The UK online ordering market is bigger than it has ever been — and more expensive to play in than most independents realise. UK food delivery is projected to reach £14.3bn in 2025, up 3.1% year on year (Lumina Intelligence, 2025). The platform layer alone — Deliveroo, Uber Eats, Just Eat — is on track for £3.9bn in revenue by 2025–26 at a 6% CAGR (IBISWorld, 2025).
That growth looks great on a press release. It looks rather different on a chip shop's P&L, where a 30% commission on every bag out the door is the difference between a profitable Saturday and an exhausted one.
This pillar guide is for UK restaurant owners who want to understand online ordering without being sold to by an aggregator. We cover what the market actually looks like in 2026, what direct ordering is, the real commission maths against aggregators, the compliance rules (VAT, PSD2, Natasha's Law), and how to move from paying 30% off the top to keeping it.
Key Takeaways
- UK food delivery is a £14.3bn market in 2025 (Lumina Intelligence, 2025) but aggregator commissions of 28–35% mean many independents bank less on a busy delivery night than a quiet dine-in one.
- Just Eat remains the most-used UK delivery platform, with 65% of surveyed consumers using it in the past 12 months vs 54% for Uber Eats and 52% for Deliveroo (Statista, 2025).
- A direct ordering page on your own website typically costs £0–£89 per month plus a 1.5–2.9% card fee — a fraction of aggregator commission on the same basket.
- PPDS allergen labelling under Natasha's Law applies to online orders too. FSA Food & You 2 data shows respondents reporting an adverse food reaction rose from 42% to 58% between Wave 3 and Wave 8 (FSA, 2024).
- The right mix for most independents is not "aggregator or direct" — it is both, with aggregators used as a paid acquisition channel and direct ordering used for retention.
What is restaurant online ordering in the UK in 2026?
Online ordering is any system that lets a customer build a takeaway, click-and-collect or delivery order through a screen — website, app, or third-party marketplace — and pay before the food arrives. In 2026 UK context, it splits into three distinct models.
Aggregator marketplaces are the Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat model. The platform owns the customer, handles payment, usually handles the rider, and charges a commission of roughly 28% to 35% of each order depending on your service tier and delivery method. You appear in a search feed alongside every other restaurant in a three-mile radius.
White-label direct ordering is a "order online" button on your own website that takes menu, cart, payment and order confirmation. You own the customer. You pay a flat software fee — often £0 to £89 a month — plus card processing fees in the 1.5% to 2.9% range. Rider logistics are either in-house (your own driver) or outsourced to an on-demand courier like Stuart or Uber Direct at cost.
Hybrid POS ordering is when your till system (Lightspeed, Square, Toast UK) provides an online ordering module that ties into the same menu, kitchen printer and stock engine as in-person service. Costs sit between the two above and menu changes are instant across every channel.
Most independents should run the first and second in parallel. Aggregators bring the new customer; direct ordering keeps them.
How big is UK online ordering actually?
Size matters because it explains why aggregator commissions are possible in the first place. Scale gives them pricing power. In 2025 the broader UK food delivery sector — meals consumed off-premise — hit the £14.3bn mark and grew 3.1% year on year (Lumina Intelligence, 2025). The narrower slice measured by IBISWorld, online food ordering and delivery platform revenue, is pacing toward £3.9bn by 2025–26 at a 6% compound annual growth rate (IBISWorld, 2025).
Inside that slice the usage numbers are tighter than most operators assume. In a March 2025 UK consumer survey, 65% of respondents had used Just Eat in the past 12 months, 54% had used Uber Eats, and 52% had used Deliveroo — and Just Eat alone processed 242 million orders across the UK and Ireland in 2024 (Statista, 2025). Uber Eats meanwhile has the highest brand favourability among delivery apps. For a small independent this means listing on only one platform leaves somewhere between a third and half of the delivery audience unable to order from you.
The growth story is real. The margin story on the restaurant side is not. On a typical £20 aggregator order, once you subtract a 30% platform commission and £1 of packaging, the take-home before food cost sits at roughly £13. That is what direct ordering is competing against — and winning on, once you model it.
Aggregators vs direct ordering: the real commission maths
This is the section every "aggregator 101" article avoids. The numbers below use UK averages. Plug in your own rate card and the conclusion only sharpens.
Assume a £20 average order value and 100 delivery orders a week.
| Line item | Deliveroo (30% commission) | Direct (website + Stuart courier) |
|---|---|---|
| Gross weekly revenue | £2,000 | £2,000 |
| Platform commission (30%) | −£600 | £0 |
| Software subscription (monthly ÷ 4) | £0 | −£15 |
| Card processing (2.4%) | £0 | −£48 |
| Courier fee (£3.50 per order) | Included | −£350 |
| Packaging | −£100 | −£100 |
| Net to restaurant (before food cost) | £1,300 | £1,487 |
Direct ordering nets roughly £187 more on the same 100 orders — about £9,700 a year on delivery alone. Swap the third-party courier for your own driver at £12/hr doing six runs an hour and the gap widens to roughly £16,000 a year. That is an extra full-time kitchen porter, funded entirely by not paying a 30% tax on your own customers.
