How to move your customers off the delivery apps

Every platform selling you direct ordering skips this part, or answers it by selling you Google Ads. Here is what actually works, from the shops that have done it.

Don’t leave the apps

The shops that quit Deliveroo on a Monday are usually back by the end of the month. The apps are how strangers find you, and that is worth paying for. What is not worth paying 30% for is the regular who already knows your name, already knows what they want, and would happily order direct if anybody had told them they could.

The goal is not to leave. It is to stop renting back the customers you already earned. Keep the listings. Move the regulars. Most shops find a surprisingly large share of their app orders come from a small group of repeat customers, so shifting that group changes the numbers without touching discovery.

Work out what a regular is actually worth

Do this before anything else, because it tells you how hard to try and what you can afford to give away. Take a typical order and run it both ways.

That last number is the one that matters. It is what one regular moving across is worth to you over a year, and it is why a £3 first-order incentive is not a cost, it is the cheapest customer acquisition you will ever do.

Put the link where the food is

This is the whole thing, and it costs about £15 of printing. Your best prospects are people already eating your food. They cannot order direct because they don’t know they can.

• A sticker on the bag. Every delivery, every takeaway, every time. This is the single highest-return thing on this page: the customer is holding your food, they are pleased with you, and the QR is right there.
• A card in the bag with the offer on it. A sticker gets seen; a card gets kept.
• A QR by the till and on the tables. People waiting for coffee will scan anything.
• Your own window. If there is a Deliveroo sticker on your door, there should be one of yours next to it, and yours should be bigger.
• Your Instagram bio and your Google listing. Both free, both take two minutes, and the Google one is where people who search your name by name will land.

Make the QR go to your ordering link directly, not your homepage. Every extra tap loses people.

Give the person on the till one line to say

Staff will not deliver a paragraph, and they should not have to. One sentence, said while handing over the bag, when the customer is already happy.

Two things are doing the work there. There is something in it for them, and there is an honest reason. People like independent shops and are often genuinely surprised to learn what the apps take. Saying so out loud is not begging, and it works.

What does not work: “we have an app now”. Nobody wants another app. They want a free coffee.

Give them a reason the app can’t match

A cheaper order is not a reason, because the customer usually doesn’t pay less. Something they cannot get on Deliveroo is a reason. Loyalty is the obvious one and it is the one the marketplaces structurally cannot copy, because their loyalty scheme belongs to them, not to you.

• A stamp card that only works direct. Ninth coffee free. Old idea, still the best one, and it gives the person on the till something concrete to say.
• First order off. Enough to be worth changing habit for. Given the £105 above, be braver than feels comfortable.
• Something only regulars get. Ordering before you open, the off-menu thing, Friday pre-orders. Costs nothing and cannot be replicated by a marketplace.

Ask once, at the right moment

The right moment is straight after a good order, not in a newsletter three weeks later. If you have an email address from a direct order, one message after the first one is worth more than a monthly round-up nobody opens.

And then stop. The fastest way to undo all of this is to become the shop that emails too much.

It is slower than you want, and then it compounds

Nobody moves half their orders in a fortnight. What tends to happen is a slow trickle of regulars, each of whom then stays, because the stamp card they have half filled is a reason to come back to you rather than to a marketplace. The first month looks like nothing much. The sixth looks like a different business.

Two honest warnings. Some marketplace contracts have rate-parity clauses about advertising cheaper prices elsewhere, so check yours before you advertise a lower price — everything on this page works without doing that, which is why none of it is about undercutting. And do not put a flyer advertising your own link inside a marketplace-branded bag; that is the one move that will get you delisted.