How to Replace Foodhub With Direct Online Ordering

Can You Replace Foodhub With Direct Ordering?

Yes. And it's less work than most owners expect.

A direct ordering platform gives your restaurant its own website and app, so customers order from you without going through Foodhub. There's no marketplace subscription. The customer data stays with you. Every order through your own channel adds a name, a phone number and an order history to a list that you own, and that list keeps its value even if you change platforms later.

You don't have to switch off Foodhub on day one, either. Most operators run both side by side for a while and move customers across gradually.

Why Restaurants Leave Foodhub

Foodhub charges a fixed subscription instead of a per-order commission. For a busy takeaway that's usually cheaper than Just Eat or Deliveroo, and it's a fair reason to have joined in the first place. The problems tend to show up later.

The first one is the customer. When someone orders through Foodhub, Foodhub gets their details. You get the order. If you want to send that customer an offer next month, you're doing it with Foodhub's tools, on Foodhub's terms, and the moment you stop paying the subscription that relationship is gone.

Then there's the listing itself. Your restaurant sits on the same app as every other restaurant on Foodhub in your area, ranked by an algorithm you can't see or control. If the pizza place down the road pays for a featured spot, you drop down the page. Your regulars might scroll past you to find them.

The subscription doesn't care how your week went. You pay it in a busy December and you pay the same amount in a dead February. When orders fall, the fixed cost takes a bigger bite out of each one.

And customers see your food inside Foodhub's interface, not yours. There's only so much you can say about who you are, where your ingredients come from or why your curry is better than the one three streets away. On a marketplace you're one tile in a grid.

A direct channel fixes each of these. The website and app carry your name. The customer data is yours. You decide how the menu looks, what goes on the homepage and when to run a promotion.

What Direct Ordering Means in Practice

Customers order through a website or app that belongs to your restaurant. The order lands in your kitchen, you take the payment, and the customer's details go into your system, where you can use them for loyalty schemes and marketing.

The money works differently too. With Foodhub you're paying a subscription for access to their audience. With direct ordering you pay a technology fee to a platform like Flipdish, and you spend some effort getting customers to order from you directly. That effort is mostly up front. Once a customer has your app on their phone and orders from it, keeping them doesn't cost you marketplace fees.

How to Make the Switch

Step 1: Pick a platform

Before you sign anything, check that the platform gives you:

• An ordering website in your restaurant's name, on your own domain
• An app for iOS and Android. Not strictly required, but repeat customers use it more than the website
• A connection to your kitchen or POS, so orders don't have to be typed in by hand
• Customer data and marketing tools
• Order management and reporting

Flipdish online ordering covers the lot. Your Flipdish ordering site carries your branding and runs on your own domain. The Flipdish branded app goes on your customers' phones under your restaurant's name, not Flipdish's. Orders go straight to the kitchen through the Flipdish POS or a connected kitchen display system.

Ask any platform you're looking at who owns the customer data if you leave. With a direct ordering setup the answer should be you.

Step 2: Build the menu

The platform needs your whole menu: categories, items, modifiers, dietary notes and prices. Flipdish, like most direct ordering platforms, helps with this during onboarding. You do it once. After it's live, changing a price or marking something as sold out takes a few seconds in the back office.

Your Foodhub menu is a useful starting point, but don't just copy it across. This is a good time to be ruthless. Cut the dishes nobody orders and the ones that barely make money. Rewrite the descriptions that say nothing ("Chicken curry - a chicken curry"). Check the modifiers too. If half your customers ask for extra sauce in the order notes, make it a paid option.

Photos help as well. A customer scrolling your own site is deciding what to eat, not which restaurant to pick, so good pictures of your best sellers do a lot of work.

Step 3: Set up payments

You need a way to take card payments online. Flipdish has payments built in. Customers pay at checkout, the money settles to your bank account on a regular cycle, and every order has its own record. You don't need a separate payment provider, and you're not matching up figures from three different systems at the end of the month.

Step 4: Tell your customers

This is where most operators slip. Your Foodhub customers won't stumble onto your new website by accident. Plenty of them think of Foodhub as the place they order from, and your restaurant as one of the options on it. You have to tell them there's a better way to reach you, and you have to keep telling them.

