Every Order Through DoorDash Costs You a Third of It
If you run a restaurant in Burlington, every order that comes through DoorDash or UberEats is costing you 25 to 30% in commission. That's not a service fee. That's a third of your revenue, on every single ticket, forever.
Your own website with online ordering costs you 0% per order after it's built. The math isn't subtle. It's brutal.
I'm Nick Hammond, a freelance web developer in Burlington. I've audited a lot of restaurant websites in the GTA. Most of them are either nonexistent, broken, or built in a way that practically forces customers onto the aggregator apps. This is what's actually going wrong and what a restaurant website needs to do in 2026.
The Aggregator Trap Is Quieter Than You Think
It starts innocently. You sign up for UberEats because a regular asked if you were on there. Then DoorDash, because someone else asked. A few orders trickle in. It feels like free money.
Six months later, 40% of your revenue is coming through those apps. You can't turn them off because that's 40% of your revenue. But every one of those orders is paying 25 to 30% in commission.
The 2024 Toast Restaurant Industry Report found that 77% of diners check a restaurant's website before deciding to visit. So even people who eventually order through DoorDash often looked at your site first. If your site doesn't let them order directly, you trained them to use the app instead.
Restaurants Canada reports that most independent restaurants run on a 3 to 5% net margin. The aggregator commission isn't a fee. It's larger than your entire profit margin on the dish.
What a Restaurant Website Actually Needs in 2026
Most restaurant websites I see in Burlington are stuck in 2014. A PDF menu, a Google Maps embed, hours that haven't been updated since the pandemic, and zero way to order anything. That's not a website. That's a digital business card with a typo.
Here's what actually works.
A Menu That You Can Update Yourself
Not a PDF. PDFs are invisible to Google, they're terrible on mobile, and they require a developer every time you want to bump the price of the burger by a dollar.
A real menu lives on the page itself, organized by section, with prices, descriptions, and dietary tags. You should be able to log in and change anything in two minutes. When the price of beef goes up, you raise the price on the site that afternoon, not next month when someone gets around to it.
Photos of Your Actual Food
Not stock photos. Not the brand-licensed shots from your supplier. The food you actually serve, taken in your actual restaurant, ideally by someone with a decent camera and natural light.
A 2024 Statista food delivery survey found that 62% of customers prefer to order directly from a restaurant when given the choice. But "the choice" means your site has to look as good as the DoorDash listing. If your photos look like someone took them with a flip phone in 2008, the customer goes back to the app where the lighting was set up properly.
Online Ordering Built Into the Site
This is the entire point. A button that says Order Online in the header of every page. Tap it on mobile, see the menu, add items to a cart, pay, done. No redirect to a third party app. No commission. Just the customer ordering directly from you.
If you have a delivery radius, the site asks for a postal code first and tells the customer whether they're in range. If they're not, you offer pickup. If you don't deliver at all, you only offer pickup. Whatever you actually do, the site reflects it.
Reservations If You Take Them
If you're a sit-down restaurant, OpenTable or Resy integration on the homepage. One tap to book a table. Don't make people call. Don't make them email. The reservation flow should be as fast as ordering a burger.
Hours, Address, and Phone Above the Fold
The first thing somebody pulling up your site at 6:42pm on a Saturday wants to know is whether you're open. Put the hours where they can see them without scrolling. Same for the address. Same for the phone number, tappable on mobile.
If you're closed Mondays, say so plainly. If your kitchen closes 30 minutes before the dining room, say that too. Wrong hours on a website is a guaranteed bad review.
Mobile-First Everything
Over 60% of restaurant searches are mobile. Akamai found that 53% of mobile visitors abandon a site that takes longer than three seconds to load. If your menu page takes seven seconds on a phone, half your dinner traffic is already gone. I wrote a full breakdown of why slow websites cost you customers if you want the technical side.
Direct Ordering Platforms That Actually Work
You don't have to build the ordering system from scratch. Several platforms plug into a custom website cleanly and charge a flat monthly fee instead of a per-order commission.
The main ones I've worked with or recommended for restaurants in Burlington:
- Square Online. Free tier exists, works well if you already use Square POS. Good for smaller operations.
- Toast Online Ordering. Built into the Toast POS ecosystem. Strong if you're already running Toast in-house.
- ChowNow. Flat monthly fee, no per-order commission. Built specifically as a DoorDash alternative.
- BentoBox. More premium, geared toward restaurants that want a polished brand presence alongside ordering.
- Custom build. I've built direct ordering flows using Stripe and a custom backend for restaurants that want full control and zero monthly platform fees.
The comparison is simple. Aggregator apps take 25 to 30% per order. These platforms charge anywhere from $0 to $200 a month flat. On any restaurant doing meaningful volume, the math favours direct ordering by a wide margin.
The Math Worked Out, Plainly
Let's run real numbers.
A $40 average order through DoorDash with a 30% commission costs you $12 in commission. The customer paid $40. You got $28 (minus food cost, minus packaging, minus your time). DoorDash, who didn't cook anything or serve anyone, got $12.
