Downtown demand arrives in walls. Zayos lets you take it on your terms.
Channelside restaurant online ordering means taking orders on your own branded site instead of paying a delivery app a cut. Zayos adds scheduled pre-ordering and timed pickup windows for arena and convention nights, one tablet for every channel, and a flat $499 per month with no commission.
Free, no card, about 60 seconds.
What happens to your kitchen when the arena empties at once?
Channelside and Water Street do not have a dinner curve. They have events. A puck drop at Amalie Arena, a session break at the Tampa Convention Center, a ship turnaround at the cruise terminal, a Riverwalk festival. Demand shows up as a wall, and the platform you are on decides whether that wall is revenue or a bad review.
The pre order window
People already have tickets. They know when they are eating and roughly where. A marketplace has no way for them to order at 4pm for a 6:15pm pickup, so that demand either walks in and waits or goes somewhere with a line it can see.
The wall
Everything lands at once. Dine-in is full, the apps keep pushing tickets at a line already at capacity, quoted times slide, and the same platform that overloaded you rates you for being slow.
The second wave
Nineteen thousand people leave the arena at the same minute. Some of them want food now. Whoever can quote an honest 20 minute window and hold it takes that wave. Everyone else takes the complaints.
How do you take a 90 minute wall without blowing your ticket times?
You move demand off the peak and you cap what lands on it. Both are ordinary features on your own site and both are missing from a marketplace. Scheduled ordering lets a guest with a 7pm ticket buy at 4pm for a 6:15pm pickup, which turns a wall into a slope. Order throttling caps how many online tickets land per fifteen minute window. Prep times are set per channel, so the window you quote is the window your line can hit.
The alternative is what most downtown kitchens do now: accept everything, watch quoted times slide, and absorb the ratings damage from a platform that had no idea how many hands were on the line. A restaurant that can promise 20 minutes and deliver 20 minutes on a Saturday after the final buzzer wins that block, and none of that is a commission argument. It is a control argument.
On Operator plus Marketplace at $599 a month, Otter, the aggregator that merges delivery-app tickets into one feed, pulls DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub into the same kitchen tablet as your direct orders. One queue on the pass, not four screens on the worst night of the week.
Half your guests will never come back. Is a customer list worth anything here?
This is the strongest argument against direct ordering anywhere in Tampa, and it is worth answering straight. A cruise passenger with six hours ashore and a convention delegate here for three days are not going to become regulars. For them, marketplace discovery genuinely does something, and we tell operators to keep the apps running for exactly that traffic.
Two things are still true. Commission is charged on that visitor order as well, so every visitor ticket you move onto your own site is money kept whether or not they ever return. And downtown Tampa is no longer only a visitor district. Water Street and Harbour Island added thousands of residents, and the office towers along the Riverwalk feed weekday lunch from the same few blocks. That resident and office base eats downtown every week, and it is the group worth owning a list for.
So the play here is split, not total. Marketplaces stay on for the wave that comes off a ship. Your own site, your own domain and your own customer list take the person who lives eleven floors up and orders twice a week, plus the office that feeds twelve people every Thursday.
What is the app cut costing a downtown Tampa kitchen?
Take 950 marketplace orders a month at a $34 average ticket. At a 30 percent effective rate that is about $9,690 a month, roughly $116,300 a year. Thirty percent sits inside the 25 to 35 percent blended range once delivery, marketing and card processing stack on the 15 to 30 percent base commission. Event driven volume tends to sit at the high end of that range, because peak pricing and promoted placement are what you buy on a busy night. This is a model with every input printed, not a customer result.
Every order moved onto your own site is worth about $10.20 at that ticket, so the $499 Operator plan breaks even at roughly 49 direct orders a month. That is one busy event night. Change the inputs on the commission calculator.
Which downtown Tampa blocks does Zayos cover?
Downtown searches are landmark searches. People look for food near the arena, near the convention center, near the cruise terminal, on the Riverwalk. Your Zayos site is built on your own domain with those landmarks in its structure, so the search has somewhere to land that is not a marketplace tile.
For a small format space or a stall, QR code ordering runs off the same menu as your site and the connected marketplaces, so a guest at a table on the Wharf orders without occupying a counter position.
Who runs Zayos, and what is actually live?
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company. We have no downtown Tampa office and we are not going to suggest otherwise. We serve the Tampa market from South Florida, onboarding is remote, and most operators are live in under two weeks with a first direct order inside the first week.
One restaurant is live and taking orders on Zayos today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach. On the commission model run at about 3,000 orders a month it keeps more than $48,000 a year that used to leave as marketplace commission. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash. No Channelside customer is on that list yet, and we will not invent one.
What does Zayos cost a Channelside restaurant?
Operator $499. Operator plus Marketplace $599, adding DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets ingested through Otter into one kitchen tablet. Concierge $699, with up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen. Per location, month to month, no setup fee, and no commission on food revenue at any tier. The price is the same on a sold out Saturday as on a dead Tuesday, which is the point in a district that runs on events. The diner pays the flat service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in and 10 percent on catering. The restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and 100 percent of tips.
Full pricing breakdown →What downtown Tampa owners ask before they switch.
Is Zayos live in downtown Tampa today?
Can guests order ahead for a specific pickup time before a game?
How do I stop the apps from flooding my line at the worst moment?
Half my guests are visitors who will never come back. Does direct ordering still pay?
What is commission costing a downtown Tampa restaurant a year?
Does it work for a stall or a small format space at Sparkman Wharf?
See what last month of event nights cost you.
The free report reads your restaurant and shows what the marketplaces took. No card, about 60 seconds.