How to Replace Foodhub With Direct Online Ordering

Replacing Foodhub with direct online ordering means customers order from your own website or app, and you stop paying commission on each of those orders. The food's the same and the kitchen's the same. What changes is who keeps the margin and who ends up with the customer's email address.

Why restaurants leave Foodhub

Foodhub sells itself on lower commission than Just Eat or Deliveroo, and for a lot of takeaways that's why they signed up. Lower commission is still commission, though, and it comes off every single order.

Take a restaurant doing 500 orders a month at an average of £20, paying 10%. That's £1,000 a month to Foodhub. £12,000 a year. And that's before card fees, packaging, staff or anything else.

Then there's the data. When someone orders through Foodhub, Foodhub has their details. You get a name and an address for the driver, and that's about it. You can't email them about a new menu. You can't send a "we miss you" offer after six weeks of silence. If they drift off to another takeaway on the same app, you won't know until the numbers drop.

You're also exposed to whatever Foodhub decides to do next. If it changes its fees, or how it ranks restaurants in search, or which listings it pushes on the homepage, your order count moves and there's not much you can do about it.

Customers tend to say they "got a Foodhub" rather than that they ordered from you. The app is what they remember. Your restaurant is one tile in a scrolling list, next to six other places selling roughly the same thing.

Loyalty is hard to build there too. You can't run your own points scheme or stamp card on someone else's platform, so nothing pulls a regular back to you specifically.

What you get from ordering direct

With your own ordering site (and an app, if you want one), the customer record is yours. Email, order history, delivery area, what they order and how often. You can contact those people by email, push notification or SMS whenever you like, without asking anyone's permission.

You set the prices. If you want direct customers to pay a bit less than they would on Foodhub, you can. If you want a loyalty scheme that only works on your own site, you can do that too.

Commission goes away. You pay a fixed subscription for the platform instead, so the more direct orders you take, the less each one costs you.

Payment timing changes as well. Marketplaces usually pay out weekly, after they've taken their cut. Direct payments tend to land sooner.

This pays off most for restaurants with a solid base of locals who order regularly. A regular ordering twice a month at £22 is worth about £53 a year more to you on direct than on Foodhub at 10% (24 orders x £22 x 10%). Now multiply that by a few hundred regulars.

Step 1: Pick a direct ordering platform

The platform runs your ordering website, your app if you have one, and the link between an order being placed and the kitchen seeing it. Get this wrong and you'll feel it every Friday night.

Flipdish is built for UK and Irish restaurants and takeaways. You get a branded ordering website, a branded mobile app with your name on it, and a direct connection to the Flipdish restaurant POS system, so orders go straight to the kitchen and nobody has to type them in again.

Whichever platform you look at, check:

• Is it your brand on the website and app, or theirs?
• Does checkout load quickly on a phone on 4G, not just on office wifi?
• Do orders go straight into your POS or kitchen screen?
• Are loyalty and marketing tools included
• Is pricing fixed, or is there a per-order fee tucked away somewhere
• Is support based in the UK or Ireland, and will someone pick up on a Saturday evening when the printer stops working

That last one sounds minor until it happens to you.

Step 2: Build the ordering website

It doesn't need to be fancy. It does need to work on a phone, because that's where most takeaway orders come from.

It should load in under three seconds on mobile. The menu should be easy to read and the prices should be right. Customisations like sauces, sizes and extras need to work the same way they do on your Foodhub listing, or regulars get confused and give up halfway through. Card payments have to be secure. Customers should get a realistic delivery or collection time, not an optimistic one. And it should look like your restaurant, not a template with your logo dropped in the corner.

Flipdish restaurant websites are designed mobile-first, with a checkout built to get people from menu to paid order in as few taps as possible. They run on your own domain, with your branding from the first page to the order confirmation.

Step 3: Match your Foodhub menu

Before you launch, go through your Foodhub menu item by item and set it up on the new site. Regulars will look for their usual order. If the chicken katsu curry is suddenly called something else, or the large size has disappeared, some of them will just go back to the app.