Now scale that. 100 orders a month through DoorDash at $40 average is $4,000 in revenue. With 30% commission, that's $1,200 a month gone. Per year, that's $14,400.
A direct-ordering website that captures even half of those orders, the regulars who'd have ordered from you anyway, saves you $7,200 a year. Build cost on a typical restaurant site is $3,500 to $6,000 (more on that below). It pays for itself in roughly six months.
If you capture all of them, the build pays for itself in three.
What Kills Restaurant Websites
Same patterns over and over when I audit restaurant sites in Burlington and the GTA.
PDF Menus
I mentioned this above but it deserves its own slot because it's so common. A PDF menu is the digital equivalent of taping a printed sheet to your front door. Google can't read it properly. Phones display it badly. Updating it requires Acrobat. Customers hate it.
No Online Ordering at All
The number of full-service restaurants in Burlington with zero way to order from the website is staggering. Every one of those customers ends up on UberEats. Every one of those orders pays a third in commission. Avoidable.
Hours That Are Wrong
I'll click a restaurant site at 5pm on a Friday, see "Hours: Mon to Sun 11am to 10pm," walk in at 9pm, and find a sign saying they close at 8 on Fridays. Now I'm annoyed and hungry. The review I leave is not generous.
A Mobile Menu That Doesn't Work
You'd be amazed how many restaurant sites have menus that work on desktop but break on phones. Text overlapping the price. Sections that scroll horizontally for no reason. A "view menu" button that links to a 12MB PDF that takes forever to download. Test your own site on your phone right now. If it's broken, you're losing dinner orders.
Food Photos That Load in Slow Motion
A 4MB photo of a steak is not a feature. It's a reason for the customer to close the tab. Compress your images, use modern formats, and stop uploading raw camera files. Same fix as for any small business site, but doubly important when food is what you sell.
Local SEO for Restaurants
If somebody in Burlington types "Italian restaurant Burlington" or "best brunch Burlington" into Google, where do you rank? For most independent restaurants, the answer is "I don't know."
BrightLocal's 2024 consumer survey found that 87% of consumers used Google to find a local business in the past year. For restaurants, that number is effectively 100%. Nobody picks where to eat without Googling it first.
Here's what actually moves the needle.
Google Business Profile, Filled Out Completely
Hours, phone, address, menu link, photos updated this year, response to every review. Most restaurants set up the profile once in 2019 and never touched it again. Google notices. So does the customer comparing your profile to the place across the street that's been updating theirs.
Photos, Lots of Them
Google rewards Business Profiles with recent, real photos. Add photos every week if you can. The hero shot doesn't have to be perfect, just real. Customers trust real food photos more than they trust polished agency shots.
Reviews and a Reply Strategy
Reply to every review. The good ones with thanks, the bad ones with grace. Future customers read your replies as much as the reviews themselves. A thoughtful owner reply to a 2-star complaint turns it into a positive signal.
Getting on Local Lists
"Best brunch in Burlington" lists. "New restaurants in Burlington" roundups. Local food blog reviews. Each one of these is a backlink and a referral source. Reach out, invite reviewers, offer to host. Most restaurants never bother.
What It Costs
Direct numbers for a restaurant in Burlington, since that's what people actually want to know.
- Basic restaurant site with menu CMS and integrated online ordering: $3,500 to $6,000
- Multi-location or fully custom build with reservations, gift cards, and loyalty program: $6,000 to $12,000
The build is one-time. Hosting and ordering platform fees run anywhere from $50 to $250 a month depending on the platform you pick. Compare that to even a single month of aggregator commissions on a busy restaurant and the comparison is over.
For context, I wrote a breakdown of what websites cost in Burlington across other industries if you want to see where restaurants fit in the bigger picture. I also wrote a similar deep dive on websites for contractors in the GTA if you know any tradespeople asking the same questions.
The Aggregator Math, One More Time
I want to be plain about this because it's the entire point of the post.
100 orders a month, $40 average, 30% commission, equals $14,400 a year you're handing to DoorDash or UberEats. Forever. Every year. Compounding.
Your own restaurant website with online ordering, built once, costs you somewhere around $5,000. After that, it's monthly platform fees in the low hundreds and zero per-order commission.
The aggregator apps aren't free marketing. They're a tax on your business that you can mostly turn off the moment you have a working direct-ordering site. The customers who already know your name (your regulars, your local neighbourhood, the people who'd have ordered from you anyway) shouldn't be going through a third party at all.
For more on building demand directly, I wrote up how to get more customers online for a small business. Most of it applies cleanly to restaurants.
What Working With Me Looks Like
I'm not an agency. You talk to me, I build the site, you launch it. I live in Burlington, I eat at a lot of the restaurants I'm talking about, and I know the local search landscape.
I build everything custom on a modern stack. That means your site loads fast on a phone, ranks well in local search, and integrates cleanly with whatever ordering platform makes sense for your business.
Want to Know What You're Paying Aggregators?
If you've already got a restaurant website, I'll run a free audit. I'll show you exactly how much you're paying aggregators every year and what a direct-ordering setup would save you. Plain numbers, no pressure.
Send me your URL and I'll get back to you within a day.