Get our free one-page cheat sheet of pizzeria cost benchmarks: food, labor, rent and delivery, with a blank for your own numbers.
DoorDash’s Plus plan takes 25% of every delivery order. The same company will also run ordering on your own website for no commission and no monthly fee, paying 2.9% plus 30 cents on every payment. On a $30 order, that’s $7.50 against about $1.17. Same company, more than $6 apart. The difference is who found the customer. That’s the whole argument for first-party ordering, and the whole argument against going all in on it.
The marketplace’s real product is the stranger
Domino’s is candid about this. CFO Sandeep Reddy told investors in July that the chain is “acquiring more customers that we wouldn’t have been able to acquire otherwise by being on the aggregator channel.” Domino’s also keeps aggregator pricing at a premium so the channel can be profit-neutral for franchisees, and its annual report warns that marketplace orders may not have the same level of store-level profitability as orders through its owned channels. This is a chain that gets more than 85% of its U.S. retail sales from digital channels, and it still prices the marketplace to break even and talks about it as a way to reach customers it couldn’t get otherwise.
That’s the frame for an independent. Commission is a fair price for a customer you’d never have met. It’s a bad price for the family that’s ordered from you every other Friday since 2019.
What your own channel actually costs
Here’s the published pricing, as the vendors state it.
Run the $30 order through it. DoorDash Plus: $7.50. DoorDash’s first-party ordering: $1.17. Slice’s online-only plan: $3.00 plus $1.17 in processing, or $4.17, if you’re the one carrying the per-order fee. Slice’s pricing page doesn’t say who does, so ask. Owner’s $499 flat plan pays for itself against Plus commission at about 67 delivery orders a month, before card processing, which the page doesn’t price. That’s our arithmetic on published rates. Your tier, your ticket and your contract will move it. We ran the full channel comparison, including your own drivers, in the delivery math nobody does.
One catch: on first-party delivery, the cost doesn’t vanish. Some of it moves to your customer. DoorDash’s terms say it charges the customer delivery fees from its rate card, at its discretion, changeable at any time, and the same terms list extra per-order regulatory fees in California, New York City and Seattle. Some customers will balk at seeing those on your site. Pickup has no driver to pay for, which makes it the easier first move.
The best data on direct customers comes from companies that sell direct ordering
Paytronix, which sells loyalty and online-ordering software, found first-party customers reordered every 33 days versus 43.1 days for repeat third-party customers, and tipped $4.44 versus $1.89. Its next report found guests ordering direct put 35% more items on each check than marketplace guests. NCR Voyix’s consumer survey found 58% of customers prefer a restaurant’s own app or website for delivery.
Discount all of it. Paytronix and NCR Voyix sell first-party technology. DoorDash’s own survey, as reported by Restaurant Business in 2022, found 37% of consumers preferred third-party apps, up 10 points in a year, and 24% said their first step is to open an app like DoorDash. Each source found roughly what its business would predict. Where they overlap is the useful part: a big group of customers will order direct if direct is easy, and a big group won’t.
Pay the marketplace to find you strangers. Stop paying it rent on your regulars.
The 60-day plan for the customers you already have
Week one: build the door. Switch on first-party ordering with the full menu and make pickup the default. Put the order link on your Google Business Profile and at the top of your website. A link three clicks deep doesn’t exist.
Weeks two through four: point every regular at it. Every phone order hears the URL once. Every counter receipt and every box you hand over in person carries it. Before you put anything in a marketplace bag, read your marketplace agreement. Fund a reason to switch out of the commission you’d stop paying. On a $30 order you’d keep about $6.33 versus Plus, so a few dollars off the next direct order still leaves you ahead. A loyalty program you already pay for does the same job.
Weeks five through eight: count. Each week, write down orders by channel. Direct pickup should be climbing. If it isn’t, test your own site on a phone before you blame the customer. Then decide whether the marketplace still needs the Plus tier, or whether Basic covers the strangers. We priced this year’s tier changes separately.
Free cheat sheet: 15 pizzeria cost benchmarks on one page
Prime cost, labor, delivery and rent, each with its source and a blank for your shop’s number. Enter your email and the download opens right away.
You’ll also get the Oven Scars newsletter. We never sell or share your address.
The honest limitation: nobody has published independent data on how many marketplace regulars actually switch when a shop asks them to. The first-party numbers above compare customers who chose to order direct with customers who didn’t. That’s not proof a customer you move will start tipping like one. The consumer surveys are dated and come from interested parties. Your own 60-day count is the only number here that’s about your shop.
