Restaurants offering home delivery used to be a relative rarity limited (in many places) to pizzerias and Chinese takeout spots. But in the post-COVID era, the demand for delivery grows every day, and restaurants need to make measured decisions about whether and how they can provide this highly desired service.
The good news is that restaurants in 2026 have abundant options when it comes to online ordering platforms and delivery services. The (possibly) bad news? The number of choices can prove overwhelming to a restaurateur planning to roll out delivery for the first time. David Scott Peters, a restaurant systems expert and coach who works with independent restaurant operators, explained the challenges like this: “A restaurant can turn on an online ordering platform quickly. That part is easy. The hard part is making sure the operation is ready to execute it profitably and consistently. Online ordering touches everything: menu pricing, food cost, labor, packaging, ticket times, kitchen flow, guest service, refunds and brand perception.”
With this in mind, we asked a group of hospitality consultants, restaurateurs and representatives from online ordering platforms to offer their recommendations on how to establish and grow these systems for your own restaurant. Here’s what they had to say.
1. Read the Fine Print When It Comes To Commission Percentages
When you first jump into the online-platform marketplace, you’ll likely be dazzled by big promises from these companies regarding your projected sales and business growth potential. But although these can be natural results of an online-ordering system, Peters warns that it’s not always so simple. “One of the biggest problems is that restaurants often look at the top-line sales and get excited, but they don’t always know whether those sales are profitable after commissions, packaging, discounts, labor, mistakes and refunds. A restaurant can be busy and broke at the same time. Third-party delivery can create volume, but if the margins are wrong, it can quietly eat away at the bottom line,” Peters said.
One way to parse through a platform’s offerings and determine whether it works for your business is to have a sit-down meeting with one of the platform’s sales reps and to build a solid relationship with that rep. “In terms of getting the best possible value from these platforms, I think it just comes down to having a consistent dialogue with the rep from the companies,” said Brooks Kirchheimer, co-owner of Hill Top Hospitality in Park City and Salt Lake City, (who uses third-party delivery platforms for his businesses). From personal experience, Kirchheimer said that “before we had a dedicated rep, we had a lot more frustrations. Especially with UberEats, we have a local rep that has made life so much easier and—more importantly—provides us with quicker answers than we had gotten without a rep.”
Kira McCabe (senior vice president of operations for Plein Air Agency, a marketing and technology consultancy for restaurant brands) urges those in the process of meeting with reps and choosing a platform to remember that “most technology stacks have incremental fees for add-ons and features; the best thing you can do is be clear in your requirements during the discovery process.” Example questions that McCabe would ask include “what are you trying to achieve for your guest experience? What data do you need access to and where do you see your tech stack playing out in the next three years? Doing this will ensure that you get the features you need and are accounted for during the negotiation process rather than afterward.” Doing this, she said, “will ensure that you get the features you need and are accounted for during the negotiation process rather than afterward.”
Speaking of negotiations, Peters insisted that all restaurant operators considering a partnership with one of the major ordering/delivery apps, like UberEats, DoorDash or GrubHub, “should negotiate. Restaurant pros should ask about commission rates, marketing fees, tablet fees, integration fees, refund policies, cancellation terms, promotional requirements and data access. The standard offer is not always the best offer.”
2. Choose a Platform that Integrates with Your Restaurant’s POS System
The idea behind online ordering platforms is to streamline and simplify ordering (whether on-site or for delivery). That’s why it’s crucial to choose a platform that integrates easily with your POS system. “Ideally, orders should flow directly into the POS. The menu should be easy to manage in one place, pricing should be adjustable by channel and staff should not have to re-enter orders from multiple tablets,” Peters explained. He also mentions a benefit for management; an online platform that integrates with the POS allows them to “review reports that clearly separate dine-in, pickup, direct online ordering and third-party delivery.”
In Peters’ opinion, one of the biggest problems when using a platform that doesn’t link to your POS involves human error. “If the platform does not integrate with the POS, staff may have to manually enter orders, which leads to mistakes, missed modifiers, duplicate tickets and wasted labor. If the menu is too large or includes items that do not travel well, the guest experience suffers. If there is no clear process for packaging, checking accuracy and handing off orders to drivers, the restaurant loses control,” Peters said.
The ultimate goal should be to “reduce errors, save labor and give the restaurant better data,” Peters continued. For that reason, he recommends that restaurants shopping for ordering platforms consider the following: “Does this make the restaurant cleaner, more efficient and more profitable?”
3. Consider Simplifying or Limiting Your Menu for Delivery Purposes
Peters firmly believes that restaurants should edit down their standard menus for delivery and online orders, focusing on dishes that are popular and that don’t lose quality when they’re transported. “I encourage restaurants to simplify the delivery menu, remove items that do not travel well, price the menu correctly for each sales channel, create packaging standards, train the team and assign clear ownership during each shift,” Peters said.
Ultimately, even though you may wish to offer rare steak, perfectly-assembled eggs benedict or gooey cheese fondue for delivery, Peters reminds you that “not every item belongs online. If something does not travel well, remove it or rework it. Protecting the brand sometimes means saying no to a sale that will disappoint the guest.”
Deciding on a delivery menu also involves training your existing staff and ensuring that they have the equipment they need to properly execute. “The team should know which container goes with each item, how sauces are packed, how hot and cold items are separated, how bags are sealed, how drinks are handled and how orders are labeled,” Peters said. A simple way to check for this is to implement “a delivery expo checklist. Before an order leaves the building, someone should verify the guest name, items, modifiers, sauces, drinks, utensils, napkins and packaging. The bag should be sealed and the driver handoff should be clear.”
