How to Replace Foodhub With Direct Online Ordering
Can You Replace Foodhub With Your Own Ordering System?
Yes. Plenty of takeaways already run their own ordering site alongside a marketplace listing, or instead of one. The money from those orders goes to the restaurant, and so do the customer's name, email and phone number. That second part is what most owners end up caring about.
You don't have to rip Foodhub out in one go, and you probably shouldn't. Get a direct channel working, push your regulars towards it, and cut back on Foodhub once the numbers say you can.
Why Restaurants Leave Foodhub
Foodhub sells itself as the cheaper option next to Just Eat and Deliveroo. Instead of taking a percentage of every order, it charges a subscription. For a busy takeaway doing hundreds of orders a week, that can work out a lot cheaper than commission. So the reasons people leave usually aren't about the headline price.
You don't get the customer
When someone orders through Foodhub, Foodhub owns that customer record. You see the order - what they had, where it's going. You don't get an email address or phone number you can use for your own marketing.
So you can't tell who your best customers are. You can't text the person who used to order every Friday and stopped in March. You can't tell the 400 people who always order the spice bag that there's a new one on the menu. Whatever you spend on promotions inside the platform builds Foodhub's customer list, not yours.
Your restaurant is one listing among many
On a marketplace, the competitor down the road is a thumb-scroll away. Foodhub decides how listings are ranked, which promotions run and what your page looks like. You get a logo and a menu in their template.
On your own website and app, nobody else is on the page. Your photos, your colours, your offers, your wording.
The costs add up
A subscription isn't free, and it's not the only cost. Add card processing on top and the real cost per order is higher than the monthly fee suggests. Direct orders still cost something - you pay for the ordering platform and for payment processing - but there's no marketplace in the middle. The gap on one order is small. Over a year of orders it isn't.
Someone else holds the tap
If all your delivery orders come through one platform, that platform controls your order flow. It can change its pricing, its terms or the way it ranks restaurants, and you find out afterwards. Some of those changes will be fine. Some won't. You don't get a vote either way.
What You Need to Replace Foodhub
Replacing Foodhub doesn't mean switching off your listing next week. It means building a second channel that you own and growing it until it carries most of your orders.
Start with an ordering website. A branded app is worth adding for regulars. Then you need some way of getting customers to actually use them, which in practice means a CRM and a loyalty scheme.
Direct ordering website
This is the basic piece. Customers order on your domain, under your name. Payments go to you. Customer details go to you. There's no other restaurant on the page.
It has to be good, though. If it's slow on a phone or the checkout is fiddly, people go back to the app they already know. It should load quickly on mobile, remember the customer, and make reordering last week's dinner a couple of taps. When the first order goes smoothly, most customers keep using it.
Flipdish builds branded restaurant websites for takeaway and delivery. They're made for ordering food from one restaurant, not for browsing twenty.
Branded mobile app
An app makes most sense for people who order from you every week or two. Once it's on their phone, you're one tap away instead of a search inside a marketplace. You can also send push notifications - a midweek offer, a new dish, a reminder that you're open on the bank holiday - without paying a platform to reach your own customers.
Flipdish's branded mobile apps are built for that job: getting existing customers to order more often and keep coming back. Web ordering on its own doesn't hold on to them as well.
A CRM and loyalty programme
The customer data is the main reason to go direct. But a list of email addresses sitting in a database doesn't do anything by itself. You need a tool that lets you act on it: send an offer to people who haven't ordered in six weeks, reward the ones who order every Friday, push a promotion to anyone who's bought a particular dish.
Flipdish has customer engagement and loyalty tools built in alongside the ordering, so you're not stitching three systems together.
How to Make the Switch
Step 1: Set up your direct ordering channel
Don't touch your Foodhub listing yet. Get your own ordering site live first. Test it on your phone and on a couple of staff phones. Place real orders. Check that the menu, prices and options match what the kitchen actually does - a missing "no onions" option turns into complaints fast.
