Stop paying JustEat to find your existing customers
If your takeaway is listed on JustEat, Uber Eats, or Deliveroo, you already know what the commission feels like. Somewhere between 14% and 35% of every order, depending on your platform and your arrangement, is taken before you’ve paid for the ingredients, the staff, the packaging, or the rent.
Those platforms are good at one thing: making it easy for customers to find you. But they’re expensive, and the customers they send you are their customers, not yours. You can’t market to them directly. You can’t build loyalty with them outside of the platform. And every time they order again, the platform takes its cut – again.
ZenithSpark works with takeaways and food businesses across the West Midlands to build the kind of direct online presence that brings orders in without the middleman. We do this through SEO, Google Ads, and a Google Business Profile that puts your menu in front of hungry people searching locally.
Are the numbers worth looking at?
Let’s be direct about the maths, because it’s the most persuasive argument there is.
A takeaway turning over £4,000 a week through a delivery platform at 20% commission is handing over £800 a week. That’s £41,600 a year, every year in platform fees, for customers who found you because you paid for the privilege of being listed.
For a fraction of that annual spend, a properly optimised Google Business Profile and a local SEO strategy would put your takeaway at the top of local food searches without commission on every order that comes through. Add a modest Google Ads budget targeting hungry searchers in your delivery area, and you have a direct-order pipeline that belongs to your business, not to a platform.
That’s not a claim that platforms have no role. For discovery, getting in front of customers who’ve never ordered from you before, they still have value. But for your existing customer base, and for local searches where people are specifically looking for what you cook, direct digital marketing consistently delivers better margins.
How do people search for food?
“Chinese takeaway Dudley”, “best pizza near me”, “curry house open now Wolverhampton”. Local food searches are among the highest-intent, most time-sensitive searches that exist. The person performing that search is hungry, has already decided they want delivery or collection, and is about to make a decision in the next two minutes.
Google Business Profile is the most important tool in local food SEO. When it’s properly set up, with your menu, your photos, your ordering link, your opening hours, and a regular stream of customer reviews, it puts you directly in front of those searches, on mobile, at the exact moment the decision is being made.
Most takeaways in the West Midlands have a Google Business Profile. Very few have one that’s actually working properly.
Can you use Google Ads for takeaways? Are they targeted, controllable and profitable?
Google Ads lets you put your takeaway in front of people searching for food in your specific delivery area, at the times you’re open, and only for the search terms that are relevant to what you offer. You set the budget, you see exactly what it’s generating, and you pay per click rather than per order.
Compare that to a 20% platform commission on every single transaction and the arithmetic tends to speak for itself.
We manage Google Ads campaigns for food businesses across the West Midlands. We set them up properly from the start, making sure they’re targeting the right searches in the right areas, and optimising them based on what’s actually converting rather than what’s simply getting clicks.
Building something that’s yours
The deeper problem with platform dependency isn’t just the commission. It’s that you’re building your business on infrastructure you don’t control. Platforms change their terms. They change their fee structures. They promote competitors on your own listing page. They own the customer relationship.
A direct digital presence, a fast, well-optimised website with a working online ordering function, a Google Business Profile that ranks for local food searches, and a Google Ads campaign driving direct orders is an asset that belongs to your business. It grows in value over time and doesn’t cost you a percentage of every order for the rest of your trading life.
We work with takeaways, restaurants, and food businesses across Birmingham, Dudley, Wolverhampton, Walsall, West Bromwich, Stourbridge, Halesowen, Brierley Hill, Oldbury, Kidderminster, Worcester, Bromsgrove, Redditch, Telford, and Droitwich. Whether you’re a single-site chip shop or a multi-location food operation, the approach is the same: get you found directly, reduce what you pay to get there, and build a customer base that belongs to you.
If you want to understand what your current platform commission is costing you annually and what a direct digital marketing strategy would cost in comparison, get in touch with ZenithSpark. The numbers are usually illuminating.7
Call us on 01384 468035 or drop us a message — no pressure, no obligation.