A Website for Your Restaurant: Stop Paying Platform Commissions

Booking platforms and delivery apps solved a real problem: being found. But they charge for it on every single transaction, forever. If your restaurant is established enough that people search for it by name, a meaningful share of those commissions is money you are paying to reach customers who were already yours.

This article does the math, then shows exactly what a restaurant website needs to convert those platform bookings into direct ones — and what it realistically costs.

The commission math, honestly

Fees vary by country, plan and contract, so verify your own statements. But the typical structure looks like this:

Channel	Typical fee	What it means
Reservation platforms (e.g. TheFork)	~€1–2 per seated diner on platform bookings, plus optional promo discounts of 20–50%	You pay per cover, and promotions eat margin
Delivery apps (Uber Eats, Glovo, etc.)	~20–30% of order value on full-service plans	The largest cut in the industry
Direct booking on your own site	€0–50/month for a booking tool	Flat cost, no per-cover fee

Now run a modest scenario. A restaurant seating 40 diners per day via a reservation platform, at €2 per cover, 300 days a year:

40 × €2 × 300 = €24,000 per year in per-cover fees.

Even a small operation with 10 platform covers a day pays €6,000 a year. On delivery: €3,000/month in app orders at a 25% commission is €9,000 per year. These are not marketing costs for new customers only — a large share of platform bookings are people who searched your restaurant by name and booked through the platform because that was the first convenient button.

The goal is not to leave the platforms. Use them as a discovery channel for first-time guests. The goal is to make sure repeat guests — the majority of a healthy restaurant's covers — book and order directly.

What "direct" actually requires

Three things, working together:

1. A Google Business Profile that points to you. For a restaurant, Google is the front door: most guests find you through Maps or a name search. Claim the profile, keep hours and photos current, answer reviews — and set the website and reservation links to your site, not a platform page. Google lets platforms inject their booking buttons into your profile; you can and should prioritise your own link.

2. A website that closes the deal in under 30 seconds. A guest who lands on your site wants four things immediately: menu, hours, location, and a way to book. If any of those takes more than two taps on a phone, they bounce back to the platform.

3. A booking mechanism you control. This can be as simple as a well-built reservation form that emails and messages you, or a self-hosted booking system with table management, or an embedded widget from an independent booking tool with a flat monthly fee. What matters: no per-cover commission, and the guest data (name, email, phone) lands in your records, so you can fill quiet Tuesdays with your own campaigns instead of paying a platform to do it.

What a restaurant website must include

Treat this as your acceptance checklist:

• Menu as text on the page, not a PDF. PDFs are slow on phones and invisible to Google. A proper digital menu is searchable ("best octopus rice near me" should find you), instantly updatable, and yours — no platform fee to change a price.
• Prices shown. Hiding prices loses more bookings than it protects.
• One-tap actions: call, get directions, book. Sticky on mobile.
• Reservation form or widget with date, time, party size — and instant confirmation by email.
• Opening hours that match Google exactly, including holiday exceptions.
• Photos of real dishes and the real room. Stock photos are detectable and corrosive to trust.
• Structured data (Schema.org Restaurant markup): invisible to guests, but it feeds Google your hours, menu URL, price range and booking link so you look complete in search results.
• Load time under 3 seconds on 4G. Guests decide on the pavement outside, on a phone.
• Allergen info and, where required, legal notices for your jurisdiction.

Nice to have, not launch-blocking: gift vouchers, event/group enquiry form, newsletter signup, multilingual menu for tourist areas.

The payback calculation

The honest question is not "how much does a website cost" but "how many covers does it need to shift to pay for itself".

Take the €24,000/year scenario above. If a proper website plus a corrected Google profile moves just 20% of platform bookings to direct, that is €4,800/year saved. A professionally built restaurant site typically costs €750–3,000 depending on scope; even at the top of that range, payback lands inside the first year. At Feitura, an essential restaurant site — menu, booking form, Google integration, mobile-first — ships remarkably fast, because our senior-built, AI-accelerated pipeline removes the usual agency queue; request an estimate and we'll tell you the exact price and date for your case. Ongoing care (updates, menu changes, monitoring) is a flat monthly fee — compare that with any single month of commissions.

A realistic 30-day plan

1. Week 1: Pull your platform statements. Calculate your real annual commission spend. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
2. Week 2: Get the site built: menu as text, booking form, photos, structured data.
3. Week 3: Point every profile — Google, Instagram bio, Facebook — at your own site. Add "book direct" with a small incentive (a welcome drink beats a discount) to receipts and table talkers.
4. Week 4: Measure. Count direct bookings vs. platform bookings weekly. Keep the platforms for discovery; watch the ratio shift.

One caution: platform fees and Google's rules change. Verify current commission structures in your own contracts before making projections.

If you want to know exactly what a booking-ready restaurant site would cost for your case, request a free estimate — you'll get a concrete number, not a sales call.