Own your orders
Stop renting your own regulars
A marketplace takes 25-35% of every order — including the ones from regulars who already know your name and would have rung you anyway. Zecoa is priced like software: a monthly fee, or a flat 5%. The orders, the customer list and the delivery all stay inside your business.
On 450 orders at a £24 average — £38,880 a year, before a single kilo of chicken.
Flat, whatever you turn over, on your own payment gateway. £720 a year.
The gap between those two columns on the same trade. A second rent you are currently paying.
The argument
Four reasons restaurants move their ordering in-house.
What 30% actually costs in a year
At 450 orders a month and a £24 average, you are putting £10,800 of food through the door. A 30% commission takes £3,240 of that — £38,880 a year, before you have paid for a single kilo of chicken. That is not a marketing budget, it is a second rent. And it scales with you in the wrong direction: every extra order you win, every price rise you push through, every good month, hands over another 30% of the upside.
The customer list is the asset
On a marketplace, the person who ordered from you is the marketplace's customer. You get a first name and a drop-off address. They get the email, the ordering history, the reviews, and the right to put a competitor's discount in front of that person on a quiet Tuesday. On your own site, the account, the saved addresses, the order history, the loyalty balance and the marketing permission belong to you. You can see what sells at 9pm on a Thursday and do something about it.
Your own riders, not a rented network
Renting a courier network costs a fee on every drop and puts someone you have never met at your customer's door with your food. Running your own riders on DriverVue means dispatch knows who is on duty and where they are, the rider gets the drop-off, the deliver-by time and the change to hand back worked out for them, and every delivery is closed with a handover code. The delivery fee the customer pays goes to you and your rider, not to a platform.
Priced as software, not as a cut
Zecoa is a tool you buy, not a partner who takes a share. £40 a month covers up to 600 orders; £60 a month is unlimited. On both, you connect your own payment gateway, the money settles into your account, and Zecoa takes no percentage of anything. If you would rather not open a gateway at all, there is a flat 5% of order value with no monthly fee, card fees included, where Zecoa manages the payments end to end. All four apps are in every plan.
Worked through
The same month, three ways.
A restaurant doing 450 orders a month at a £24 average — £10,800 of monthly order value.
| Model | Monthly cost | Annual cost | What you keep |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace at 30% | £3,240 | £38,880 | £7,560 a month |
| Zecoa Unlimited, £60/month | £60 | £720 | £10,740 a month, before your gateway's own processing fees |
| Zecoa commission, 5% | £540 | £6,480 | £10,260 a month, card fees already included |
To be fair to the marketplace
It brings people who have never heard of you. We don’t.
Most restaurants run both for a while — the marketplace for discovery, their own site for the regulars, with a card in every bag pointing at it. What Zecoa stops is the 30% on the customers who already know your name.
Fair objections
The things worth saying out loud.
"I get volume from the marketplace."
True, and Zecoa does not replace that. A marketplace puts you in front of people who have never heard of your restaurant, and no ordering system of your own can do that. What it can do is stop you paying 30% on the customers who already know you. Most restaurants run both for a while — the marketplace for discovery, their own site for the regulars, with a card in every bag pointing at it.
"My customers won't download another app."
Most of them never need to. Your ordering site opens in a browser like any other page — from a link, a QR code on the table, or a search for your name. If someone uses it twice, they can add it to their home screen, where it opens full-screen and can send push notifications. If you do want a listing in the App Store and on Google Play under your own name and icon, that is a £9.99 a month add-on.
"So who does my marketing?"
You do, and that is the honest answer. The tools are there — order history, loyalty points, promo codes, push notifications to anyone who has installed your site, and a customer list you actually own. But nobody is going to put your name in front of a stranger the way a marketplace does. If you have no regulars and no local following yet, keep the marketplace while you build one.
"What if my broadband goes down?"
Orders are placed on your customers' phones and arrive on your devices over the internet, so a total outage stops new orders reaching you. No ordering system avoids that, and anyone who says otherwise is selling. What Zecoa does is make partial failures survivable: the kitchen board keeps the last good screen instead of blanking, tickets that fail to print queue up for retry, and the tablet at the pass runs perfectly well on mobile data.
"What happens to my existing orders?"
Nothing changes on the marketplace while you set Zecoa up — the two run side by side, and marketplace orders keep arriving exactly where they always did. You load your menu once, take test orders through your own site, and go live when you are ready. Nobody is going to ask you to switch off a channel that is still bringing money in. Most owners wind the marketplace down gradually, as regulars move across.
Run the numbers on your own turnover.
Bring last month’s order count and average basket to a thirty-minute call. We will tell you which plan costs you less — including if the honest answer is to stay where you are for now.