Peters encourages all restaurateurs to remember the following: “Technology does not fix broken restaurant systems. It exposes them. If the operation is messy, online ordering just helps the restaurant make mistakes faster.”
4. Be Cautious with Discounts and Promotions
It can be understandably appealing to offer discounts when you first put your restaurant on an online delivery platform; there’s substantial competition from other eateries on DoorDash and UberEats, and promos can help you stand out. But Peters encourages you to “be cautious with discounts and promotions. Third-party platforms often encourage restaurants to offer deals, but discounts can train guests to only order when there is a promotion. That may be marketing, but it needs to be intentional marketing.”
5. Consolidating Vendors Is a Good Idea, but Diversifying Opens Up More Opportunities
It seems like new online ordering platforms are constantly launching, and Peters doesn’t believe that a restaurant needs to stay loyal to one single platform under all circumstances. However, he recommends fully evaluating your restaurant’s operating capacity and goals when deciding whether to expand to a second (or third or fourth) platform.
Specifically, Peters says that “I would advise a restaurant to consolidate vendors when the operation is overwhelmed. If the restaurant has multiple tablets, inconsistent menus across platforms, missed orders, reporting that is difficult to understand and staff who are confused about which system does what, consolidation may be the right move.” Restaurants that fall under this category could include single-location spots just entering the delivery space or multiple-location groups with very different concepts and menus that would benefit from a single-platform strategy.
“On the other hand, I would advise diversification when the restaurant has strong systems, understands its profitability by channel and has a clear reason for each platform,” Peters continues. “One platform might be useful for visibility, while another might perform better in a specific market.”
6. For Better Control, First-Party Delivery Is the Move
When we talk about platforms like DoorDash and UberEats, we’re discussing third-party delivery. This involves outside contractors (the drivers who are employed by the platforms rather than the restaurants themselves) picking up the orders and delivering them to the customers. But that’s not the only way to introduce delivery and online ordering to your operation. There’s an alternative known as “first-party delivery”; this term refers to delivery systems in which the restaurant itself manages the ordering platform and hires the delivery drivers. Basically, this is the system that restaurants used to manage deliveries before DoorDash ever existed (but now, it’s digitized).
To Peters’ mind, first-party delivery is often preferable to third-party delivery. “The long-term goal should be to build direct online ordering whenever possible,” he says. His central argument involves cost; “third-party delivery can be useful for exposure and convenience, but restaurants should be careful about becoming too dependent on borrowed customers. The best operators know which channels drive profitable sales and which channels are just expensive noise.”
Li-ran Navon is the CEO of Sauce, a platform that enables first-party delivery and customer retention. When working with a first-party platform, “the customer orders directly from the restaurant through its own website or app. The restaurant owns the customer relationship, the customer data and the ability to communicate with that customer in the future.” Delivery, he continued, “can still be fulfilled through national or local courier networks [DoorDash Drive is an example of a third-party program that contracts with first-party operators], but the restaurant remains at the center of the experience.”
Navon said that “restaurants should not think of first-party and third-party delivery as competing models because they solve different problems. Third-party marketplaces can help restaurants reach new customers and generate discovery, while first-party delivery gives restaurants a channel where they own the customer relationship and customer data.”
7. Additional Staffing and/or Training Is Required
When it comes to staffing after you partner with an online platform, Peters said that assumptions don’t always hold true. “The dangerous assumption is that delivery replaces labor. It usually does not,” he noted. In terms of specifics, Peters insists that “someone still has to receive the order, make the food, package it, check it, manage the timing, hand it off to the driver, handle mistakes and protect the in-house guest experience.”
Peters admits that using an online ordering system “can reduce the amount of time staff spend taking phone orders, [which] can be helpful.” But because online ordering can dramatically increase kitchen output, restaurants need to staff in a way that supports this operation. “In high-volume restaurants, especially during peak times, it may make sense to have a dedicated person responsible for off-premise orders. That person may manage order flow, packaging, driver handoff, accuracy checks and communication with the kitchen. Without that ownership, third-party delivery can overwhelm the team and damage service for dine-in guests,” Peters suggested.
From Kirchheimer’s perspective, putting online ordering into practice “certainly puts extra stress on the food runner and host positions in a restaurant, especially when it comes to accuracy and making sure you have extra systems and checklists in place so that an order never goes out the door without every single item being correct.” Kirchheimer admits that he hasn’t added additional staff at his restaurants to handle online orders (yet), but he tells us that these systems have “given more hours to our [existing] staff.”
Of course, that raises a question of gratuity. “Third-party delivery orders do not provide tips to our staff (unlike online pickup orders, where guests can leave a tip that goes directly to our staff),” Kirchheimer explains. He goes on to say that, “to mitigate this, our managers came up with a system where our service staff are rewarded based off of revenues from third-party delivery.” This allows the restaurant group to take advantage of third-party efficiency while keeping their own staff fairly compensated.
8. Pay Close Attention To Feedback — Make Changes When Needed
If you’re new to the online ordering and third-party delivery game, the best way to get your bearings and to figure out how to move forward is to listen to your customers. “Restaurants should monitor reviews, refunds, complaints and mistakes by channel. If the same problems keep showing up through third-party delivery, the restaurant needs to identify whether the issue is food quality, packaging, timing, driver handoff, menu design or platform communication,” Peters said.
Kirchheimer sees online ordering as a chance to market his restaurants and encourage guests to experience them both through delivery and through in-person dining. “The growth of third-party delivery has also led to the growth of in-house dining and we do not think that is a coincidence. [We] look at it as an opportunity to get into peoples' houses and hotels, [which] grows visibility in our cities,” Kirchheimer said.