Delivery marketplaces advertise 30% of order value when the platform delivers, 16% when you deliver, and 6% for pick-up, identical in Australia and New Zealand as published in September 2026. Skai Solutions ran one A$40 order through all three channels below.
Delivery marketplace merchant plans are published rather than secret, and the three rates that matter are the same in both markets, read in September 2026. Skai Solutions has written them as category rates rather than naming a platform, because they move and because the shape is what matters.
| Arrangement | Advertised rate |
|---|---|
| Listed in the app, the platform delivers | 30% of order value |
| Listed in the app, your own driver delivers | 16% of order value |
| Listed in the app, the customer collects | 6% of order value |
| Platform-built ordering site on your domain, platform delivers | 25% of order value |
| Platform-built ordering site, you deliver or they collect | 6% of order value |
Two things in that table surprise people. The first is that the pick-up rate is a fifth of the delivery rate, which makes promoting collection the single largest lever most venues are not pulling. The second is that the Australian and New Zealand pages carry identical percentages.
Percentages are hard to feel. Here is one order, A$40, worked through each route. Food cost is set at 35%, which is the middle of the ATO's published cost of sales band for Australian restaurants, so A$14 of the A$40 is ingredients. Everything below is Skai Solutions' own arithmetic on published inputs, shown so you can substitute your own.
| Channel | Fee | Food cost | Left before labour and rent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Marketplace, platform delivers | A$12.00 (30%) | A$14.00 | A$14.00 |
| Marketplace, you deliver | A$6.40 (16%) | A$14.00 | A$19.60 less your driver |
| Marketplace, customer collects | A$2.40 (6%) | A$14.00 | A$23.60 |
| Ordered on the phone, customer collects | A$0.00 | A$14.00 | A$26.00 |
The spread between the top row and the bottom row is A$12 on a A$40 order. Thirty of those a week is roughly A$18,700 a year, which for most single-site venues is a larger number than any software decision they will make this year.
The percentage is the part everyone quotes and the part that is easiest to plan around. The rest is not.
The honest answer depends on which problem you have, and for two of the three the answer is not us.
If you need new customers, stay on the marketplace and treat the 30% as acquisition spend. No independent ordering site is going to find you a stranger at 8pm on a Tuesday. Judge it the way you would judge advertising, on whether those customers come back, not on the cut.
If your problem is that regulars order through the app, your own ordering site is the fix, and the lever is collection rather than delivery. Getting a repeat customer to collect moves that order from a 30% cut to a 6% one, or to nothing at all if they ring you.
If your problem is that the phone rings during service and nobody can get to it, neither of the above helps, because those orders are not being lost to a percentage. They are being lost to a busy signal.
Nobody takes a percentage of a phone order. That is the whole argument for the channel and it is a good one, but it comes with a cost the apps do not have: someone has to pick up, during service, while plating. Skai Solutions is a fixed monthly fee rather than a cut, which is the relevant difference. At A$299 a month, the plan is paid for by about 25 orders a month that would otherwise have gone through the app at 30%, on the A$40 example above. Under that, the app is cheaper. Over it, it is not. Our Australian pricing and New Zealand pricing pages carry the full plan detail, and AI phone ordering for takeaways covers how a phone order reaches the kitchen.
Where the phone does not help: it will not find you a new customer, it will not carry your menu photography, and it is a worse experience than an app for a fussy order with six modifications. Use it for the traffic you already have.
A 30% cut is survivable at a healthy margin and fatal at a thin one, so the number to hold it against is your own. The ATO's small business benchmarks put average total expenses at 88% of turnover for an Australian restaurant turning over A$500,000 to A$2 million, from 2023-24 lodged returns, which implies a pre-tax margin near 12% before the owner takes anything. That is Skai Solutions' arithmetic on the ATO's published averages, not an ATO figure. Our page on restaurant profit margin in Australia works through the bands properly, and restaurant food cost percentage covers the other half of the equation.
At a 12% margin, a 30% commission does not reduce your profit on that order. It removes it and then some, unless the menu price was set for the app in the first place. Which is the real question behind this whole page, and most venues have never sat down and answered it.
Skai Solutions answers it, takes the order and sends it to your point of sale, for a flat monthly fee that does not scale with what you sell.
Book a Free DemoPublished merchant rates in September 2026 are 30% of order value when the marketplace supplies the driver, 16% when you supply your own driver, and 6% when the customer collects. Those are headline rates excluding GST. Large chains negotiate below them.
No. The published New Zealand merchant rates read 30%, 16% and 6%, the same three numbers as Australia, as at September 2026. Operators frequently assume the smaller market is charged less and it is not.
No, and this is where budgets break. On top of the percentage sit GST on the platform fee, a one-off activation fee of about A$700 or NZ$700 excluding GST for your first location and about A$350 for each additional one, optional in-app advertising, and any discount you fund yourself to stay visible in the app.
Not quite. A platform-built ordering site on your own domain is advertised at 25% if the platform still delivers and 6% if you deliver or the customer collects, published September 2026. An independently built site avoids the percentage but you pay card processing, hosting and, most expensively, the marketing to get anyone to visit it.
On the fee alone, yes. Nobody takes a percentage of a phone order. The real cost is staff time and the orders you never hear because the line was busy. That is a fixed cost problem rather than a percentage problem, which is why the arithmetic below compares a flat monthly fee against a per order cut.
For most venues, no. The apps buy reach you cannot buy any other way, and the honest way to read a 30% cut is as a cost of customer acquisition rather than a cost of sale. The move that pays is shifting your repeat customers off it, not walking away from new ones.