect
Deliverect comes up a lot in these conversations, but it's a different kind of product. It pulls orders from Just Eat, Uber Eats, Deliveroo and others into one dashboard, so you aren't juggling three tablets on a Saturday night. That's useful. It doesn't touch the commission, though. Every order still comes through a marketplace and you still pay the fee on it. Deliverect helps you manage your marketplace presence. It doesn't replace it.
5. Hungrrr
Hungrrr is a UK direct ordering and loyalty platform for independent restaurants and small groups. It offers branded apps and websites and has some loyalty features. It's aimed at smaller operators and doesn't have the multi-location management or AI-driven marketing a larger chain would want.
6. GloriaFood (now Oracle Food and Beverage)
GloriaFood was a popular free online ordering tool for independent restaurants. Oracle bought it, and if you still rely on it, now is a good time to check where the product is heading and look at what else is out there. Flipdish works as a like-for-like replacement and does a good deal more.
How to move your customers from Just Eat to a direct channel
This takes months, not weeks. Restaurants that keep at it for six to twelve months usually see a clear change in where their orders come from.
Get the direct channel right before you promote it. Order from your own website and app a few times. Try it on an old phone with bad signal. If checkout is slow or confusing, people will go straight back to Just Eat and they won't give your site a second chance.
Then put your ordering address on everything. Packaging, receipts, napkins, bags, table cards, the counter. If a customer is looking at it, your URL should be on it.
Give people a reason to switch. A small discount on the first direct order works. So does free delivery on direct orders, or loyalty points that only build up when they order from you. "Please order direct, it helps us" works on some customers. A discount works on more of them.
Social media is easy to forget about. Anyone following you on Instagram or TikTok already likes you, so tell them to order direct and put the ordering link in your bio. Say it more than once. Most of your followers won't see the first post.
The Just Eat orders themselves are probably your best chance. Every bag that leaves your kitchen is going to someone who has just chosen your food. Put a card or sticker in it with a QR code that goes straight to your ordering page, and tell them what they get for ordering direct next time.
And track it. Check each month what share of orders came through each channel. Week to week the numbers will bounce around. The trend over a few months tells you whether it's working.
What does it cost to set up a direct ordering channel?
Most direct ordering platforms charge a monthly subscription. Commission goes up and down with your sales. A subscription doesn't.
The sums are simple. Take what you paid Just Eat in commission last month. Work out what you'd save if 30-40% of those orders came through your own channel instead. If that saving is bigger than the platform's monthly fee, switching improves your margin.
For a restaurant with a decent base of regulars and steady order volume, that point usually comes within a few months.
Flipdish's pricing for online ordering is set up for restaurants of different sizes.
What does it cost to stay on Just Eat?
| Monthly Just Eat sales | 14% commission | 20% commission | 28% commission |
|---|---|---|---|
| £5,000 | £700 | £1,000 | £1,400 |
| £10,000 | £1,400 | £2,000 | £2,800 |
| £20,000 | £2,800 | £4,000 | £5,600 |
| £30,000 | £4,200 | £6,000 | £8,400 |
Take a restaurant paying £2,000 a month in Just Eat commission. Move half of those orders to a direct channel and that's £1,000 a month that stays in the business, less whatever the platform costs. Over a year that's £12,000 before fees.
Is there value in staying on Just Eat at all?
For most restaurants, yes, at least for now. Just Eat does bring in new customers who wouldn't have found you any other way. There's no sense throwing that away.
What you want to stop is paying commission on people who already know you. Someone who found you on Just Eat in March and has ordered every Friday since has cost you commission on every one of those orders. If they'd switched to your website after the second order, you'd have kept that money.
So use Just Eat to find new customers and use your own website and app to keep them. Over time, more of your revenue comes in with no commission taken off the top.
How Flipdish helps restaurants reduce marketplace dependency
Flipdish gives you a branded website, a mobile app, a POS connected to your kitchen, customer loyalty, and AI-powered marketing that keeps bringing customers back through your own channel without you running every campaign yourself.
If you run a restaurant in the UK or Ireland and want to pay Just Eat less, start with Flipdish online ordering, or look through the full products overview to see everything the platform does.