How to Replace Foodhub With Direct Online Ordering

Why restaurants want to get off Foodhub

Foodhub is a UK-based food delivery marketplace. It works on commission. You pay a percentage of every order that comes through it, and the customer who placed that order belongs to Foodhub, not to you.

The maths isn't complicated. An order that comes in through Foodhub costs you more than the same order coming in through your own website. On one order it's a few pounds. Across a year of Friday nights it's thousands of pounds, going to a platform that also keeps the customer's name, number and order history.

So most owners aren't really asking whether to move orders off Foodhub. They're asking how to do it without a slow month that wipes out the savings. That's what the rest of this page covers: moving your Foodhub orders onto your own website and app, step by step, without switching anything off too early.

What the marketplace actually costs you

Commission is the obvious one. Foodhub takes a cut of each order and it comes straight off your margin. On a £25 pizza order, the margin wasn't huge to begin with.

The less obvious cost is the customer data. Someone who orders from you through Foodhub every second Saturday is, as far as your business is concerned, a stranger. You don't have their email. You don't know they always get the same two pizzas and a garlic bread. You can't text them on a quiet Tuesday with an offer. Foodhub can, though.

Then there's the shop window problem. On a marketplace your restaurant is one listing in a long scroll of listings, usually right next to the place down the road running 20% off. A customer on your own ordering site sees your menu and nobody else's.

And you're exposed to whatever Foodhub decides to do next. If it changes how restaurants are ranked, puts commission up, redesigns the app or just gets less popular in your town, your order numbers move with it. You don't get a vote.

Direct ordering deals with all four. Not because it's clever, but because you're the one running it.

What direct ordering means in practice

Direct ordering just means customers order from you, through your own branded website, your own app or a kiosk in the restaurant, instead of going through a third-party marketplace.

This used to be something only the big chains could afford to build. Not any more. A single-site pizzeria can have it running. You need:

a restaurant website with online ordering built in
a mobile app with your name and logo on it
a POS that takes orders from every channel in one place, so the kitchen isn't juggling tablets
marketing tools that use the customer data you're now collecting

Flipdish provides all of these in one system.

How to move away from Foodhub

Step 1: Get your own ordering channel live first

Don't cancel Foodhub until you've got something to replace it. Launch your ordering website and app, then run them alongside Foodhub for a while.

The reason is simple. Foodhub has customers who already know where to find you on it. Switch that off before you've given them another way to order and some of them will just order from someone else. That's lost revenue, and those people take a long time to win back.

Step 2: Teach customers to order from you directly

Anywhere Foodhub currently gets a mention, your own ordering link should be there instead. Or at least first.

Put a card with a QR code linking to your ordering site in every takeaway bag and on every table
Make the direct ordering link the obvious button on your Google Business Profile
Post on Instagram and Facebook pointing followers to your site, not the marketplace
Give a first-order discount to anyone who creates an account on your own channel

The takeaway bag is the one people underestimate. Every Foodhub order you send out is a chance to tell that customer they can order from you directly next time. They're holding your food when they read it. You won't get a better moment.

Step 3: Collect the customer data

A customer ordering through Foodhub is invisible to you. A customer ordering through your own site leaves an email address, an order history and a fair idea of what they like.

Use it straight away. Send a welcome message after the first order. Offer something for the second. If someone who used to order every week hasn't ordered in a month, give them a reason to come back. Flipdish AI marketing automates this, sending messages based on what each customer does (or stops doing), so you're not sitting down every Monday to build a campaign by hand.

Step 4: Set up a loyalty programme

Foodhub isn't going to run a loyalty programme that makes customers more loyal to you. Your own ordering platform can.

Keep it simple. Points per pound spent, points off future orders. Once a customer has a few quid's worth of points sitting in your app, they've a real reason to open your app instead of browsing Foodhub. Those regulars end up being the most valuable part of your order volume, and they're exactly the people you'd least want a marketplace to own.

Step 5: Wind Foodhub down gradually

When your direct channel is bringing in steady orders, start cutting back on Foodhub. Gradually, not all at once.

A few ways to do it:

Only keep Foodhub switched on at quiet times when you've got kitchen capacity to fill
Stop running promotions on Foodhub and keep the discounts for your own channel
Turn Foodhub off completely once direct orders make up most of your delivery volume

How fast you go depends on your restaurant. Some places are off the marketplace within a few months. Others keep a small Foodhub presence indefinitely for the reach, while the profitable regular orders move over to their own channel. Both are reasonable. What matters is that the marketplace becomes the extra channel, not the main one.

The revenue case

A simple model.

Say you take 200 delivery orders a week at an average of £25, and you pay 12% commission. That's £5,000 a week in delivery orders and £600 a week in commission. Over a year it's £31,200, paid to a platform that also keeps your customers.

Move half of those orders to your own channel with no commission and you save £15,600 a year. A direct ordering platform costs a fraction of that.

Plug in your own numbers. Even at half the volume or a lower commission rate, the gap is big enough that direct ordering comes out ahead at almost any realistic order level.

That model doesn't count what a direct customer is worth over time, either. Once someone is ordering from your own app, you can bring them back with an offer that costs you a free garlic bread, not a percentage of every order forever.

What happens to your Foodhub reviews?

They stay on Foodhub. They don't come with you to your own platform and there's no way to move them.

Put the effort into Google reviews instead. More people see them, they show up when someone searches for pizza nearby, and nobody can take them away by changing their platform. After each direct order, ask the customer to leave a Google review. A short message with a direct link is enough. Over time your Google rating replaces whatever score you had on the marketplace, and far more people will see it.

The usual objections

"I can't afford to lose my Foodhub orders."

You're not losing them. You're moving them. That's why you run both channels at once during the switch. The point is to turn Foodhub customers into your customers, not to vanish from the marketplace overnight and hope people follow you.

"Setting up my own ordering system sounds complicated."

It's less work than most owners expect. With Flipdish the setup is done for you. The platform team handles the menu upload, payment integration and getting your app into the App Store and Google Play. Most restaurants are live within weeks.

"My customers won't download another app."

Some won't. Plenty will, especially regulars who already like your food and would rather order from you than from a marketplace. A decent branded app with a loyalty scheme gets used. And the ones who won't download anything can order on your website. No app needed.

What to look for in a direct ordering platform

If you're comparing platforms to replace Foodhub, check for these:

An integrated POS, so the kitchen isn't managing a separate tablet just for online orders
Branded apps on iOS and Android with your name on them, not a generic app with your menu stuck inside it
Marketing tools - email, push notifications and loyalty
Website, app and kiosk ordering in one system, so you're not stitching three suppliers together
Support in the UK and Ireland from people who know how payments work here

Flipdish does all of these. Restaurants and groups across the UK and Ireland use it to move order volume off marketplaces and onto their own channels.

How Flipdish helps you replace Foodhub

Flipdish builds the direct ordering side (website, app, loyalty programme and marketing tools) and connects it to your in-house POS system. Orders from every channel come through on the same kitchen screen. Customer data builds up in one place, under your name. Marketing campaigns run on their own.

If you want to stop paying commission on every order and start owning your customer list, get in touch with Flipdish and start building your own ordering channel.