Third-party platforms have made themselves almost unavoidable for hospitality and service businesses. The takeaway app brings hungry customers, the booking site fills tables, the voucher platform shifts quiet mid-week slots. They work, which is exactly why so many businesses lean on them. But every one of those orders arrives with a cost attached, and it is worth understanding that cost properly before you decide how much of your business to hand over.
This is not a case against ever using platforms. It is a case for knowing the maths, so you can use them deliberately rather than by default.
Why commission hurts more than it looks
The trap with a commission percentage is that people compare it to their turnover when they should be comparing it to their profit. A slice taken off the top of every sale does not come out of your revenue in any gentle way. It comes almost entirely out of the margin, which is the only part you actually keep.
Consider the shape of it. On most orders, the ingredients or materials, the staff time, the rent and the overheads are already spoken for. What is left over as profit is usually a modest fraction of the sale price. When a platform takes its commission from the total, it is taking that cut before you get to your thin slice of profit, not after. So a commission that sounds like a fraction of the sale can easily amount to a large fraction of what you would otherwise have banked.
The headline rate is a percentage of the sale. The number that matters is what percentage of your profit it represents, and that is almost always much larger.
This is why a business can be busy, with orders flooding in through an app, and still feel like it is barely getting ahead. The volume is real, but a meaningful share of every order is walking straight back out of the door as commission.
What a direct booking actually costs
When a customer books or orders directly through your own website, the cost picture is completely different. You are not paying a platform a percentage for the introduction. The main cost is card processing, a small fee charged by the payment provider on each transaction, and that is a fraction of typical platform commission.
So the same order, taken direct, leaves far more of the sale in your business. Multiply that difference across a month of orders, then a year, and the gap between "taken direct" and "taken through a platform" becomes one of the largest single levers on your profit that you actually control.
Rather than trust a rule of thumb, it is worth putting your own figures in. Our booking fee calculator lets you enter your typical order value, your platform's commission and your monthly volume, and see the annual difference for your own business in a few seconds.
The real value platforms provide: discovery
It would be dishonest to pretend platforms give you nothing. They give you one genuinely valuable thing: reach. A takeaway app puts you in front of people scrolling with no particular loyalty, deciding what to eat tonight. A booking site surfaces you to someone searching a whole city for a table. That visibility, to people who have never heard of you, is hard to build on your own and has real worth.
The problem is not discovery. The problem is paying a discovery fee, over and over, for customers who were already yours. When a regular who loves your place books their fourth visit through a platform, you are paying commission to be introduced to someone who needs no introduction. That is the leak worth closing.
The smart approach: platforms to find, direct to keep
You do not have to choose all-or-nothing. The businesses that handle this well treat platforms and their own website as two different jobs:
- Let platforms do what they are good at. Use them to reach new customers who would never have found you otherwise. Treat the commission on a genuinely new customer as a marketing cost, because that is what it is.
- Own the repeat business. Give people every reason to come back through your own site: an easy booking or ordering page, a small loyalty perk for booking direct, a card or note in the bag with your web address, a follow-up that points them to you rather than the app.
- Make direct the easy option. If booking direct is clunky, people default back to the app they already have. A clean, fast booking or ordering flow on your own site is what makes the switch stick.
Over time the mix shifts. New customers still arrive through platforms, but your loyal base flows through your own website where you keep far more of each sale. You get the reach without handing over a commission on every regular for the rest of the relationship.
How to work out your own numbers
Before you change anything, get the real figure for your business. It only takes a moment:
- Take your typical order or booking value.
- Apply your platform's actual commission rate to it, so you can see the cost of one order.
- Multiply by how many orders you take through that platform in a month, then by twelve.
- Compare that against the much smaller card fee you would pay on the same orders taken direct.
The annual gap is often large enough to pay for a proper booking system many times over. If you would rather not do the sums by hand, the booking fee calculator does exactly this with your own figures.
The bottom line
Third-party platforms are a useful way to be found, and for reaching brand-new customers the commission can be money well spent. But paying that same commission on your regulars, forever, is a quiet and expensive habit. Own the tool that takes your bookings, move your loyal customers onto it, and you turn a permanent cost into a one-off investment that keeps paying you back.
