How to Replace Foodhub With Direct Online Ordering
Why restaurants move away from Foodhub
Foodhub is one of the big food ordering marketplaces in the UK, and plenty of takeaways got a good run of new customers out of it. The trouble starts later, once the shop is busy and the commission line on the statement is bigger than the electricity bill.
Foodhub takes commission on every order. On a £20 order, part of that £20 is gone before you've paid for the chicken, the boxes or the driver. Most kitchen costs come down as you get better at running the place. You order stock properly, you waste less, you stop over-staffing Tuesdays. Commission doesn't work like that. It's a percentage, so it grows with you. More orders from Foodhub means a bigger bill from Foodhub.
The takeaways that do well over years aren't usually the ones with the most marketplace orders. They're the ones where a big share of customers skip the marketplace and order straight from the shop's own website or app.
What direct ordering means
Direct ordering just means the customer orders through something you own. In practice that's:
- your own website, with ordering built in
- a mobile app with your takeaway's name on it
- your phone line, answered by an AI agent that takes the order
None of those charge you commission per order. You pay the technology provider a platform fee and that's it. On a busy week the difference adds up fast.
The other thing you get is the customer. Someone who orders through Foodhub is, for all practical purposes, Foodhub's customer. You get a name on a ticket and an address for the driver. Foodhub gets the relationship, the email address and the chance to show them three other kebab shops next time they open the app. When someone orders through your app, you have their details. You can send them an offer on a slow Monday, give them points for coming back, or remind them you exist when they haven't ordered in six weeks.
The phone is the one people forget. A phone order has never carried commission, but on a Friday at 7pm nobody has a free hand to answer it, and a customer who rings twice and gets no answer will often just open Foodhub instead. So you end up paying commission on an order that was trying to come to you direct. An AI agent on the line fixes that particular leak.
What you need in place
Three things, really.
You need an ordering platform, which is the software that takes the order on your website or app and takes the payment. You need somewhere to keep your menu, ideally one place that feeds every channel, so you're not updating prices in four different systems when the cost of cheese goes up again. And you need the orders to land in the kitchen without someone re-typing them from a tablet into the till.
Most restaurant tech platforms now do all three in one package. For takeaways and restaurants in the UK and Ireland, Flipdish is the one to look at first.
How Flipdish replaces Foodhub
Flipdish gives you the direct ordering setup you'd otherwise be renting from a marketplace:
- a branded website with ordering built in, so people who search for you on Google can order there instead of clicking through to a marketplace
- a branded app for iOS and Android, under your name rather than Flipdish's
- order management that sends orders from every channel to the kitchen, so you're not running a separate tablet per platform on the counter
- loyalty tools for rewarding regulars and getting them back more often
- an AI Phone Agent that picks up the phone and takes orders while the staff are busy at the fryer
For the kitchen, nothing much changes. A Flipdish order comes through and gets made the same way a Foodhub order does. The difference shows up on the statement at the end of the month, because there's no commission on it.
The numbers
Take a takeaway doing 200 Foodhub orders a week at an average of £18 an order. That's £3,600 a week going through the marketplace.
At 15% commission (Foodhub's advertised rate; yours may be different), each order costs you £2.70. That's £540 a week, or roughly £28,000 a year. Twenty-eight grand, on food you bought, cooked and packed yourself.
Now say half of those customers move to ordering direct. You keep about £14,000 a year that used to go to Foodhub. A Flipdish subscription costs a fraction of that.
The 50% is a round number to make the sum easy, not a promise. Some shops move more customers than that and some move fewer. Even a quarter of your Foodhub customers moving across is about £7,000 a year on these figures.
Run it against your own numbers. The answer depends on your order volume, your average order value and whatever commission deal you have with Foodhub. A lot of owners have never added it up over a full year, because the statements arrive weekly and £540 doesn't look like much on its own. £28,000 does.
Will you lose customers?
It's the first thing most owners ask, and the honest answer is yes, a few. Some people only ever order through marketplaces. They like having every takeaway in one app, their card is saved there, and they're not going to download an app for one chip shop. If you leave Foodhub completely, you'll lose some of them.
Regulars are a different story. The person who orders the same curry every Friday is usually happy to move if there's something in it for them. A discount on their first direct order works. So does a loyalty scheme that gives them something back on direct orders and nothing on Foodhub ones.
That's why almost nobody quits Foodhub in one go. You run your own ordering alongside it. Foodhub keeps doing the job it's actually good at, which is putting you in front of people who've never heard of you, and you move the regulars over one order at a time. Within six to twelve months, most restaurants that do this have a good chunk of their old marketplace customers ordering direct.
How to make the switch
Start by getting Flipdish online ordering set up. It can be configured and live within days.
Then build your menu in Flipdish. This becomes the master copy. Change a price or mark an item sold out there and the change goes out to all your connected channels. It's a good moment to tidy the menu up too: better photos, proper descriptions, and maybe drop the combo deals nobody has ordered since 2023.
Next, tell people. This is the step owners skimp on. Your website address should be on every bag, every box and every receipt. Post it on Instagram and Facebook. Put a sign at the counter for collection customers, and get staff to mention it when someone picks up. Offer a discount on the first direct order so there's an obvious reason to try it.
Look at your prices too. Some takeaways charge a bit more on Foodhub than they do on their own site, to cover the commission. If the same meal is cheaper on your site, customers who compare will notice, and that's a reason to switch that you didn't have to hand out a voucher for.
Set up loyalty properly. Customers earn points on direct orders and Foodhub orders don't count. That one rule does a lot of the work. A regular who orders twice a week notices pretty quickly that half their orders are earning nothing.
Once you've got a list of direct customers building up, use it. Flipdish's AI marketing tools can send offers to customers who haven't ordered in a while, or push a deal on a quiet night. You couldn't do any of that with your Foodhub customers, because you never had their details.
Then look at Foodhub again every few months. Once direct ordering is steady, check what Foodhub is still bringing in, how many of those orders are from new customers rather than regulars ordering in the wrong place, and what you're paying for them. Decide from there whether staying on is worth the commission. For some shops it is, purely as a way to get found. For others it isn't.
What about menu aggregation tools?
Some operators use aggregation tools to manage their Foodhub menu alongside Just Eat, Deliveroo and Uber Eats from one screen. They save time. One menu update instead of four, one device on the counter instead of a stack of them.
They don't change the money, though. Every order through Foodhub still carries Foodhub's commission, whether you manage the menu from an aggregator or by hand. An aggregator makes commission channels easier to run. It doesn't make them cheaper.
If the aim is to pay less commission, you need more orders coming through channels that don't charge it. That means your own.
UK takeaways and direct ordering
UK customers are used to ordering food online. Nobody needs convincing that it works. What they need is a reason to order from your site instead of the app they already have open, and a site that's quick to use.
A decent website or app with a clear menu, a first-order discount and loyalty points will pull a fair share of your marketplace customers across over time. Owners who've made the switch tend to say the same things afterwards: they have more customers, each order costs them less, and they actually know who's buying from them now.
Flipdish is the platform most commonly used by UK and Irish takeaways and restaurant groups making this move.