What delivery apps really cost a small food business in the Philippines
Delivery apps bring you customers you would never have reached, and they take 20 to 30 per cent of every order for it. For a shop working on thin margins, that is not a marketing cost. It is most of the profit.
The arithmetic, on one order
Take a ₱300 order. At 25 per cent commission the app keeps ₱75 and you receive ₱225. Now subtract what the food actually cost you. If your ingredients are around 35 per cent of the menu price - which is ordinary for Filipino food service - that is ₱105.
You are left with ₱120 before rent, electricity, gas, and the wage of whoever cooked it. On the same order taken directly, you would have kept ₱195. The commission did not cost you 25 per cent of the sale. It cost you roughly 38 per cent of what you had left.
Commission is charged on the whole ticket, but it comes out of your margin. That is why a percentage that sounds survivable on paper feels brutal at the end of the month - and why shops so often discover it only when they compare a busy month's sales to the money that actually arrived.
The costs that are easy to miss
- You do not get the customer. The name, the number and the order history belong to the app. You cannot text them a promo, and if you leave the platform you leave without them.
- You compete on the app's terms. Your shop sits in a list beside every other shop, sorted by whatever the app decides that week.
- Discounts are often yours to fund. A promotion that brings volume can bring it at a price you did not set.
- Payouts arrive later. Money you have already spent on ingredients sits with the platform until the settlement lands.
None of this makes delivery apps a mistake. They are genuinely good at reach. The mistake is letting them become the only way people can order from you.
What Philippine shops do instead
Most small shops already take direct orders. They just take them in a way that does not scale.
- Messenger and Instagram DMs. Free, and every owner reading this knows the cost: orders buried in a thread at 11pm, no record, and a wrong total that you find out about at the counter.
- A phone number on a poster. Works, until two people ring at once during the lunch rush.
- A form or spreadsheet link. Better record-keeping, but nobody builds a basket in a form, and nothing tells the kitchen.
- Your own ordering page. Your menu, your prices, your branding, and the order arrives on a screen at the counter instead of in somebody's inbox.
When a direct ordering page is worth it
Be honest about the trade. A delivery app brings discovery; your own page does not. A page is worth having once you have repeat customers who already know your name - because those are the orders you are paying commission on for no reason. The regular who orders the same thing every Friday did not need an app to find you.
The realistic shape for most shops is both: stay on the app for reach, and give the regulars somewhere direct to go. Every order that moves across keeps the margin the app was taking.
If you want the three options side by side - cost, who owns the customer, and what breaks - we put them in one table: delivery app, DMs, or your own ordering page.
A useful test. Look at last month's app orders and count how many were from names you recognise. That number, times your commission rate, is what a direct ordering page would have been worth to you.
Common questions
Do I have to leave the delivery apps?
No, and most shops should not. They reach people who have never heard of you. Running your own page alongside simply means your regulars have a cheaper route.
Will customers actually use a direct page?
Repeat customers will, particularly if the page is easy to reach - a QR on the table and the receipt, a link in your page bio. First-time customers who found you on an app usually will not, and that is fine.
Do I need delivery riders of my own?
Not to start. Pick-up is the easiest thing to switch across, because there is no logistics to replace - the customer was coming to you anyway.
NOY builds that direct ordering page for Philippine shops - your brand, your menu, your prices, with the order landing on a screen at your counter. See every screen, or book a free demo.