Commission-Free Online Ordering for Restaurants
bavoli now includes online ordering. It comes with the Professional plan at $50 a month, pickup ordering is live everywhere bavoli runs, and the restaurant pays a flat $1 per order. There is no percentage commission and no setup fee, and ordering is part of the plan rather than a separate subscription. Card processing is added at checkout and paid by the customer, which makes the $1 your entire per-order cost.
I want to walk through why the flat dollar matters, because the difference between a dollar and a percentage is bigger than it sounds.
What a percentage takes from a pickup order
Marketplace apps charge restaurants a commission of 15% to 30% per order, depending on the platform and the plan tier. On a $60 pickup order, the numbers look like this:
| $60 pickup order | Fee the restaurant pays |
|---|---|
| Marketplace at 15% | $9.00 |
| Marketplace at 30% | $18.00 |
| bavoli | $1.00 |
Across a month of 200 pickup orders at that average, the commission comes to $1,800 to $3,600. The same month on bavoli costs $200.
The percentage also grows with your prices. Raise menu prices to cover food costs and the app's cut rises with them. A $95 catering tray pays a bigger commission than a $12 sandwich, even though accepting either order is the same tap on the same tablet. A flat fee stays a dollar whether the bag holds $14 of food or $140.
And this is pickup, so there is no driver being paid out of that commission. Your kitchen cooked the food, your staff bagged it, and the guest walked in and carried it out. The percentage paid for transmitting an order.
The honest case for marketplaces
I will concede the strongest argument for the apps up front. Marketplaces bring in new customers. Someone scrolling an app at 7pm has never heard of your restaurant, sees the listing, and orders. That is real customer acquisition, and paying a commission on that first order can be a defensible trade.
The problem is that the commission makes no distinction between that stranger and your regulars. The guest who has ordered from you every Friday for two years opens the same app out of habit, and you pay the same percentage on her order as you would for someone who found you five minutes ago. She already knows where you are. She was going to order from you anyway. The app collected an acquisition fee on a customer you acquired years ago.
Repeat orders are what commission-free online ordering is for. Put your ordering link on your website, your Google profile, and your Instagram bio, and give the people who already know you a place to order where the margin stays in the building. Keep the marketplace listing if the new-customer flow earns its fee. Your regulars are the ones who should cost you a dollar.
There is a second cost that never shows up on a statement. When a guest orders through a marketplace, the app owns the relationship. It holds her order history and her contact information, and it will use both to promote whoever pays for placement next week. When she orders through your bavoli page, she is your guest. The order history is yours, and the next order starts on your page instead of in an app that lists your competitors.
Your menu is already the ordering page
If you use bavoli, your menu is already digitized. We build menus from a PDF or a photo of the physical menu, so nobody re-types anything. That same menu powers the ordering page, with sections, prices, and descriptions carried over. When you 86 an item, it disappears from the ordering page immediately, without a support ticket or a sync delay.
What guests see
Guests order from your own page and pay by card, Apple Pay, or Google Pay. They get a text when the order is placed, another when the kitchen accepts it, and another when it is ready, plus a status page where they can watch it move. If plans change while an order is still pending, the guest can cancel it themselves and the refund is automatic, which spares your staff the phone call and the manual refund.
What the kitchen sees
Orders land in the same dashboard and tablet app you already use for reservations, so there is no second screen to babysit. A new order chimes until someone acknowledges it. Accepting takes one tap, and prep-time presets let whoever is at the pass quote 15, 25, or 40 minutes without typing. The guest's text updates fire from those same taps, so nobody has to remember to send them during a rush.
What it costs
The Professional plan is $50 a month and includes online ordering alongside reservations, the waitlist, and the rest of the plan. Every order costs you $1, flat, at any volume. Card processing is paid by the customer at checkout, and there is nothing else on the bill. Delivery is live as well, in the US only for now, and it gets a post of its own.
If you take pickup orders through an app today, last month's statement has the real numbers in it. Find the commission line, count the orders behind it, and price the same month at a dollar each. The full detail on how ordering works is on the online ordering page.
