Direct ordering for independent restaurants
The delivery apps found some of your customers. Fine — that was worth paying for once. But every time a regular reorders through the app, you hand over a quarter of the ticket for a customer you already earned. We move your regulars to direct pickup ordering that runs in your name — and we do all the labor.
The problem
DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub charge 15–30% commission on every order. That's a defensible price for a new customer. It's an absurd price for the same regular ordering their usual, week after week.
Most independent restaurants never separate the two. The app statement is one number, so the whole thing feels like a cost of doing business. But inside that number is a group of loyal repeat customers who would happily order directly from you — if ordering directly were as easy as the app, and if anyone ever asked them to.
Nobody asks them because the work is unglamorous: setting up an ordering page, putting a card in every bag, training staff to say one sentence at pickup, sending a text when Tuesday is slow. You're running services. That work doesn't get done.
That work is our entire business.
What we do
We set up commission-free pickup ordering on an established white-label platform — under your domain, your payment account, your customer list. We build nothing custom and own nothing of yours.
Every app order that leaves your kitchen carries an invitation to skip the app next time. We design the cards, print them, and train your staff on the one sentence that makes them work.
We build your SMS opt-in list and run templated campaigns — slow-Tuesday offers, holiday preorders, catering pushes — with revenue you can trace to each send.
Platforms we implement: Square Online, DoorDash Storefront, GloriaFood. We are implementers, not developers — your ordering runs on proven software, in accounts you own.
The arithmetic
Two numbers from your merchant statement. No email required.
Your effective rate is on your merchant statement — commission plus marketing fees, divided by gross app sales. Most full-service marketplace plans land between 15% and 30%.
* Assumes only 20% of app sales shift to direct ordering — our conservative planning number, not a promise — and discounts a further 25% for cannibalization: some “new” direct orders are just phone orders switching to clicks, which saves you nothing, so we don't count them. Formula: app sales × 20% × 75% × commission rate × 12 months.
Same assumptions as above. The gap between the lines is money that stays in your kitchen.
What we won't tell you
DoorDash does that, and it's genuinely good at it. Keep it for discovery if it's working. We do one thing: stop you paying 25% on the regulars you already earned. If someone promises you growth and commission savings from the same QR card, hold onto your wallet.
The ordering page, the domain, the payment account, the customer list — all of it lives in your name from day one. If we stop earning our fee, export your list, cancel, and nothing breaks. We think lock-in is a confession that the service doesn't work.
If you're doing less than roughly $8,000 a month through the apps, or almost all your app volume is delivery with no pickup habit, the math doesn't clear our fee and we'll tell you so. We'd rather turn you down than send you an invoice you shouldn't pay.
When a phone order becomes a click, that's convenient — but it never paid commission, so it saves you nothing. Our reporting counts only orders that actually left the marketplace, measured against your baseline. We'd rather show you a smaller true number than a bigger fake one.
The offer
We're earning our first Las Vegas case study, so one qualifying restaurant gets the full service free for six months. Three months of maximum effort to find the ceiling, then three months at a deliberately reduced pace to prove the results hold without constant attention. At the end you see the honest number — marketplace orders diverted versus your baseline — and we both decide if it's worth $250 a month. Either of us can walk away at any point.
After the pilot, standard pricing is $700 setup + $250/month. If the measured savings don't clear the fee, we'll be the first to say so.
Who's asking
I'm Dominic Burgess. I spent a year as a chef in sit-down restaurants before starting Ship Axiom, which is why I'll show up at 2:30 in the afternoon — between services — instead of calling during your dinner rush. It's also why I know exactly how much intention you have to fix the ordering situation, and exactly how much time: none, because you're running a kitchen.
So I do it for you. The setup, the cards, the staff training, the texts. You cook. Once a month I hand you one page with one honest number on it.
Ship Axiom LLC · Las Vegas, Nevada
Contact
Email me, or just tell me when to stop by — 2:30pm works for most kitchens.
[email protected]Phone: [YOUR PHONE] · Las Vegas, NV