The seven questions every operator asks us before moving orders to a direct channel: visibility, ratings, who builds it, what the kitchen learns, what if it fails, how fast money shows up, and what the diner pays.
Short version: most owners asking about leaving DoorDash are really asking whether they can keep the volume and stop paying for it. You can, and you do not have to delist to do it. Marketplace commissions run 15% to 30% base, and 25% to 35% blended real cost once ads, promos and processing stack on top. A direct ordering channel takes commission to zero on every order that moves, because the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. Below are the seven questions operators ask us before they start, in the order they usually ask them. Zayos (also written Zay-OS) is what we build to run this, at $399 to $599 per location per month, no setup fee, month to month.
Quick vocabulary, because these terms get used loosely. A marketplace is DoorDash, Uber Eats or Grubhub: someone else's app, someone else's customer list, a commission on every order. POS is your point of sale, the register system your staff rings orders into. KDS is a kitchen display system, the screen on the line that replaced paper tickets. Otter is the order aggregation service that merges marketplace orders onto one tablet, and ingestion is the word vendors use for pulling those orders in. Many kitchens already run Otter and do not know it by name. They just know the tablet.
No, because nobody is telling you to delist. This is the question that stops the most owners, and it is built on a misread of what actually changes.
You do not have to leave DoorDash to stop paying DoorDash for your regulars. Keep the listing. Keep the discovery. A first-time diner who has never heard your name is worth the commission, and that is what the apps are genuinely good at. The customer who has ordered from you eleven times is not a discovery problem. That order costs you 25% to 35% blended for nothing except the convenience of a button they already know how to press.
There is a second visibility answer people miss. Your own site can rank in Google for "your cuisine plus your city," show up in the map pack, and get cited by AI assistants when someone asks where to eat. A DoorDash listing ranks for DoorDash. Every direct order you take also builds a page and a brand that belongs to you. We wrote the full commission math in how much delivery apps take from restaurants.
Your marketplace star rating stays exactly where it is. It belongs to that platform, and orders you take somewhere else do not touch it.
The more useful point is that marketplace ratings are mostly not about your food. They move on late drivers, cold bags and missing sides, none of which your kitchen controls. That is a rough deal, and it is one of the reasons operators want a channel where the complaint comes to them instead of to a star count.
The rating that actually decides whether a stranger walks in is your Google Business Profile. Direct orders help there in a specific, mechanical way: you get the diner's name, phone and email, so you can ask for a Google review by text the day after they ate. You cannot do that through an app, because the app does not give you the customer. Our own Google Business Profile, ZayOS-Zayrev, sits at 5.0 from 12 reviews, and it got there by asking every single time.
We do. That is the whole model. Nobody hands an owner a login and a setup wizard.
Zayos is built for you and goes live in under 2 weeks. What we need from your side is short: your menu (a photo of the printed one is fine), your hours, your logo, your delivery zone, the make of your POS, and access to Otter if you already run it. We handle the build, the menu entry, the pricing, the modifiers, the tax rules and the staff walkthrough. There is no setup fee, so the build costs you nothing before it earns anything.
Where things stand honestly, because vendors lie about this constantly. Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, is live and taking direct orders today. Storefronts are built and opening for ordering at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, and Yalla Market. If a salesperson gives you a customer count and cannot name the restaurants, ask for the names.
Close to nothing, and that is a design constraint, not a slogan.
Direct orders route into the same kitchen tablet the restaurant already runs for DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, through Otter. Same screen, same ticket flow, same sound, same place on the line. Nobody gets a second device to watch during a Friday rush. If a rollout adds a screen, the kitchen abandons it inside three weeks, and every operator who has been through a failed tech install already knows this in their bones.
Staff training is roughly twenty minutes. The one real difference is that a direct ticket carries a real name and a real phone number, so if something is unclear the expo can just call the guest. Line cooks tend to like that part. If you want the deeper comparison of how these order pipes differ, see Otter vs Chowly vs KitchenHub.
Then you cancel at the end of the month and you still have every app you had before, because you never left them.
Zayos is month to month with no contract and no setup fee. Your total exposure is one month, between $399 and $599 for that location. That is the honest ceiling on the downside, and it is deliberately small, because an owner should not have to bet a quarter on a vendor's promise.
Decide up front what "working" means so you are not arguing with a feeling ninety days later. Three numbers do the job: direct orders per week, the share of those that are repeat customers, and commission dollars avoided on the orders that moved. Write down where they sit at day zero. Look again at day 60. Numbers you agreed on in advance are much harder for anyone, including us, to spin.
Live in under 2 weeks, and most operators take their first direct order within a week of signing up, usually from a regular who was going to order anyway.
The savings are not a launch event. They accumulate order by order as regulars shift over. The modeled range is $48,000 to $300,000 or more per location per year, at 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month. That basis matters, and any vendor quoting you a savings number without one is quoting you a mood. Run your own volume through it rather than borrowing someone else's.
For a real figure instead of a model: Naya Grill has kept $48,000 or more per year in commissions that used to go to marketplaces. One restaurant, our first, named on purpose. The step by step version of how volume shifts is in how to reduce Uber Eats and DoorDash commissions.
A service fee at checkout, paid by the diner, never by the restaurant: $0.99 on pickup, $0.99 on delivery, $0 on dine-in, and 10% on catering.
Two things follow from that. First, the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips, with no commission taken out of the ticket. Second, this is not a new cost imposed on your guest. Diners already pay fees on the apps, usually a service fee plus a delivery fee plus a small order fee, and the total is normally well above a dollar on pickup. Ordering direct is generally cheaper for them and dramatically better for you, which is why the "my customers will be annoyed" fear almost never survives contact with an actual checkout screen.
Full plan detail sits on the pricing page, and the product itself is Zayos.
Find out whether a diner can order from you directly at all right now, and what is broken if they try. Run your site through the free grader at Zayos. It takes about a minute, it is self serve, and there is no call attached to it. You get a fix list you can hand to whoever manages your website, whether that is us or not.
No. Most operators keep every marketplace they are on and use them for discovery. Zayos runs the direct channel alongside them, and both order types land on the same kitchen tablet through Otter.
Yes. Direct orders push to your point of sale through Otter, so your register, your reporting and your end of night stay the way your team already does them.
$399, $499 or $599 per month per location, depending on tier. No setup fee, month to month, no contract. The diner pays the per order service fee at checkout, so the restaurant keeps 100% of food revenue.
Under 2 weeks from the day we get your menu, hours, logo and delivery zone. First direct order typically lands within a week of signing up.
Yes. Pricing is per location, and multi location operators run every store from one place. See the multi location case study for how that is set up.
Start with the free check, then look at the product: Zayos site grader, the Zayos platform, see the demo, pricing, or call 321-666-1102.
30 minutes. We look at your business and tell you exactly what we'd do. client or not.
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