Direct ordering for independent restaurants

Stop paying 25% on customers who already love you.

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.

Fire us anytime. Keep everything. Your domain, your payment account, your customer list, your ordering page. No Ship Axiom account holds your money.

You keep the apps for discovery. We are not asking you to leave DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub. We only test whether repeat pickup reorders can move direct.

See what the apps cost you The free measured pilot

0%Typical marketplace commission

$0Paid to apps on $10,000 of monthly app sales

$0The same leak, over a year

The problem

The apps charge acquisition prices for retention orders.

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 — a card in every bag, one sentence at pickup, a text when Tuesday is slow — and that work is our entire business.

What we do

Three unglamorous things, done relentlessly.

01 — Set up

An ordering page in your name

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.

02 — Convert

A QR card in every takeout bag

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 — something as simple as:

Example script (adapt to your restaurant): "Next time, order straight from us online — same food, no delivery fee tacked on."

03 — Retain

Texts that bring regulars back

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.

Before you ask

The practical objections are the point.

Do I have to leave the apps?

No. Keep them for discovery and delivery if they work. The pilot targets regulars who already know you and are willing to pick up when the direct path is easy.

How much staff time does this take?

One bag insert, one counter QR, one pickup sentence. We design the materials, train the handoff, check compliance, and retrain when new staff rotate in.

What access do you need?

Read-only marketplace and POS reporting. The report has to come from source numbers: app sales, commissions, direct pickup, promos, refunds, and anything unusual that month.

What do I keep if I cancel?

Your domain login, ordering platform login, payment account, customer export, SMS list, QR artwork, and the monthly reporting template. The service stops; the assets stay yours.

What happens after the free pilot?

We make the decision from the report, not from a sales call. If cannibalization-adjusted savings clear your tier's monthly fee ($250 standard, $150 starter), we can continue. If they do not, we stop and you keep the assets.

How do I know the savings are real?

The report compares marketplace order decline against a baseline, subtracts phone-order cannibalization, and notes obvious confounders like holidays, promotions, menu changes, and weather. Raw direct-order volume is not the headline metric.

Could direct pickup hurt app performance?

It might, so we watch for it. If marketplace delivery or visibility falls in a way that wipes out the pickup savings, the pilot should say so instead of pretending every direct order is a win.

Why not do this ourselves?

You can. The service is follow-through: setup, print, training, retraining, SMS rhythm, monthly reporting, and the discipline to keep doing it after the first busy weekend.

What the monthly report has to show

Line	Purpose	Source
Marketplace baseline	Three-month order and sales baseline before the pilot.	DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub reports
Current marketplace decline	Whether app orders actually fell versus baseline.	Read-only marketplace reporting
Direct pickup orders	Orders that moved through the restaurant-owned page.	Ordering platform and POS reports
Cannibalization adjustment	Phone orders that became clicks, subtracted from savings.	POS trend and owner review
Confounder notes	Promos, holidays, weather, closures, menu changes, or app visibility issues.	Owner context plus monthly reports
Fee test	Net savings after your tier's monthly fee ($250 standard / $150 starter).	Same conservative formula shown above

SMS opt-ins run through a compliant platform in your name. If customers unsubscribe, they are removed; if opt-in quality is not clean, the pilot pauses before sending more.

The arithmetic

What did the apps take from you last month?

Two numbers from your merchant statement. No email required.

Last month's app sales (dollars)

Commission rate (%)

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%.

Paid to the apps monthly—

Conservative monthly savings*—

After Ship Axiom monthly fee—

Current yearly app commission—

* 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 for the monthly savings line: app sales × 20% × 75% × commission rate.

Would this clear the monthly fee?

Same calculator inputs, tested against Ship Axiom's monthly fee for your tier — $250/month at $8,000+ in app sales, $150/month from $4,500–8,000.

Estimated monthly net —

Monthly comparison uses the same conservative assumptions footnoted above: 20% diversion, then a 25% cannibalization discount, before comparing savings with your tier's monthly fee.

If this clears the fee on conservative math, the pilot tests it for free.

Bring one app statement. We check the sales line and the commission line together. If the numbers do not justify the pilot, you get a straight no before anyone wastes time.

Show me the statement

Good fit / bad fit

This only works when there is enough app volume to recover.

Two tiers, both qualified from one real merchant statement, not a self-serve signup. $8,000+/month through the apps is $700 setup + $250/month. $4,500–8,000/month is $700 setup + $150/month — the lower end of that range only if your commission rate runs high. Below $4,500, the conservative math doesn't clear a fee yet, and we'll say so.

Worth testing if

You do at least roughly $6,000 a month through third-party apps.
You have repeat pickup or takeout customers, not only one-off delivery.
Your staff can put a card in every bag and say one sentence at handoff.
You are willing to measure marketplace decline against a real baseline.

Probably not worth it if

App sales are under roughly $4,500 a month, so conservative savings don't clear either tier's fee.
Nearly all app volume is delivery from people who will not pick up.
You want new customers more than lower commission on regulars.
You cannot share reporting, because then the result cannot be proven.

The free pilot is not a favor and not a contract trap. It is a falsification test: either regulars move direct enough to clear the fee, or the claim is false and we stop.

What we won't tell you

Every agency has a pitch. Here's our fine print, up front.

We do not bring you new customers.

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.

Fire us anytime. Keep everything.

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. This is written into a pilot agreement you can walk away from — not a handshake.

We do not pretend there is no platform risk.

If a restaurant depends on marketplace delivery for most of its sales, we should be careful. We target repeat pickup behavior first, keep the apps live for discovery, and watch marketplace decline against the baseline instead of celebrating raw direct orders.

This isn't for every restaurant.

We have two tiers now — $8,000+/month gets our standard rate, $4,500–8,000/month gets a lower starter rate. But if you're doing less than roughly $4,500 a month through the apps, or almost all your app volume is delivery with no pickup habit, the math doesn't clear our fee at either tier, and we'll tell you so. We'd rather turn you down than send you an invoice you shouldn't pay.

Some of the "savings" aren't real, and we subtract them.

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

A free six-month pilot, measured like an experiment.

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 continuing at your tier's monthly rate ($250 standard, $150 starter). Either of us can walk away at any point.

What you get

Direct pickup ordering, set up in your accounts, on your domain
QR cards designed, printed, and in every takeout bag
Staff trained on the pickup-handoff script
SMS opt-in list built on a compliant platform you own
Templated remarketing campaigns with traceable revenue
A monthly report of real, cannibalization-adjusted savings
Retraining when bag inserts or handoff scripts slip

What we ask

Read-only access to your marketplace and POS reporting, so results are measured, not guessed
Permission to use the anonymized results as a case study
Staff actually hand out the cards and say the sentence
Clean SMS opt-in only — no scraped numbers, no gray-area lists
Six months, unless either of us calls it off sooner

After the pilot, pricing is $700 setup + $250/month standard tier ($8,000+/month app sales) or $700 setup + $150/month starter tier ($4,500–8,000/month). If the measured savings don't clear your tier's fee, we'll be the first to say so.

Who's asking

I've worked your line. I know why this doesn't get done.

Dominic Burgess, founder of Ship Axiom LLC

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