What works:

• Stickers on every bag or box with your website and a link or QR code to download the app
• A line on every receipt: "Order directly at [your website]"
• A flyer in the bag for the first few weeks after launch
• Posts on your social accounts introducing the new site and app
• A message to any customers you already have contact details for, even an old email list from a paper loyalty card scheme

Give people a reason to try it. A small discount on their first direct order, or free delivery over a certain amount, gets the first order in. After that, the app does most of the work.

Keep Foodhub running while this happens. You're building a direct customer base, and that takes a while. When direct orders cover enough of your volume, you can decide whether the Foodhub subscription is still worth paying. Some operators keep a marketplace listing for discovery and push everyone they can onto the direct channel. Others drop it completely. That's your call, and you'll make it with real numbers in front of you instead of guesses.

Step 5: Bring them back

Repeat orders are where direct ordering pays off, so reward people for ordering direct. Stamps, points, money off the third order. Flipdish's loyalty features are part of the platform, so you're not running a separate loyalty system alongside your ordering.

The branded app also lets you send push notifications. If you've launched a new dish, have a promotion on, or want to fill a quiet Tuesday night, you can message your customers directly. You can't do that with customers who only know you through Foodhub.

A practical tip: don't overdo the notifications. One well-timed message on a slow evening beats five a week that people learn to ignore or switch off.

The Money

At high volumes, Foodhub's subscription works out cheaper per order than the commission-based marketplaces. That's true, and it's why plenty of takeaways chose it. Direct ordering changes what you're comparing, though.

Take a restaurant doing 150 orders a week through Flipdish. The technology fee is well below marketplace commission rates, so the restaurant keeps more from each order. As direct volume grows, the cost of each extra order falls. A customer who has your app and orders every Friday costs nothing extra to keep beyond the platform fee you're already paying.

To see what it means for your own business, do the sum. Take your current monthly Foodhub cost and divide it by the number of Foodhub orders you took that month. Do the same for a few different months, including a quiet one. Then compare that with the per-order cost of a direct platform, and remember that in your quiet months the subscription doesn't shrink.

Per-order cost isn't the whole picture, though. The bigger difference is who the customer belongs to once the order is placed. On Foodhub, they belong to Foodhub. On your own channel, they belong to you, and you can reach them again without paying for the privilege.

Can You Still Do Delivery?

Yes. Direct ordering isn't collection-only. Flipdish delivery management handles delivery through your own channel. You set the delivery zone, the minimum order and the delivery fee. The customer orders on your website or app, and you deliver with your own drivers or a connected courier service.

Set the zone carefully. It's tempting to cover as wide an area as possible, but food that arrives cold after a 40-minute drive does more damage than a lost order. Start with an area your drivers can reach quickly and widen it once you know how it's going.

Common Questions

Will I lose customers if I leave Foodhub?

Some won't move straight away. Most will if the direct channel is easy to find and simple to use. An app that remembers their address, their usual order and their card is quicker for repeat ordering than opening a marketplace, searching for you and scrolling through everyone else.

Running both channels for a while also takes the risk out of it. You're not choosing between Foodhub and direct on day one. You're moving people across, and you can watch the numbers as you go.

How long does setup take?

Most restaurants can have a Flipdish ordering website live within a few days of finishing the menu build. A branded app takes longer, usually one to two weeks, because Apple and Google both review apps before they appear in their stores. The website can go live first, and you can start pointing customers to it while the app is in review.

Do I need a new POS as well?

Not necessarily. Flipdish ordering connects to a range of POS systems, so you may be able to keep what you have. If you'd rather run everything on one system, Flipdish's own restaurant POS system connects directly to online ordering and kiosks, and all your orders arrive in one kitchen queue whatever channel they came from.

Getting Started

Replacing Foodhub with direct ordering isn't technically hard. The setup is a menu build, a payment connection and some marketing to let customers know. The economics get better the longer you run it, and what you end up with is a customer base you own instead of one you rent.

Flipdish works with restaurants and takeaways in the UK and Ireland on exactly this switch, from single-site takeaways to restaurant groups with several locations, and can get a direct ordering channel live quickly.