Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
On March 11, Uber Eats raised its Lite commission from 15% to 20% and started charging Plus restaurants 30% instead of 25% on orders from Uber One members. Restaurant Business reported it was Uber Eats’ first rate change in about 10 years. Then on July 23, DoorDash started rebuilding the fees your customers pay around distance. One change hit your payout. The other hits whether a customer three neighborhoods away still orders from you. If you set up your tablets in 2021 and haven’t opened the merchant portal since, you’re running on numbers that no longer exist.
The Uber One surcharge is the change most shops will miss
The headline Lite increase is easy to see. The Plus change is quieter, and it’s bigger than it looks. Uber One members account for 60% to 70% of Uber Eats bookings, depending on the market. If that share holds for your store, most of your Plus orders now bill at the Premium rate without the Premium tier’s lower delivery fees for your customers.
Here’s the arithmetic on a $30 order. A non-member order on Plus costs you $7.50, same as before. A member order costs $9.00. At a 65% member share, the blended cost is about $8.48 an order. That’s our math, not Uber’s, and your own member share may differ. At 100 Uber orders a week, that 65% share means roughly $97 a week, or about $5,000 a year, that wasn’t there in February.
Pickup moved too, from 6% to 7% when your app prices match in-store, and 10% when they don’t. Restaurants with custom-negotiated rates got three points added, capped at 30%.
DoorDash didn’t touch your commission. It changed who sees you as expensive.
DoorDash’s published merchant tiers still read 15%, 25% and 30% on delivery and 6% on price-matched pickup. The July change was on the consumer side. Service fees now vary with distance and order size, a long-distance fee applies to some orders over 10 miles, and a “Farther Away” label marks stores whose fees may run higher because of distance.
DoorDash says customers on over 70% of recent orders would have paid the same or less, with a median saving of $0.78. A spokesperson told Restaurant Business that “the shorter the distance and/or the larger the order, the more likely fees stay the same or decrease.” Read that from the shop side. A small order from the edge of your radius just got more expensive for the person placing it, and your listing may now carry a label telling them so.
The change is rolling out across most of the U.S., but DoorDash left out California, Chicago, Colorado, D.C., Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York City, Puerto Rico and Seattle. If you’re outside those markets, compare your DoorDash orders from before and after late July by distance. If the far orders thinned out, this is a likely reason.
The tier you picked in 2021 is a pricing decision you stopped making. The platforms didn’t.
The platforms are growing. Your rate card is how.
None of this is a sign of a struggling business. Uber’s delivery segment booked $27.5 billion in Q2, up 26% from a year earlier, on $5.2 billion in revenue. DoorDash kept a 13.5% net revenue margin on $33.1 billion in marketplace volume, flat from a year earlier. Uber said its increase would “help us reinvest in ways to drive more customer demand for restaurants.” That may be true. It’s also the line you’d use either way.
Washington is circling the same tickets. In April, the FTC asked for comment on a possible nationwide rule on delivery-platform fees, including whether apps disclose when item prices differ from what the restaurant charges in-store. That’s aimed at the platforms. But if your app menu runs higher than your counter, you’re already paying for it: both DoorDash and Uber reserve their lowest pickup rate for shops with matching prices. As we laid out in the delivery math nobody does, the fee structure decides which channel pays, not the food cost.
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The honest limitation: the 60–70% Uber One share is Uber’s platform-wide figure as reported, not your store’s, and nobody publishes how independent pizzerias split across the tiers. Nor do we know whether the platforms’ next earnings reports will bring another round of changes. Grubhub’s processing fees aren’t stated in the coverage we used, so price that line from your own statement before you compare it to the other two.
