Takeaway / delivery-only / Online ordering
Online ordering for takeaway and delivery-only kitchens
Scored and compared prices dated
The short answer
With no dining room to fall back on, online ordering is not a side channel for a takeaway kitchen, it is most of the business, which makes the roughly 30% commission on third-party marketplaces the single biggest number in the whole operation. Owning your own ordering page and steering customers toward it matters more here than anywhere else on this site.
Reviewed by the editorial team · updated 11 August 2026
Step 3
What matters most to you?
Pick one or two. Everything below re-scores instantly, and we show you the maths.
Winner overall
Square for Restaurants
The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon.
The trade-off
Offline mode takes the card without knowing if it will clear, so a declined payment surfaces after the customer has gone.
Why it won
- price
- ease of setup
- support
- volume
- integrations
Our scores, 1 to 5, defined on the methodology page.
Everything else, ranked the same way
| # | Product | From | Contract | Card rate | Score | Price checked |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Square for Restaurants The default answer for anyone who wants to be selling this afternoon. | Free, then $49 | none | 2.6% + 10¢ in person on the free plan, 2.5% + 15¢ on Plus | 4.2 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 02 | Toast The one built for restaurants only, with the lock-in that implies. | Free, then $69 | multi-year is typical | 2.99% + 15¢ on the free Starter Kit, 2.49% + 15¢ on the $69 plan | 3.6 | Pricing checked 10 Aug 2026 |
| 03 | Otter Pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and the rest onto one screen, sold as a hardware bundle rather than a subscription. | From $198 | not published, sales-quoted | separate, plus a per-order transaction fee on every bundle | 3.4 | Pricing checked 11 Aug 2026 |
What's different about buying this for takeaway / delivery-onlys
A restaurant with a dining room can treat a delivery app as incremental revenue and shrug at the commission. A takeaway kitchen with no other channel is paying that same roughly 30% cut on the majority of its sales, which turns a marketing decision into a margin decision fast.
Square's Plus plan at $49 a location a month and Toast's ordering module at around $75 both give you a branded ordering page with a materially lower cost than a marketplace commission, and both route the order into the same kitchen queue as everything else rather than a separate tablet. The trade-off is discovery: your own page only gets found by people who already know you, while a marketplace puts you in front of people who do not.
Most operators in this category end up running both, and the sensible way to think about the marketplace commission is as paid advertising with a very high cost per acquisition, worth it for new customers, worth actively discouraging for repeat ones you can move to your own page instead.
Questions people actually ask
- Can I get marketplace customers to switch to my own page?
- Some will, especially with an incentive on the receipt or packaging. It rarely converts everyone, but even a modest shift meaningfully changes your blended margin given the size of the commission gap.
- Is it worth being on more than one delivery app?
- For reach, yes, though each additional app is another screen or feed to watch, which is the exact problem an aggregator like Otter is built to solve.