The counter-argument aggregators make — fairly — is that they bring new customers who would not otherwise know your restaurant. That is true, and it is the right reason to keep them on. But it is also the reason to treat them as a paid acquisition channel, not a revenue channel. Every aggregator order should be converted into a direct-ordering customer the second time.
How do UK restaurants get started with direct ordering?
Direct ordering is not a technology project. It is four decisions, in order.
Decide your fulfilment model first. Click-and-collect only is the cheapest entry point and has near-zero operational risk — no driver, no courier API. Delivery by your own driver is the highest-margin model but needs a minimum order value of about £15 and a ~2.5-mile radius to work. Delivery via an on-demand courier (Stuart, Uber Direct, Gophr) is the middle path: you pay per drop, there is no fixed cost, and it scales with demand.
Decide where the "order online" button lives. If you already run your website on Wix, Squarespace or a builder like DineHere, a direct ordering module from the same provider is almost always cheaper and simpler than a standalone vendor. The button lives on every page, the menu updates in one place, and you pay one bill.
Decide how you handle payments. UK direct ordering must comply with PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication — that means 3D Secure 2 on every card transaction above £25. Any credible UK payment processor (Stripe, Adyen, Square) handles this automatically, but you need to confirm it before going live, not after a chargeback.
Decide your opening promo. A 10% first-order discount delivered via an on-table QR code or a receipt flyer is how you migrate aggregator customers to direct. Cost: around £2 per acquired customer, versus the ~£7 you are losing on every subsequent aggregator order from that same person.
Which platforms give UK restaurants direct ordering without an app?
There are three tiers of direct ordering software that matter in the UK in 2026. Prices below are list-price snapshots taken in April 2026.
Website-builder modules. Wix Restaurants, Squarespace Scheduling + Orders, and AI-first builders like DineHere bundle direct ordering with your website from roughly £0 to £25 a month. Best for click-and-collect-first restaurants that do not need stock sync.
Specialist direct ordering platforms. Flipdish, Slerp (now Deliverect Direct), Orderswift and Vita Mojo start at £79–£149 per month with a 1% to 2% software fee on top. Better for higher-volume operators doing 200+ weekly orders who need loyalty, SMS marketing, marketing automation and route-optimised driver dispatch.
POS-integrated ordering. Square Online for Restaurants, Lightspeed Order Anywhere and Toast UK (launched 2023) are free-to-£90 a month on top of your POS subscription, with the advantage that menu changes on the till appear online instantly and every order prints to the kitchen automatically.
The choice between the three tiers is not about features. It is about whether your constraint is cash, operational complexity or menu-sync accuracy.
What about VAT, PSD2, and Natasha's Law?
Three compliance topics catch UK restaurants off guard when they start taking online orders. None of them are scary, but none are optional.
VAT on takeaway and delivery. Hot takeaway food is standard-rated (20%) in the UK, while cold takeaway food is zero-rated — with a pile of HMRC case law in the middle, including the famous Jaffa Cake question. Your online ordering platform has to let you set VAT per product, not per order. If it only supports a single global VAT rate, it is not built for the UK.
PSD2 Strong Customer Authentication. Any card-not-present transaction above £25 needs two-factor authentication (3D Secure 2). Stripe, Adyen and Square handle this automatically for UK merchants. Test it on a real phone before launch — some older WooCommerce ordering plugins quietly break SCA and lose you one in ten transactions you did not know about.
Natasha's Law and PPDS allergen labelling. Since October 2021 any food Prepacked for Direct Sale in the UK must carry a full ingredient list with the 14 regulated allergens emphasised. Online menus count. The Food Standards Agency estimates food allergies affect roughly 1–3% of the UK population depending on how they are measured (FSA, 2024). The more important operator-side number is trust: consumer confidence in written allergen information fell from 89% in Wave 6 to 78% in Wave 8 of the Food & You 2 survey, and the share of respondents reporting an adverse food reaction rose from 42% to 58% between Wave 3 and Wave 8 (FSA, 2024). If your online ordering platform cannot flag allergens per item and export a PPDS-compliant label PDF, it is a liability, not a tool.
How do I move customers from Deliveroo to my own website?
The most valuable thing you do on any aggregator order is not the order itself. It is the moment the bag leaves your kitchen. That is the one window in which you can convert a commission-bleeding customer into a direct one, and it closes after roughly two subsequent orders.
Three tactics, in order of effectiveness:
Flyer the bag. A printed card inside every aggregator delivery saying "Order direct next time and get 15% off. Scan this QR code." Cost: about 3p per card. Even a modest conversion rate on repeat aggregator customers saves you roughly £6 per subsequent order for the rest of that customer's life.
Build a WhatsApp or SMS list. UK GDPR allows "soft opt-in" for your own customers at point of sale. Capture the phone number at checkout on direct orders, send a weekly specials message with a one-tap reorder link. Transactional SMS is read almost universally within minutes of delivery — an order of magnitude more attention than any aggregator push notification you are allowed to send.
