Resources
Work out whether direct ordering is worth it for you
A calculator that runs on your own figures, the vocabulary the industry uses without explaining, what going live actually involves, and the compliance documents your accountant will ask for.
Commission calculator
What marketplaces cost you, in your own numbers
Move the three sliders to match your restaurant. Nothing is submitted anywhere and no figure is assumed on your behalf.
Your numbers
What goes through marketplaces each month, before their cut.
Typically 15–30%, and higher once promotions and fees are counted.
Regulars, not first-time discovery. Most of the shift comes from people who already know you.
At those numbers
Commission paid per year
$54,000
Commission at stake if 40% moved direct
$21,600
about $1,800 a month
This is arithmetic on the figures you entered — not a forecast, and not a promise about what OwnTable will achieve for you. It also does not subtract our subscription, because that depends on your plan and country; the real prices are here so you can do that subtraction with the actual number.
Product guides
How each part actually works
Go-live checklist
Six things that decide how fast you trade
This is the order we work through with every restaurant, and it holds whichever platform you end up choosing. The one that catches people out is the third.
- Get the menu right firstEverything else reads from it — the web page, the QR, WhatsApp and the phone agent. Photograph a printed menu or paste a URL and check what the importer produced before going further.
- Decide your fulfilment rulesWhich of pickup, delivery, dine-in and drive-thru you actually offer, the prep time per daypart, and the zones and minimums for delivery. Honest quoted times matter more than fast ones.
- Connect payments earlyGateway approval is the one step that is outside anyone's control and it is the usual reason a go-live slips. Start it on day one. Cash on collection works meanwhile.
- Claim your WhatsApp numberIt connects through Meta in your own business account. Allow time for the business verification if you have never done it — it is Meta's queue, not ours.
- Put the link somewhere realThe bio, the receipt, a table card, the window. A direct channel nobody can find loses to the app every time.
- Switch retention on before you need itReview requests and win-back are more valuable in month one than month six, because month one is when the list starts.
Glossary
The words the industry uses without explaining them
- Direct order
- An order placed on a channel the restaurant controls — its own page, phone, WhatsApp or a table QR — where no marketplace takes a share and the guest's details reach the restaurant.
- Effective commission
- The headline marketplace rate plus the parts that are easy to miss: promotional funding, delivery subsidies, advertising, and the price uplift many restaurants apply to survive the rate. Usually well above the quoted number.
- Merchant of record
- Whoever is legally the seller in a card transaction, and therefore whose account the money passes through. On OwnTable that is always the restaurant, never us.
- 24-hour window
- Meta's rule that a business may only send free-form WhatsApp messages within 24 hours of the customer's last message. Outside it, only pre-approved templates send — which is why OwnTable shows the clock running down on a conversation.
- Win-back
- Contacting a guest who used to order regularly and has gone quiet. The highest-return automated message a restaurant can send, because the guest has already decided they like the food.
- Attribution window
- How long after a marketing message an order still counts as caused by it. OwnTable states its window rather than leaving the number unexplained.
- Soft cap
- A usage allowance that warns and keeps working rather than cutting off. OwnTable's AI allowances are soft caps.
- 86'd
- Kitchen shorthand for a dish that has run out. In OwnTable an 86'd dish greys out on the menu rather than disappearing, so a regular can see it is off today rather than gone for good.
Trust & compliance
The documents your accountant will ask for
All public, all current. If you need something that is not here — a signed DPA, a security questionnaire, our data-residency position for a particular market — ask and you will get a real answer.
Common questions
Including the ones with uncomfortable answers
Each product page carries its own questions too. This is the set that applies whatever you are considering.
No, and we would not advise it on day one. Marketplaces are a discovery channel — people who have never heard of you find you there. OwnTable is the channel you move your regulars onto, because a regular does not need to discover you again. Most restaurants run both.
Still deciding? Ask us the hard question.
Whether it works with your POS, whether your gateway is proven, whether we can do the thing a competitor promised. You will get a straight answer, including when the answer is no.