DoorDash and Uber Eats are destroying your restaurant's profitability and you're telling yourself it's worth it for the exposure. I've analyzed the financials for restaurants paying 25-30% commission on delivery orders, and the math is brutal—you're working harder to make less money while these platforms own your customer relationships and data.
Here's what actually happens when someone orders your $18 pasta through DoorDash. You get $12.60 after the 30% commission. Your food cost on that pasta is $5.40 (30% of menu price, which is already tight). Your labor, rent, utilities, and overhead bring it to $14 total cost. You just lost $1.40 on that order. Multiply that by two hundred orders a week, and you're bleeding $280 weekly to subsidize DoorDash's business model.
The customer ownership problem is worse than the commission fees. When someone orders through a third-party app, you never get their contact information. They're not your customer—they're DoorDash's customer who happened to order from your kitchen this time. Next week, DoorDash suggests your competitor because that's who bid more for promoted placement. You paid the commission, did the work, and lost the relationship.
Restaurants tell me "but we get so much volume from these apps" like that justifies losing money on every order. Volume without profit is just busy work. I watched a sandwich shop do $40,000 in monthly delivery app sales and net $2,800 after all costs. They were working sixty-hour weeks to barely break even on delivery while their dine-in business suffered because the kitchen was slammed with app orders.
The promoted placement trap is where these platforms really screw restaurants. Your orders drop, so DoorDash offers to feature you more prominently—for an additional 5-10% commission. Now you're paying 35-40% to maintain the volume you used to get at 30%. It's a subscription model where they slowly increase the price while providing the same service.
Menu pricing is where restaurants try to recover margins and end up destroying their reputation. You raise your delivery prices to offset the commission, so your $18 pasta is $24 on DoorDash. Customers see that markup, feel gouged, and leave bad reviews. Or you keep prices the same and lose money on every order. Either way, you lose.
The data transparency issue is infuriating. These platforms don't share customer details, order patterns, or behavior data. You have no idea if the same person orders every Tuesday or if you're getting one-time customers constantly churning. That data would let you market directly to repeat customers and build loyalty, but the apps keep it locked away because that information is valuable and they're not sharing it.
Tablet chaos is the operational nightmare nobody talks about. You've got iPads from DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub all pinging during dinner rush. Orders come in on three different systems with different interfaces. Your kitchen staff is constantly checking multiple screens, orders get missed, and mistakes spike. Every error costs you money and creates a bad customer experience that damages your reputation, not the app's.
Building your own direct ordering system sounds good in theory, but most restaurants can't drive enough traffic to it because customers are already trained to use DoorDash. You need consistent online visibility, accurate information across platforms, and a strong local presence to make direct ordering viable. RestaurantDestinations.com directories help solve this by driving qualified local traffic directly to your website and ordering system, where you keep 100% of the revenue and own the customer relationship, without paying 30% to a middleman who's actively working to make your restaurant interchangeable with every other option on their platform.