If you have a POS, connect the ordering site to it so web orders go straight to the kitchen and nobody has to type them in again. Flipdish online ordering works directly with the Flipdish POS, so a web order turns up on the kitchen screen the same way a counter order does. If you're on a different POS, Flipdish integrates with most of the major ones.
Step 2: Tell your existing customers
The people ordering from you on Foodhub are your customers. They like your food. They just order it through whichever app they happen to have.
So tell them, everywhere you can. A flyer in the delivery bag. A line on the receipt. Posts on Instagram and Facebook. A sign by the counter. An email, if you have any addresses at all. And give them a reason. "Order direct and get 10% off your first order" is simple and it works. Someone who already trusts your food doesn't need convincing about the food. They need a nudge to try ordering it a different way.
Step 3: Give them a reason to stay
A first-order discount gets people to try your site once. A loyalty programme gets them back the second, third and tenth time. If every direct order earns points, every order placed on Foodhub is points the customer didn't get. It's a small thing. Small things are what change habits.
Flipdish's loyalty tools can be set up to reward direct orders only, which speeds this up.
Step 4: Keep Foodhub running for now
Run both channels side by side. Check the split every week - how many orders came direct and how many came through Foodhub. When a decent share is coming through your own channel, look at whether the Foodhub subscription still earns its keep.
Some restaurants decide to keep a smaller marketplace presence for good, because that's where new customers find them. The trick is making sure a customer's first order is on Foodhub and every order after that is direct. The leaflet in the bag does a lot of that work.
Step 5: Use the data
Every direct order adds a customer to a list you own. Use it.
The easy wins are people who ordered once and never came back. A targeted offer to that group usually pays for itself quickly. Your frequent customers deserve different treatment - a higher loyalty tier, maybe, or a reward for bringing a friend.
You can't do any of this through Foodhub, because you don't have the data. With direct ordering through Flipdish, you do.
The Numbers: What to Expect
When a restaurant moves a good share of its orders off marketplaces and onto its own channels, a few things tend to change:
- Each order makes more money. Even after the platform fee and card fees, a direct order keeps more than a marketplace order does.
- People order more often. Customers on your own site or app come back more frequently than they did through the marketplace.
- You can see who orders what, how often, and who's dropped off, and then do something about it.
- Keeping customers gets cheaper, because a loyalty scheme costs less than paying a marketplace for visibility again and again.
None of this happens in a month. Six to twelve months of steady effort to move a real chunk of customers across is a fair expectation.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
The big one is switching off Foodhub too early. If you cut the marketplace before the direct channel is taking enough orders to cover it, you lose revenue, and that hurts. Build first, then reduce.
Putting a poor ordering site in front of customers is nearly as bad. If it's slow or the checkout confuses people, they'll go straight back to Foodhub and probably won't try your site again. It has to be easier to use than the marketplace, not just cheaper for you.
A lot of restaurants also just don't tell anyone. Customers won't stumble on your ordering site. If the bag, the receipt, your socials, your emails and the sign on the counter don't all say "order direct", most people won't.
Then there's collecting the data and doing nothing with it. Even simple stuff - a message to customers who haven't ordered in a month, a thank-you offer for regulars - brings in orders you wouldn't have got otherwise.
How Flipdish Helps Restaurants Go Direct
Flipdish covers what you need to take orders yourself: branded websites, mobile apps, a POS system that pulls every order channel into one place, loyalty and CRM tools, and AI marketing for reaching your customers.
Restaurants using Flipdish for direct ordering have cut how much they rely on marketplaces and grown their total order revenue at the same time. Two things do most of the work. Ordering on the restaurant's own site or app is easier for the customer, and the loyalty programme keeps them coming back. Over time that costs less than paying a marketplace for placement.
If you want to start moving orders off Foodhub, take a look at Flipdish online ordering or book a demo.
