Delivery Commission Profit Calculator
Enter one delivery order to see what is left after commission, packaging and discounting — and how that compares with selling the same dish to someone sitting at a table.
What a delivery order actually earns
A delivery order does not behave like a dine-in order, even when the price on the screen is identical. The food cost is the same, the ticket prints in the same kitchen, and the sale appears in the same POS report. But between the moment a guest taps confirm and the moment money reaches your bank account, three deductions happen that dine-in never sees: the platform's commission, the packaging that carries the food out of the door, and whatever discount was funding the promotion that won the order in the first place.
Almost every operator knows their commission rate. Far fewer have worked out what one order is worth after all three deductions land together, and fewer still have set that figure next to the same dish sold across the pass to someone sitting at a table. That comparison is the entire question, and it is what this calculator answers.
What follows the payout is ordinary arithmetic: subtract the food and the packaging you were always going to pay for. The difficulty is that you are subtracting them from a materially smaller number than the one printed on your menu, and the size of that shrinkage is what decides whether the channel is building your business or quietly funding somebody else's.
Where the money goes on a $30 order
Take a $30 order on a platform charging 30% commission, running a 15% off promotion you agreed to fund, with a 32% food cost and a dollar and change of packaging. None of those inputs is unusual.
| Line | Amount | Running total |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery menu price | $30.00 | $30.00 |
| Promotion – 15% off, funded by you | −$4.50 | $25.50 |
| Platform commission at 30% | −$7.65 | $17.85 |
| Food cost at 32% of menu price | −$9.60 | $8.25 |
| Packaging, bag, cutlery and label | −$1.40 | $6.85 |
The order leaves $6.85, which is 22.8% of the price the guest saw. The same food sold dine-in at $30 leaves $20.40 of gross profit, because none of the top three lines exist. You would need just under three delivery orders to replace the contribution of one dine-in cover — and those three orders occupy the same kitchen, the same equipment and the same pair of hands during the same ninety-minute window.
That is not an argument against delivery. It is an argument for knowing the ratio before you decide how much of your kitchen's capacity to hand over to it.
The number that decides it
The single figure worth tracking per dish is the margin left after everything the channel takes, expressed against the price the guest was shown. Using the menu price as the denominator keeps the number comparable with your ordinary food cost percentage and with the dine-in version of the same dish.
Below about 5% the order is not carrying any share of rent, utilities or the labour that made it. Between 5% and 15% it is contributing something, which can be the right answer for a quiet Tuesday and the wrong answer for a full Saturday. Above roughly 15% the dish is genuinely working on the platform and is worth promoting there.
The second number worth knowing is how many delivery orders it takes to stand in for one dine-in cover. This is the figure that tells you whether the channel is filling spare capacity or displacing better business.
When that ratio sits near one, delivery is close to a straight substitute and you can grow it without much thought. When it climbs past three, every delivery order that pushes a dine-in ticket out of the kitchen is a net loss, and the channel needs to be capped, repriced or restricted to off-peak hours.
Packaging is a real ingredient
Packaging is the cost operators most reliably leave out, partly because it is bought on a separate invoice from a separate supplier and never touches a recipe card. A rigid container with a lid, a bag, a label, a sauce pot, cutlery and a tamper seal comfortably reaches a dollar to two dollars per order, and on a $18 ticket that is enough to move the margin by six or seven points on its own.
Treat it exactly as you treat an ingredient: cost it, add it to the dish, and price accordingly. If you already build plate costs with recipe costings, add a packaging line to the delivery version of every dish rather than carrying it as a general overhead. Overheads get forgotten; ingredients get repriced.
There is a menu design point buried here too. A dish requiring three separate containers to travel well — a hot element, a cold element and a dressing — can cost three times the packaging of a dish that goes in one box, while selling for a similar price. That difference rarely shows up anywhere in your reporting, but it is the difference between a delivery dish that works and one that does not.
