Seven alternatives to food delivery apps, and who each one suits

Choosing between the alternatives

The list above is more useful read as a set of questions than as a menu. Three of them decide most of it.

How much of your trade is repeat?

If most of your orders come from people who have ordered before, the delivery app is charging you discovery rates for customers it did not discover. An own ordering site, pickup-only or not, is the direct answer: no platform commission on Tuckly, your gateway’s fee instead, the customer’s number on your screen. If most of your orders come from people who have never heard of you, the app is doing its job and the better question is how to turn some of those first-timers into regulars who order from you next time. The guide to encouraging repeat orders is about that second case.

Can you physically deliver?

Self-delivery sounds like independence and is, in practice, a logistics business attached to a kitchen. Wages, insurance, a vehicle, and the question of what the driver does between orders. It works for restaurants with a short radius and steady volume: the pizza shop that serves four streets, the tiffin service with a fixed route. For everyone else, the realistic choices are a courier service where one is integrated (Porter, in the Indian cities it covers), the marketplace’s riders, or pickup.

Pickup deserves more respect than it gets. For cafés, bakeries, lunch spots and any kitchen within walking distance of its customers, a pickup order on your own site has no commission, no driver and a card fee of pennies. The takeaway and pickup page covers lead times and the ready status that make it work without a queue at the counter.

How much do you want to own?

WhatsApp ordering is the extreme of low cost and low structure: the customer is yours, but the order lives in a chat and gets retyped. A marketplace’s direct product is the opposite: structured and easy, but the platform still sets the terms and usually keeps the record. POS-bundled ordering sits in between, tidy but tied to that POS. A standalone ordering site like Tuckly is the option that gives you the menu, the customer and the terms, at the price of having to promote it yourself and pay a subscription rather than a commission. The pricing page says what that subscription is and what else you pay.

A sequence that works for most restaurants

Start by changing the WhatsApp reply: send the ordering link instead of taking the order in chat. Add the link to Google Business Profile the same day. Print a QR on the next run of bags or table cards. Leave the marketplace on. After a month, look at how many orders came through the link and what they would have cost on the marketplace statement. Then decide whether self-delivery or a Porter request is worth adding for the delivered share, or whether pickup is enough. Give it a quarter before judging it; direct volume builds in proportion to how often the link is put in front of people, not to how good the site is.

One more practical point about the mix: keep prices identical across channels. A regular who notices the direct site is dearer than the app will go back to the app and tell a friend. A regular who notices it is the same price, with no customer platform fee and their details remembered, tends to stay.

What to be sceptical of

Any option that promises to replace the marketplace’s reach. Any rate quoted without a date and a source. Any ordering product that lists “integrations” as a wall of logos rather than a statement of what syncs. And any claim, including ours, that a direct site will save you a specific sum; it saves you the commission on the orders that actually move, and how many move is up to you and your customers.