Use loyalty points the aggregator cannot match. Deliveroo Plus is a £3.49/month free-delivery subscription owned by Deliveroo, not you. Your own loyalty — say, one free starter after eight direct orders — is yours, and it compounds. Pair it with an email capture at checkout and you own the relationship.
Case maths: a 40-cover independent doing 150 delivery orders a week
Let's run the full picture. Assume a neighbourhood pizzeria in Manchester: 40 covers dine-in, 150 delivery orders a week at a £22 average order value.
Today, 100% aggregator mix at 30% commission:
- Delivery gross: 150 × £22 × 52 = £171,600 a year
- Aggregator commission: −£51,480
- Net to restaurant before food cost: £120,120
Shift to a 50/50 split, aggregator as acquisition only:
- 75 aggregator orders/week × £22 × 52 = £85,800 (−£25,740 commission)
- 75 direct orders/week × £22 × 52 = £85,800 (−£2,000 software/year, −£2,060 card fees, −£13,650 courier fees at £3.50/drop)
- Net to restaurant before food cost: (£85,800−£25,740) + (£85,800−£2,000−£2,060−£13,650) = £128,150
Swing: +£8,030 a year with no extra marketing budget, no price increase, and no menu change. Shift to 75% direct and the swing roughly doubles. The only work involved is the flyer, the QR code, and one month of patience.
Frequently asked questions
Is direct online ordering legal in the UK?
Yes. Direct online ordering is fully compliant with UK retail, payment and food-safety law as long as you use a PSD2-compliant payment processor, charge the correct VAT rate per item and display PPDS allergen information where required. No special licence is needed beyond your existing food business registration with your local authority.
How much commission do Deliveroo, Uber Eats and Just Eat actually charge in the UK?
UK aggregator commission in 2026 typically runs between 14% (marketplace-only, you deliver) and 35% (full service, platform delivers, priority placement). The headline 30% is the most common figure for a small independent using platform couriers. Packaging, promo-fund contributions and service fees are usually charged on top.
Can I use Deliveroo couriers without being on their marketplace?
Yes. Deliveroo Plus for Restaurants, Uber Direct and Stuart all offer on-demand courier APIs you can plug into your own ordering page. You pay per drop — typically £3.50 to £6 depending on distance — with no commission on the order itself. That is usually cheaper than marketplace commission above about £14 per order.
What is the cheapest way to take online orders for a small UK restaurant?
Click-and-collect via a free website-builder module is the cheapest route. A restaurant doing under 50 collection orders a week can run the whole stack — website, ordering page, Stripe payment — for under £20 a month total. You pay only card-processing fees (1.5% for UK domestic cards on Stripe) per transaction.
Do I need a separate mobile app for online ordering?
No. In 2026 a mobile-optimised website page is functionally identical to a native app for ordering, loads faster, and does not need App Store approval. Apps made sense when ordering was slow and mobile connections flaky. Neither is true any more. Spend the development budget on a fast ordering page and SMS loyalty instead.
How does Natasha's Law apply to online orders?
Natasha's Law requires full ingredient lists with allergens emphasised on any food Prepacked for Direct Sale. For online orders this means your digital menu must show allergen information per item before the customer checks out, and any physical label on the bag must carry the same PPDS-compliant information if the food was packed before the order was placed. Food cooked to order and boxed at dispatch is outside PPDS but still subject to general allergen disclosure rules.
Which payment processor is best for UK restaurant online ordering?
Stripe, Square and Adyen are the three credible options in 2026. Stripe has the best developer ecosystem and is the default in most website-builder ordering modules. Square is the simplest if you already use Square POS in the dining room. Adyen makes sense once you are processing more than £1m a year and can negotiate interchange-plus pricing.
How long does it take to launch direct online ordering?
Using a website-builder module, a single-location restaurant can launch direct click-and-collect in a weekend: a few hours to upload the menu, connect a Stripe account, enable VAT per item and publish. Full delivery with courier integration takes longer — typically one to two weeks — because of courier onboarding and driver zone mapping.
Will aggregators penalise me if I promote direct ordering?
Aggregator terms of service forbid explicit price discrimination (you can't charge less on Deliveroo than on your own site) but they do not forbid in-bag flyers or loyalty programmes. Practically, the marketplace ranks you by order volume, not by whether you also run a direct channel. Running both in parallel is normal.
How do I measure whether direct ordering is working?
Track four numbers weekly: percentage of delivery orders placed direct vs aggregator, cost per acquired direct customer, repeat-order rate at 30 and 90 days, and net margin per order by channel. A healthy direct channel after six months sits at 30%+ of delivery volume with a repeat rate above 40% and a net margin at least 15 points above the aggregator equivalent.
DineHere builds AI-powered websites for UK independent restaurants with direct ordering, PPDS-compliant allergen labelling and Stripe payments built in — so commission-free delivery is a setting, not a project.
