A restaurant website with online ordering, without the commission
Delivery platforms take between 15 and 30 percent of every order. For a small restaurant that is often the entire margin. The alternative is not complicated: your own website where regulars order directly, for pickup or your own delivery. What used to cost a developer and a monthly SaaS fee can now be described in a paragraph.
What a direct ordering site actually needs
Not much, but each piece has to work:
- A menu with categories, photos and prices that you can edit yourself.
- A cart and a checkout with pickup or delivery, and a delivery address when needed.
- Payment — at the door, or online with a card. Both are fine; online payment needs Stripe.
- Order status the customer can follow: new, preparing, ready, on the way.
- A kitchen screen where staff see incoming orders and change the status.
- Notifications: an e-mail (or a sound in the kitchen) for every new order.
And three things that must be true underneath: prices are calculated on the server (the browser cannot change a total), the kitchen screen is only reachable by staff, and customers only see their own orders.
The request that builds it
Build a website for my restaurant, Olive & Thyme, with online ordering. Menu with categories and photos, a cart, checkout with pickup or delivery (customer enters an address for delivery), orders paid at pickup or on delivery. Customers can sign up to see their order history and track the status. Admin page for me: manage dishes and categories, see incoming orders, change status. Add 12 sample dishes with prices in EUR.
That request, sent to Malpera, produced the demo restaurant linked from our home page in about four minutes. Replace the name and the dishes with yours.
Online payment or pay at the door?
Pay at the door is simplest and good enough for pickup. For delivery, prepayment removes the no-show problem. If you add "with online card payment", Stripe is connected to your own account: the money goes straight to you, not through the builder, and there is no commission from Malpera. Stripe's own fee applies (around 1.5-3% depending on country and card).
What to do after the first version
- Upload real photos — they sell more than any design.
- Set your real opening hours and a "we are closed" state; ask for it if it is missing.
- Add a minimum order value for delivery and a delivery area if you have one; these are server-side rules, say so.
- Put the site address on your receipts, your window and your Instagram bio. "Order direct and skip the app fee" is a sentence customers understand.
The economics
A restaurant doing 400 platform orders a month at €25 pays roughly €1,500-3,000 a month in commission. A direct ordering site costs a domain and a hosting plan — on Malpera, €19 a month including hosting, SSL and the builder itself. Even if only a third of regulars switch, the maths is not close.