Commission on a delivery platform is a large, fixed cost on every order it sends you. Charging the platform price at the same level as the dine-in price means absorbing all of it, which is a decision some restaurants make deliberately and many make by accident.
Raising the platform price is now common practice in most markets. But it is not free, and the two costs are worth understanding before you set the number.
Trap one: your contract may forbid it
Several platforms have run programmes where the lower commission rate is conditional on price parity — usually for pickup orders, sometimes more broadly. If you are on such a tier, raising prices across the whole menu can drop you into a higher commission band and cost you more than the markup earns.
This varies by platform, by country, and by which agreement you signed in which year. Read the current terms of the specific contract you are on. Do not rely on what another restaurant in the same city told you, and do not rely on this page — we are describing the shape of the trap, not your contract.
Trap two: your regulars are looking
The guest who orders from you twice a month on a platform is also the guest who walks past your window. A large blanket markup gets noticed, and what gets lost is not the platform order — it is the trust of the customer you already had.
The restaurants that handle this well tend to do two things. They mark up selectively rather than uniformly, concentrating it on items that travel well and have room in the margin, and leaving signature dishes closer to parity. And they give people a reason to come direct — a member price, a stored-value top-up bonus, a coupon that only exists in the shop. That is what the member programme is for: platforms rent you a customer, membership is how you keep one.
What the system does about it
Channel-specific pricing means the same dish can carry a different price for delivery than for dine-in, without duplicating the dish. One record, one place to change the recipe and the routing, different price by service type. That keeps your best-seller reports honest — the dish is one line, not two.
What the system cannot do is update the platform’s own back office for you unless a direct integration exists in your market. Assume the platform menu is a second place to change prices until we confirm otherwise for your country — see connecting to local delivery platforms.
One more thing to check
Whether the tax treatment of a delivery order differs from dine-in where you trade. In several countries it does, and the difference is not small. Tax is set per dish and per store, so it can be configured either way — but which way is correct is a question for a local accountant. See tax-inclusive or tax-exclusive pricing.
