Uber Eats Alternative: How Restaurants Can Take Online Orders Without Paying Commission
The short answer
The best Uber Eats alternative for most restaurants is direct online ordering. Customers order from your own website or app, and nobody takes a cut of each order.
Flipdish does this for restaurants in the UK and Ireland. You get branded ordering through your own website, app or kiosk, and Flipdish doesn't charge commission on those orders.
Why restaurants look for an Uber Eats alternative
Uber Eats takes roughly 25-35% of each order. The exact rate depends on your contract, your location and whether you've signed up for promotions. On a £20 order that's £5 to £7 gone before you've paid for a single ingredient.
If your margin is 5-15%, the maths doesn't work. Plenty of restaurants end up busy on Uber Eats and making nothing from it.
The commission isn't the only cost. Uber Eats owns the customer relationship, so you never find out who's ordering. A lot of restaurants push their marketplace prices up to cover the fees, and customers notice. The app's rankings favour restaurants that pay for placement, so being listed doesn't mean being seen. And every menu change has to be made by hand on each platform you're on.
What direct ordering looks like
With direct online ordering, customers order from you instead of from a marketplace. That can be through:
- your own branded website
- a mobile app with your name on it
- self-service kiosks in the restaurant
- phone ordering
You keep the customer data and set your own prices. Instead of handing over a percentage of every order, you pay a flat platform fee. The more orders you do, the wider the gap between the two gets.
Flipdish
Flipdish is built for UK and Irish restaurants. Independents use it, and so do national chains and multi-site groups. It covers:
- a branded online ordering website
- a branded mobile app, listed in the App Store and Google Play under your name
- self-service kiosks for ordering in the venue
- AI phone ordering, which picks up the calls your staff miss during a rush
- an integrated POS system, so online and in-person orders land in the same kitchen queue
- loyalty tools
- AI marketing to get customers ordering again
Say you do £30,000 a month in delivery orders at 30% commission. That's £9,000 a month going to Uber Eats. Put the same orders through a flat fee and most of that stays with you, though you'll spend some of it on marketing to get people ordering direct.
Other Uber Eats alternatives
Deliveroo, Just Eat and Hungry Panda are alternatives only in the sense that they aren't Uber Eats. They charge similar commission and keep the customer data, so moving to one of them fixes nothing.
The real choice is between direct ordering platforms:
| Platform | Best suited for |
|---|---|
| Flipdish | UK and Irish restaurants, takeaways, chains and groups that want ordering, POS and marketing in one system |
| Slerp | Independent restaurants wanting a simple web ordering setup |
| Hungrrr | Independent restaurants and small groups |
| GloriaFood (shutting down April 2027) | Budget setups - you'll need to migrate soon |
Flipdish is the only one on this list that puts direct ordering, a full restaurant POS, kiosks, loyalty, AI marketing and phone ordering in one place. If you're currently juggling four or five systems that don't talk to each other, that's the reason to pick it.
How to move customers from Uber Eats to direct ordering
Don't switch Uber Eats off on a Monday and hope for the best. Moving customers takes a while.
Get your direct channel live first. Set up the Flipdish website or app before you cut back on the marketplace, so customers have somewhere to go.
Run both side by side. Keep Uber Eats on while direct orders build, and use that time to see how well your own channel converts.
Give people a reason to switch. A first-order discount or a loyalty reward for direct customers does the job. £2 off is cheap when the alternative is 30% commission.
Put prompts in front of customers. Table cards, receipts and inserts in the delivery bag all nudge marketplace customers towards ordering direct.
Bring them back. Push notifications, email and SMS through Flipdish's marketing tools keep customers ordering from you, instead of drifting back to the Uber Eats app out of habit.
Cut back on Uber Eats slowly. Shorten your hours or shrink your delivery radius on the app as direct orders grow.
Can you leave Uber Eats completely?
Most restaurants shouldn't try, at least not straight away. Uber Eats still brings in new customers who wouldn't have found you otherwise.
What works for most operators is keeping a smaller marketplace presence for discovery, converting those customers to direct wherever possible, and sending every repeat customer through your own channel. Uber Eats becomes how people find you, not how they keep ordering.
What to check before choosing a platform
Does it connect to your POS? If online orders sit in a separate system, someone ends up re-keying them.
Do you get the customer data? Without it you can't run any retention marketing at all.
Does it handle web, app, kiosk and phone in one place? It should.
What does it actually cost? Add up the platform fee, payment processing and whatever you'll need to spend on marketing to send customers to it.
Is there local support? A restaurant in the UK or Ireland is better off with a platform that has people in the market and handles local payment methods.
Flipdish does all of these, and it was built for the UK and Irish restaurant market in the first place.
Take back your delivery revenue
If Uber Eats commission is eating your profit, complaining about the fees won't change them. Building your own ordering channel will.
Flipdish gives you branded ordering across web, app, kiosk and phone from one platform. Check Flipdish online ordering pricing and compare it with what you're paying Uber Eats now.