What aggregator commission actually costs your restaurant
Most restaurant owners in the Gulf can quote their aggregator commission rate from memory. Far fewer have sat down and worked out what that rate does to their profit, as opposed to their revenue. The two numbers are very different, and the gap is where a lot of restaurants quietly lose money.
Start with the arithmetic
Take a mid-sized restaurant doing 40 delivery orders a day at an average ticket of KWD 8. That is KWD 9,600 a month in delivery revenue.
| Line | Amount |
|---|---|
| Monthly delivery revenue | KWD 9,600 |
| Aggregator commission at 22% | − KWD 2,112 |
| Food cost at 30% of revenue | − KWD 2,880 |
| Packaging, labour, overhead allocation | − KWD 2,400 |
| Remaining | KWD 2,208 |
The commission is 22% of revenue. But measured against what is left after costs, it consumed roughly 49% of the operating margin on those orders. That is the number that matters, and it is the one almost nobody quotes.
The costs that never appear on the invoice
The headline percentage is only part of it. Three further costs are real but invisible:
- Promotions you fund yourself. Ranking well on an aggregator usually means running discounts. A 20% promotion on top of a 22% commission means you are keeping well under half of the menu price.
- You do not own the customer. You get an order number, not a relationship. You cannot message that customer again, cannot tell them you have a new menu, and cannot bring them back. You rent access to them, order by order, forever.
- You compete on your own order. When a customer opens the app to find you, they see nine competitors on the same screen, several of them running a bigger discount than you can afford.
The asymmetry: a customer who orders from you 12 times a year costs you commission 12 times on an aggregator. On a direct channel, the acquisition cost is paid once.
What direct ordering actually changes
Moving an order to a direct channel does not eliminate cost — payment gateways charge, messaging platforms charge, and someone still has to deliver the food. But the numbers are of a different order of magnitude. On the same KWD 9,600 of revenue, a direct WhatsApp channel at a 2% fee on completed orders plus the Commerce plan (USD 999 a year, about KWD 26 a month) costs about KWD 218 a month, against KWD 2,112.
More importantly, the customer becomes yours. You know their name, their order history and their address. You can send them an offer on a slow Tuesday. That capability does not exist on an aggregator at any price.
The honest caveat: do not quit cold
Aggregators do something genuinely valuable — they put you in front of people who have never heard of you. That discovery function is worth paying for, and a restaurant that deletes its aggregator listings on Monday morning will usually regret it.
The strategy that works is splitting the funnel by customer type. Let the aggregator do what it is good at: finding you new customers. Then move the repeat customers — the ones who already know your food and would have ordered anyway — onto a direct channel where you keep the margin. Those customers cost the aggregator nothing to serve and cost you 22% every single time.
How to tell if this applies to you
Two questions will tell you most of what you need to know:
- What share of your delivery orders are repeat customers? If it is above 30%, you are paying commission on demand you generated yourself.
- What is your net margin on a delivery order after commission? If you cannot answer within a few percentage points, that is the first thing to fix — before changing any channel.
Run the numbers on your own volume before you act on anyone's recommendation, including ours.
Work out what you're actually paying
Use the savings calculator on our homepage to see the difference using your own numbers.