Where Restaurants Lose Money on Delivery: 7 Places

A restaurant with delivery rarely loses money through one big mistake. It loses it in small, invisible places: commission, late orders, orders for sold-out dishes, idle couriers. This article lists seven such places and what to do about each.

Sales are visible, so it is easy to think "everything is fine". But sales and profit are different things. At least two of the seven places below exist in almost every restaurant with delivery.

Key points:

• The biggest losses are usually aggregator commission and orders processed by hand.
• Much of the loss doesn't show in reports, so nobody counts it.
• Each place has a warning sign: once you find it, you know where to start.

1. Orders arrive from several places and get lost

If orders come from the website, Telegram, Instagram, aggregators and phone, and you don't see them on one screen, some get lost or delayed. The customer waits, then leaves. You never know, because nobody counts lost orders.

A typical picture: the waiter writes on paper, the kitchen hears something different, and nobody knows where the courier is. Sign: customers call asking "where is my order?". Fix: bring every channel into one order screen. More on the order screen and dispatcher.

2. Aggregator commission takes a big share of the margin

Aggregators take 15–35% of each order. A restaurant's margin is usually around 20–30%, so at high commission an aggregator order leaves almost no profit, or you work at a loss.

Example: if 50 million UZS of orders come through an aggregator per month at 25% commission, 12.5 million UZS is not yours. Most people never calculate this number. Sign: sales look big in the aggregator report, but there is no profit in your own books. Fix: build a second channel and move customers to your own website or bot. The commission math.

3. Orders are accepted for sold-out dishes

A dish has run out in the kitchen, but it still shows on the website or in the aggregator. The customer orders, and you cancel or send something else. The result is a bad review and a lost customer.

Sign: many cancelled orders. Fix: when a dish is stopped in the POS, it should disappear everywhere at once. That needs your POS to be connected to the platform. How stop-list sync works.

4. Couriers sit idle or are not enough

A permanent courier gets a salary. But orders come unevenly: at lunch and in the evening there are not enough couriers, in the morning and afternoon they sit idle. For a small restaurant this is very expensive.

Sign: delivery is late at peak hours while couriers wait in the morning. Fix: call an external courier service at peak times. On delivery without your own couriers.

5. The customer base is not yours

The phone number of a customer who came through an aggregator is not in your hands. You can't send them a promo or try to win them back. They are the aggregator's customer, not yours.

Sign: many customers, but few repeat orders, and you don't know who they are. Fix: collect every customer who orders in your own channel into a CRM and reward them with bonuses.

6. You don't know how much you earned yesterday

Reports are assembled by hand, arrive late and are approximate. Data is scattered: part in the POS, part in the aggregator, part written nowhere. The owner runs the business by looking backward.

Sign: you have to ask for a report to be written from scratch. Fix: a real-time dashboard. What an owner should see in the morning.

7. A promo raised sales, but there is no profit

When sales drop, you run a promo. Sales go up, but after discounts and costs you don't know whether any profit is left. You also don't know which dish brings profit and which loses money.

Sign: the feeling that "sales are good, but there is no cash". Fix: calculate profit before and after a promo, and run an ABC-XYZ analysis of the menu. How to calculate promo profit.

Where to start

Don't try to fix all seven at once. Pick the two you can calculate: aggregator commission and orders processed by hand. They are easy to count, and fixing them gives quick results. The rest follow.

Most of these problems have one root cause: your programs don't talk to each other. More on that: one system instead of ten apps.

Conclusion

• For one week, write down every cancelled and delayed order.
• Calculate the commission paid to aggregators last month in UZS.
• Divide courier pay by the number of orders: what does one delivery cost?

At Delever we go through where you are losing money using your own numbers: ask for a free demo at delever.io or write to @delever_bot on Telegram.