Top 5 Direct Ordering Platforms for Restaurants
What is a direct ordering platform?
A direct ordering platform lets a restaurant take orders through its own website or app instead of through Just Eat, Deliveroo or Uber Eats. The customer sees your name, your menu and your branding. The order comes to you, and so do the customer's contact details and order history.
There's no per-order commission. You pay for the software, usually a monthly fee, plus card processing. You set the menu, the prices, the delivery area and the offers, and nobody ranks you below a competitor who paid for a promoted slot.
It won't replace marketplaces overnight, and plenty of restaurants on this list keep at least one of them running. The point is to have a second channel where the margin stays with you.
Why restaurants are moving orders to their own channel
Marketplace commission averages 25-35% of the order. Take a restaurant doing £500,000 a year through marketplaces. At 35% that's £175,000 in fees. At 25% it's £125,000. That money comes straight off the top, before food cost, wages or rent.
Per order, the gap is easy to see. An order placed on your own website or app costs around £3-£5 in payment processing. The same order through a marketplace costs £7-£12 in commission. Same food, same customer.
The catch is discovery. Marketplaces bring in people who have never heard of you, and that's what the commission pays for. Fair enough. But once someone has eaten in your restaurant or ordered from you once, you've already paid for the introduction. Paying 30% again on every order after that makes very little sense. The job is to turn those repeat customers into direct ones.
Top 5 direct ordering platforms for restaurants
1. Flipdish
Flipdish comes first because it covers the most ground for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. You get website ordering, a branded mobile app, loyalty, marketing and a POS in one platform, so there's no stitching together of separate tools.
Flipdish charges a monthly platform fee instead of commission on each order. As your order volume grows, the cost per order falls. That's the opposite of how a marketplace works, where every extra order adds another 25-35% to the bill.
Customers order on your own website or through your branded restaurant app. They don't land on a Flipdish page. Your name and logo are what they see.
Loyalty is built in. Every direct order can earn points, which gives people a reason to open your app next time instead of tapping a marketplace icon out of habit. The loyalty and retention tools sit in the same platform as ordering.
The Flipdish AI Marketing platform finds customers who haven't ordered in a while and sends them an offer. Nobody has to build a customer list or write a campaign every week. For a small team that is the difference between marketing that happens and marketing that's always on next week's to-do list.
Direct orders go straight into the Flipdish POS alongside counter orders. Staff work from one queue instead of two. Online ordering tends to go wrong in the middle of a busy service, when tickets are coming from a tablet, a printer and a till and somebody misses one. Having everything in one place stops that.
If you get a lot of phone orders, the Flipdish AI Phone Agent answers the call, takes the order and handles payment without anyone on your team picking up. Anyone who has run a takeaway on a Saturday night knows what a ringing phone does to a kitchen.
And if you're keeping Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats for now, Flipdish's order management system puts those orders on the same screen as your direct ones. The row of tablets by the pass, one per marketplace, can go.
2. Slerp
Slerp does direct ordering for restaurants and food businesses, with a focus on online preorders and scheduled delivery. That suits bakeries and food producers better than a full-service restaurant, or a takeaway that has to push through a high volume of orders quickly. It has a branded website but no branded app, and its POS connections come through third parties.
3. Hungrrr
Hungrrr is a white-label ordering and app platform for restaurants and hospitality venues. You get branded ordering on the web and in an app. Its loyalty features are more limited than Flipdish's, and the POS integration isn't as deep as a native one. If you already have a POS you're happy with, the second point may not bother you. The first one probably will if loyalty is central to your plan.
4. GloriaFood
GloriaFood used to be a free direct ordering tool for restaurants. Oracle bought it, and it now sits inside Oracle's product range. If your online ordering has run on GloriaFood as a standalone tool, it's time to look at alternatives. Its POS connection is Oracle only, and it has no branded app or loyalty.
5. Ordoo
Ordoo does mobile pre-ordering for cafés and casual dining. It works for collection-focused places with a busy daytime trade, where people order ahead and walk in to pick up. It's a weaker fit for takeaways or restaurants that live on delivery.
Direct ordering platform comparison
| Platform | Branded website | Branded app | Loyalty | AI marketing | POS integration | Phone ordering |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Flipdish | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ Native | ✅ AI agent |
| Slerp | ✅ | ❌ | Basic | ❌ | Third-party | ❌ |
| Hungrrr | ✅ | ✅ | Basic | ❌ | Third-party | ❌ |
| GloriaFood | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Oracle only | ❌ |
| Ordoo | ✅ | ✅ | Basic | ❌ | Limited | ❌ |
What to check before you pick one
Start with the kitchen, not the website. Ask where the orders actually appear. If they land on a separate tablet, your staff will have to re-key them or juggle two screens, and that cost shows up as mistakes and slow tickets. A platform that feeds your POS directly avoids it.
Ask how delivery works. Some platforms are built around collection and preorders, others expect you to deliver. If you don't have your own drivers, find out now what the options are, because a direct ordering site with no way to get food to people is only half the job.
Check who owns the customer data. You want names, emails and order history in a system you can export from, since that list is the main thing you're building. Then look at how fees are set up: a flat monthly fee, a percentage, setup charges, contract length. A low headline fee with a percentage on top is just a smaller marketplace.
Ask to see it working, too. A demo with your own menu loaded tells you more than a feature list: how many taps it takes to order, how modifiers like extra toppings or sides behave, and what staff see when an order comes in. Then ask for the names of a couple of restaurants of your size already using it.
Finally, think about whether you want an app at all. A branded app costs more effort than a website, but it's the only version where you can send a push notification straight to a customer's phone. If most of your trade is walk-in collection, a website may be enough to start with.
How to move customers from marketplace to direct
Get your ordering website and app live before you start any campaign. Customers need somewhere to go, and a broken link on a flyer is a wasted flyer.
Tell your existing customers. Put your direct ordering link or QR code on receipts, packaging, in-store signage and social media. A first-order discount on direct orders speeds up the switch. Check what your marketplace agreements say about promoting your own channel before you put anything inside a delivery bag.
Keep the marketplaces, but adjust prices. Many restaurants stay on marketplaces and price items a little higher there to cover the commission. That makes the direct menu look cheaper without giving up the discovery that marketplaces provide. Read your contract first, as some marketplaces have rules on pricing.
Use loyalty to hold on to them. Once someone has ordered directly once, loyalty points give them a reason to come back the same way. Flipdish loyalty earns points across all direct channels.
Message them. App customers can be reached directly. Push notifications work for new dishes, limited offers and seasonal specials, and they don't depend on someone opening an email.
None of this has to happen in one go. Start with the receipt and the QR code, then add the rest as direct orders build up.
How much can you save?
Say a mid-sized restaurant takes £15,000 a month through marketplaces at 28% commission. That's £4,200 a month in fees. Move half of those orders to a commission-free direct channel and £7,500 of sales stops attracting that 28%. The saving is £2,100 a month, or about £25,000 a year.
A smaller takeaway doing £8,000 a month through marketplaces at 30% pays £2,400 in commission. If 60% of those orders move to its own channel, £4,800 of sales stops paying commission, which is £1,440 a month or £17,280 a year.
That's before the cost of the direct channel itself, so take off your platform fee and card processing to get the real number.
Flipdish online ordering pricing is available on request. Flipdish says most operators get their money back within the first three months on the platform.
Further reading
For independent comparisons of direct ordering platforms and restaurant technology, visit restauranttech.co.uk.
Book a demo
Flipdish helps restaurants build direct ordering channels that reduce marketplace dependency and grow customer lifetime value. Request a demo to see how it works for your restaurant.