Discounts stack badly with commission
The reason platform promotions feel so much more expensive than the same offer run in-house is that the two deductions compound. A 20% discount does not just cost you 20% of the order; it also lowers the base the commission is calculated on, which sounds helpful until you notice you have given away a fifth of your revenue to reduce a commission bill by a fraction of that.
On the $30 example above, moving from no promotion to 15% off costs $4.50 of revenue and saves $1.35 of commission — a net loss of $3.15, or nearly half the profit the order was going to make. Run that promotion across a whole weekend and it is entirely possible to increase order volume, increase kitchen workload, and reduce absolute profit at the same time.
If you are going to discount, discount narrowly. A promotion on one high-margin dish, or a spend threshold that raises average order value, behaves very differently from a blanket percentage off everything. Check the arithmetic with a target margin price before you agree to a platform's campaign, not after the invoice arrives.
When delivery still earns its place
The honest case for delivery is that it uses capacity you have already paid for. Your rent, your equipment and most of your kitchen labour are fixed for the shift. An order that arrives at 3pm on a Wednesday, when the dining room is a third full and the kitchen is standing still, contributes real money at a margin that would be unacceptable if it were displacing a table.
- Price delivery separately. A 10–15% uplift on delivery menu prices is standard practice and covers most of the packaging and part of the commission. Guests broadly expect it.
- Build a shorter delivery menu. Restrict it to dishes that travel well, pack in one container and carry a healthy margin. Removing your three worst delivery dishes usually moves the channel's average margin more than any negotiation with the platform.
- Cap it at peak. If your ratio says three delivery orders equal one cover, turning the tablet off during a full service is a profit decision, not a service failure.
- Push direct ordering where you can. Every order that moves off the platform keeps the commission line, which is far larger than any promotion you would need to run to attract it.
- Watch the labour. Packing, checking and handing over orders is real work. If delivery volume has grown without a change to your labour cost percentage, someone is absorbing it and service is quietly getting worse somewhere.
Delivery becomes dangerous only when it is treated as the same business at a slightly worse price. It is a different channel with a different cost structure, and it needs its own menu, its own prices and its own margin target. Once you can see the per-order number, all of those decisions become straightforward.
Frequently asked questions
Is commission charged before or after the discount?
This calculator applies commission to what the guest actually pays, after the discount, which is how most platforms operate. Some calculate commission on the pre-discount order value instead, which makes promotions more expensive still. Check one settlement report against your own arithmetic before trusting either assumption.
What delivery margin should I be aiming for?
Above 15% of the delivery menu price after commission, packaging and discounts is a dish that works on the platform. Between 5% and 15% it contributes to fixed costs but will not build profit. Below 5% you are effectively cooking for free once packing labour is counted.
Should I charge higher prices on delivery platforms?
Generally yes. A 10–15% uplift is common and recovers packaging plus part of the commission. The limit is credibility: guests do compare, and an uplift large enough to look punitive damages the direct relationship you are trying to build.
Why does my dine-in profit look so much higher here?
Because the dine-in figure in this calculator is gross profit — price minus food cost only. It does not carry server labour, glassware, laundry or the cost of the seat. Delivery avoids some of those, so the true gap is narrower than the headline. The comparison is still the right one for deciding which order you would rather have when the kitchen can only cook one.
Does packaging really matter that much?
On a large order, no. On an $14 single-dish order with a container, lid, bag, cutlery and sauce pot, packaging can be eight or nine percent of the price, which is often more than the entire remaining margin. It matters most exactly where margin is thinnest.
Should I include delivery sales in my prime cost?
Yes, but track the channel separately as well. Delivery food cost and delivery labour both roll into your overall prime cost, and commission sits below it as an operating expense. Blending the channels hides the problem; splitting them shows you which one is carrying the other.
How do I decide whether to leave a platform entirely?
Work out the contribution the channel makes after commission, packaging and any incremental labour, then ask what share of those orders would still reach you directly if the platform disappeared. If the remaining contribution covers the fixed costs it was supporting, leaving is viable. Your break-even point is the test, not the revenue figure.