Aggregator Commission: Reading the Platform's Cut

The fourth night’s read follows the money out through the apps. Delivery is the cost line that grew fastest in most restaurants over the last five years — and the one most P&Ls still treat as a footnote, netted quietly out of revenue where nobody reads it. The platform’s cut deserves the same discipline as food and labour, because for delivery-heavy operations it is the same order of money.

This is the fourth read in the Five Nights to a Tighter P&L series — a free five-night email course you can join from the toolkit — and it stands alone.

Off the top: how the cut works

When an order comes through an aggregator, the platform takes its share of the order value first — before food cost, before packaging, before anyone in your kitchen is paid. The rate is commonly 15–30% depending on contract and delivery model: whether the platform’s riders or yours carry the order, what marketing placement you take, category, exclusivity. Treat that range as context only. The number that decides your margin is the one in your own agreement — effective rate per order, add-ons included — and it is worth reading against the published platform take rates collected, with sources, in the aggregator commission tracker.

The mechanics matter more than the headline: the cut is a share of revenue, while your costs live below it. A few points of commission move your bottom line by far more than a few points, because everything else was already spoken for.

The stack the dine-in price never carried

A dish priced for the table carries food cost and its share of the room. The same dish, same price, through an app, has to absorb three costs the table never billed it:

• The commission, off the top of the order.
• Packaging — a real cost on every single order, scaling with volume, not revenue.
• Promotion drag — the discount or delivery offer that won the order, cut from the same ticket.

Stack all three on a discounted order and a dish that earns honestly at the table can hand money back through the app — at full volume, all month, while the sales report looks busy. Nothing on the menu changed. The channel changed everything around it.

Contribution per order: the only honest read

Blended P&Ls hide delivery problems by construction — strong dine-in margin papers over weak delivery margin until the combined number sags and nobody can say why. The honest read is per order, by channel:

Order value − platform’s cut − packaging − promotion − food cost = contribution per order

Run it on real orders — your three best-selling delivery items first, actual tickets, not list prices. You are sorting the delivery menu into items that still leave a sensible contribution after the full stack and items being quietly subsidised by the rest of the card. The wider economics — packaging spec, promotion design, direct channels — are walked in delivery aggregator economics; the arithmetic above is the night’s non-negotiable.

Promotions are margin decisions

Marketplace promotions work — they win orders. The discipline is to treat each one as a priced decision rather than a reflex, because the discount stacks on top of commission and packaging on the same ticket. A promotion that reads as a modest percentage can be the whole difference between positive and negative contribution. Run offers with the post-stack margin in front of you, aimed at the orders you actually want more of — not as a permanent state of the listing.

Decide the mix deliberately

None of this argues for leaving the platforms. It argues for choosing. Price the delivery channel for its real cost stack — a delivery menu is legitimate engineering, not trickery. Move what repeat demand you can onto channels you own, where an order does not pay the full cut. Then decide, with the channel numbers in front of you, how much volume you want through a third party — instead of letting the apps decide by default.

The Delivery Margin Recovery instrument runs the contribution read item by item and shows where the recovery is — free, on-device, in a few minutes — and the aggregator commission tracker keeps the published take rates in one cited place. The final night ties all four lines into the one discipline that keeps them closed: the weekly P&L read.