Low-Commission Online Ordering for Irish Restaurants

Commission is the one number on an ordering platform that decides whether an online order makes you money. It is also the one most often quoted in a way that is hard to compare.

This page is about comparing it honestly.

Turn every rate into euro

Percentages hide things. Convert everything to what you keep on a typical order, including every fee.

Take a €30 order:

Commission	Mosey's share or the platform's	You keep, before card fees
30%	€9.00	€21.00
25%	€7.50	€22.50
15%	€4.50	€25.50
6%	€1.80	€28.20
1.5%	€0.45	€29.55

On a hundred orders a week, the gap between 25% and 1.5% is €705 a week on the same food, cooked by the same people.

The four places a fee hides

When you compare two platforms, check each of these:

1. Commission — the headline percentage
2. A per-order fee charged to you on top of the commission
3. A monthly subscription, charged whether or not anybody orders
4. Card processing, which some providers mark up and some pass through at cost

Also check who pays the customer-facing fee. Some platforms add a service fee to the customer's bill; some take it from you. Both are legitimate, but they are not the same deal.

Why marketplace commission is high

It is worth being fair: the large delivery marketplaces are not charging 20-30% for nothing. That commission typically pays for the delivery rider, for being shown to people who have never heard of you, and for a very large marketing budget.

So the honest comparison is not "marketplace bad, direct good". It is:

• A marketplace is a way of being found by new customers, at a high price per order
• Direct ordering is a way of keeping the customers you already have, at a low price per order

Most venues do best with both, and the mistake is letting the expensive one become the only one.

What a low-commission set-up looks like

For most Irish cafés and restaurants, a sensible set-up is:

• Collection ordering on a low-commission direct system, promoted to your existing customers
• Delivery, if you offer it, on the cheapest route you can do well — your own drivers, a shared pool, or a marketplace used deliberately for reach
• Loyalty on the direct route, so ordering direct is visibly the better deal for the customer
• A card in every marketplace bag telling people how to order direct next time

Mosey's rates

We are one of the direct options, so here are ours in full.

• Collection (Order Ahead): 1.5% of the order
• Delivery: 6% of the order
• No monthly fee on either
• No markup on Stripe's card fee, which is passed through at cost
• 23% VAT on Mosey's commission, reclaimable if you are VAT-registered

The customer pays a booking fee that scales with the order: €0.30 under €10, €0.60 under €30, €0.90 under €50, and €1.29 at €50 or more, inclusive of VAT.

Delivery on Mosey is done by your own drivers, drivers shared with nearby venues, or a contractor — Mosey does not run a rider fleet, which is a large part of why the rate is 6% rather than 25%.

A monthly fee versus commission

Some direct ordering providers charge a flat monthly fee instead of commission. That can be cheaper for a busy venue: at a thousand orders a month, a flat fee may beat any percentage.

For a small or seasonal venue, it usually is not. A subscription is a fixed cost in January as well as in July, and it is charged in the month you took no orders at all. Work it out on your own order volume, in your quietest month, not your busiest.

A worked week

Take a café doing 60 online orders a week at an average of €18, all collection.

• On a 25% marketplace: €270 a week in commission, or roughly €14,000 a year.
• On Mosey at 1.5%: €16.20 a week, or a little over €840 a year, plus Stripe's card fee at cost.

Neither figure includes the customer-facing fee, which the customer pays in both cases. The difference — over €13,000 a year on the same coffee and the same sandwiches — is the whole case for moving regulars to a direct route, and it is why the venues that do it well talk about it at the counter rather than hoping people find it.

The marketplace may still be worth keeping for the customers it finds who would never have found you. The mistake is paying marketplace commission on customers who were already yours.

Getting customers to order direct

A low commission is only worth something if people use it. What works:

• Tell them in person. A card in the bag, a line on the receipt, a sign at the counter.
• Give them a reason. A loyalty reward that only direct orders earn is the most effective one.
• Make it easy. A link in your Instagram bio and on your Google listing, and no app to download.
• Do not hide it. Venues that are embarrassed to mention a cheaper route rarely get anybody to use it.

What it connects to

• Order Ahead at 1.5%
• Delivery at 6%
• Driver pools: share drivers with nearby venues
• The Irish alternative to Deliveroo and Just Eat
• What Mosey costs — every rate on one page