Decide on pricing deliberately. Some operators keep prices identical across both. Others use part of the commission saving to make direct ordering a bit cheaper than Foodhub, which gives customers an obvious reason to switch. Either works. Just make the call rather than copying numbers across without thinking.

Put sides, drinks and add-ons where people will actually see them while they're ordering. That's where average order value comes from.

Flipdish's menu tools let you copy your existing structure and then tidy it up. It's a good moment to drop the three items nobody has ordered in years.

Step 4: Connect your kitchen

Orders from your direct channel have to land on your kitchen display system or POS automatically. If someone has to read orders off a separate tablet and key them into the till during a rush, you've added a job and a place for mistakes. Wrong order, missed allergy note, forgotten side. Busy nights are exactly when that happens.

With Flipdish, online orders show up on the same screen as in-house orders, in the same format and routed the same way. No extra tablet beeping on the counter.

Step 5: Move your customers over

This is the part that decides whether the whole thing works. Your Foodhub customers already have a habit. You need to give them a reason to change it, and make changing it easy.

Start with the bag. Every Foodhub order still goes out of your kitchen, so every bag reaches someone who already likes your food. Put a printed card in each one with a QR code that goes straight to your ordering site, plus a first-order offer - a free drink, money off, or some loyalty points. People who order a few times a month switch quickly when the offer is obvious.

Post about it on your social accounts. Be specific about why direct is better for the customer: orders go straight to your kitchen, so they're quicker and less likely to be wrong. If there's a discount, say exactly what it is.

Update your Google Business Profile so the direct ordering link is the first thing people see. Plenty of customers search your name on Google before ordering. If the top link sends them to Foodhub, that's where the order goes.

Get staff saying it out loud. Anyone who phones or collects in person should hear something like "you can order on our website next time and get 10% off your first order." One sentence. Said a few hundred times a month, it adds up.

Make loyalty direct-only. Points or a digital stamp card that only work on your own site give people a concrete reason to stop opening the app. If they know the tenth order is free, they'll order direct.

Step 6: Keep Foodhub running for now

Don't cancel Foodhub the day the new site goes live. Run both for two or three months. As direct orders grow, start spending less on Foodhub: fewer promotions, less paid visibility. Leave once the direct numbers can carry the business on their own.

Once a customer has ordered direct once, most of them don't go back to the marketplace. Checkout is quicker, the price is the same or lower, and they're dealing with you instead of an app.

How much you save

A rough example for a restaurant that has moved 400 monthly orders off Foodhub:

Scenario	Monthly orders	Avg order value	Commission rate	Monthly commission cost
On Foodhub (10%)	400	£22	10%	£880
Direct via Flipdish	400	£22	0%	£0

You pay a fixed platform subscription instead of that £880. At 300 orders a month and the same £22 average, Foodhub commission is still £660 a month. For most restaurants at 300 orders or more, the commission saved is bigger than the subscription, and it tends to work out that way within the first few weeks.

Things owners worry about

"Our customers won't download another app." They don't have to. A mobile website is enough to start with, and for plenty of restaurants it's enough full stop. After someone has ordered direct a couple of times, they're usually happy to install the app because reordering gets quicker.

"Foodhub brings us new customers." It might. People who've never heard of you do find you on marketplaces. So keep the listing for that, and put your effort into moving the regulars, who make up most of your orders anyway. As your Google presence and your own customer list grow, you'll lean on Foodhub for new customers less and less.

"Setting it up sounds like a lot of work." Flipdish does the setup, the menu migration and the onboarding. Most restaurants are live within days, not weeks.

"What if direct orders don't make up for what we lose on Foodhub?" They won't straight away. It usually takes two to four months for direct volume to catch up with marketplace volume. That's the reason for running both in parallel while you build the direct base. No gap in revenue.

Why Flipdish for replacing Foodhub

Thousands of restaurants and takeaways in the UK and Ireland use Flipdish to take orders on their own channels instead of through marketplaces.

You get a branded ordering website, a mobile app under your own name, direct POS integration, and AI marketing tools that send offers to customers automatically based on how they order. Pricing is fixed with no commission per order, so the more you sell direct, the better your numbers get.

To see everything that's included, go to the Flipdish products overview.