The Direct Ordering Playbook

Keep the delivery apps for new customers, and move your repeat customers to ordering from you directly, where you know who they are and can bring them back.

  • Free playbook
  • 10-minute read
  • PDF, 9 pages
  • Restaurants and kitchens on Chowdeck, Glovo and other delivery apps

If I owned a restaurant doing serious volume on delivery apps, I would not leave them. I would just stop letting them own the entire customer relationship. The apps are useful: they already have the customers and the demand, and people open them ready to order. The problem starts when the same customer orders from you ten times and you still barely know who they are.

This is the playbook I would use to start making that transition. You keep the apps for discovery, stay inside your contract with them, make ordering from you the easiest option, give people a reason to choose it, and measure the shift every month. None of it asks you to change a single price.

Martins Udotai, co-founder and CEO of Dinesurf

What's inside

  1. The app found the customer. Stop paying to find them again.Read it below
  2. Step 1: Work out what your repeat customers cost youRead it below
  3. Step 2: Check your contract before you start In the PDF
  4. Step 3: Make ordering from you the easiest option In the PDF
  5. Step 4: Give people a reason to order direct that is not price In the PDF
  6. Step 5: Capture every direct customer in your own guest list In the PDF
  7. Messages you can copy In the PDF
  8. Step 6: Measure the shift every month In the PDF

The app found the customer. Stop paying to find them again.

Delivery apps are good at something that is hard to do alone: putting your food in front of people who have never heard of you. That is worth paying for. What is not worth paying for, over and over, is the same customer.

Take a $50 order. If the app takes 25%, $12.50 is gone before you have paid for the food, the labour or the packaging. Now say a regular orders ₦15,000 twice a month: that is ₦360,000 a year through the app and, at 25%, ₦90,000 in commission for a customer you had already won. And after all those orders you still cannot invite them back: Glovo’s Nigerian terms let you use a customer’s details only to fulfil their order, and Chowdeck masks their email and phone number in your dashboard.

So direct ordering is not really about saving commission. It is about customer lifetime value. When someone orders from you directly, you know who they are, and the first order can lead to the second and the third.

Step 1: Work out what your repeat customers cost you

Before you change anything, spend an hour with your last three months of app statements. Four numbers tell you what is at stake.

  1. Orders and sales, per app, per month

    How many orders each app sent you, and what they were worth. This is your starting line, and the number you want to keep steady.

  2. What each app order really costs you

    Add up the commission, payment fees, promotions and ads for the month, then divide by the number of orders.

  3. How many of those orders were repeats

    If your app dashboard shows returning customers, use that figure. If it does not, make an honest estimate with your kitchen: they know the orders that come in every week.

  4. What you pay to reach people who already know you

    Multiply the month’s commission and fees by your repeat share. Say the apps took ₦600,000 last month and half the orders were repeats: about ₦300,000 went on customers you had already won. That is the number this playbook works on.

The rest of the playbook is in the PDF

6 more parts, ready to print or keep on your phone:

  • Step 2: Check your contract before you start
  • Step 3: Make ordering from you the easiest option
  • Step 4: Give people a reason to order direct that is not price
  • Step 5: Capture every direct customer in your own guest list
  • Messages you can copy
  • Step 6: Measure the shift every month

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Dinesurf

Run this playbook on Dinesurf

  • Customers order directly on your own website, with no commission on those orders, and each one lands in Guestbook with their order history. See how
  • Dinesurf builds and hosts your website on your own domain, with your menu, ordering, reservations and events, built to be found on Google. See how
  • Smart filters find your New Guests (last 30 days), Top Spenders and Lapsed (90+ days) guests, so you know who to thank and who to bring back. See how
  • Send newsletters to your whole Guestbook, a tag or a filtered group, and see the opens and clicks in the campaign report.
  • Turn on the birthday email, and the win-back email for guests last seen 90 to 120 days ago, checked every Monday.
  • Running both? See how your own ordering compares with Chowdeck. See how
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