How to Price an Online Menu in Ireland Without Destroying Your Margin
A €12 burger is €12 in cash on the counter, closer to €8 on a rider-delivered Just Eat order, and €11 and change on a direct channel at a single-digit commission. Price each channel for its own economics or give the difference away.
How to Price an Online Menu in Ireland Without Destroying Your Margin
A €12 burger on the counter is €12 in cash. A €12 burger on Just Eat at a rider-delivery commission is closer to €8 back to the business. A €12 burger on your own direct ordering page at a single-digit commission is €11 and change.
Three different unit economics behind the same headline price. Most Irish operators run one price across all three channels and absorb the gap out of margin.
This post walks through what the actual numbers look like on a realistic takeaway, what changes on each channel when you stop treating them as the same product, and how to engineer an online menu that is not quietly subsidising the platform.
Rate references below draw on publicly reported numbers for Just Eat and Deliveroo in Ireland, collated in our commission-rate sources document. Full references at the end.
The gap nobody prices for
On publicly reported rates, commissions for Irish restaurant partners on the two largest delivery platforms sit anywhere from around 14 percent on self-delivery contracts up to roughly 30 to 35 percent on rider-delivered orders. Most takeaways on rider delivery are at the top end of that band.
On a 30 percent rate, a €12 item is €8.40 back to the business before food cost. On a 5 percent direct commission, the same €12 item is €11.40 back. The food costs the same to make in either case. The packaging costs the same. The labour is the same.
The operator pricing identically across both channels is running two different businesses at one menu price, one of them structurally less profitable than the other, hoping the averages work out. Usually they do not.
Three ways operators respond, and which one actually works
Price the same everywhere, absorb the commission. The most common choice and the worst one. The business pays the platform out of margin that never left the kitchen.
Price the platforms higher, keep in-venue and direct cheaper. The correct one. A €12 counter burger becomes €14 or €15 on Just Eat. The customer paying a delivery premium is already expecting a delivery premium. Anyone who has held up a platform menu next to an in-venue menu knows the prices are not the same.
This is legal and standard. The one rule: be transparent about it on your own packaging. A note that says "prices are lower when you order direct at yoursite.ie" turns the gap from a liability into a reason to switch channels. Customers paying the delivery premium find out either way. Better they find out from you first.
Price everything high, offer in-venue and direct discounts. A cleaner version of the second approach for some operators. Works well if your in-venue trade is strong and the discount is clearly visible. Works poorly if you end up trying to run promo codes through a delivery platform whose promotions team has different ideas than yours.
What actually changes on an online menu
Not every dish on your counter menu belongs on your delivery menu.
Dishes that do not survive the journey. A crispy schnitzel that is still crispy after fifteen minutes in a delivery bag is a different dish than one that leaves the pass crispy. Either you have engineered it to travel (proper venting, batter choice, packaging), or it should come off the delivery menu. A cold soggy chip is a one-star review, and one-star reviews are more expensive than one item of lost revenue.
Dishes with expensive packaging. A salad bowl that needs a €0.80 bowl and a €0.20 lid and a sauce pot is carrying €1.00 of packaging against its price point. At 30 percent commission on a €9 salad, you are netting €6.30 before food cost. Take another €1.00 off for packaging and you are deep in unviable territory. Either raise the price of that item online, or do not offer it online.
Bundles. A well-built bundle widens margin in two directions. Average order value goes up, which dilutes the fixed per-order costs (packaging, driver allocation, platform flat fees). Food cost percentage on a combo is usually lower than on its components sold separately, because the cheap-to-make part (chips, a drink, a dip) carries easier margin than the expensive protein centrepiece.
A €28 meal deal lands closer to profitable on a 30 percent platform than two €14 items do.
The minimum order value conversation
A €6 delivery order on a 30 percent platform is structurally unprofitable for most Irish takeaways. Packaging, driver allocation, labour to prepare, platform commission, the lot.
A minimum order value of €12 to €15 eliminates the orders that were never going to make money. You lose a small number of customers and keep the ones whose orders were worth making. This is one of the cleanest margin moves a takeaway can make and one of the least taken.
Set the minimum higher on delivery than on collection. A collection order the customer walks in for does not carry the same driver cost or packaging stress as a delivery order.
Review your prices every quarter
Food cost in Ireland has moved upward through 2023, 2024, and into 2026. Prices that worked in 2022 do not work now.
Build a quarterly pricing check into the operation. One afternoon every three months, pull the current food cost on the ten highest-volume items, calculate the actual percentage, and move anything that has drifted more than three points below target. An operator reviewing quarterly is usually running on up-to-date food costs. An operator reviewing annually is usually running on nine-month-old ones.
The direct-channel pricing advantage
When the direct channel runs at a single-digit commission, the pricing options open up.
You can run a lunchtime deal that only exists on the direct link. You can honour a regular's discount without asking platform approval. You can price the direct-channel menu slightly lower than the platform menu and let the gap do the marketing for you. You can bundle into a price that would not have worked at 30 percent because you are not losing 30 percent.
Every one of those moves is available to the operator with a direct channel. None of them are available to the operator who is platform-only.
Where SELLERS fits
SELLERS is the direct-channel shape. Your own menu, your own prices, your own promotional rules, at a single-digit commission on collection orders and a low double-digit rate on delivery. No platform reviewing your promos, no marketplace algorithm deciding which item gets visibility this week.
Run it alongside whatever platforms you are on today. Price each channel for its own economics. Let the direct channel reward the customers willing to come to you directly. That is how menu pricing actually compounds into margin over time.
Sources
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