Give the beach visitor to DoorDash. Give the Clearwater local to Zayos.
Clearwater restaurant online ordering means taking orders on your own branded site instead of paying a marketplace percentage. Zayos gives a Clearwater kitchen that site, one tablet for every channel, and a flat $499 per location per month with no commission on food revenue.
Free, no card, about 60 seconds.
What does a Clearwater owner worry about that an inland operator does not?
Two businesses in one kitchen. Clearwater Beach draws visitors from all over the country, and across the Memorial Causeway the rest of Clearwater is a large, settled, year-round city: Countryside, Morningside, Belleair, the Gulf to Bay and US 19 corridors, with Safety Harbor and Dunedin next door. Those two customers have almost nothing in common. One is here for three days at a high ticket and will never come back. The other has been ordering from the same four places for fifteen years.
Most ordering advice is written as if a restaurant has one customer, and in Clearwater that is wrong in both directions. Telling a beach operator to quit the marketplaces throws away the only channel that reaches a family who landed at Tampa International this morning. Telling an inland operator the apps are fine ignores that they charge acquisition pricing on a Countryside household that has your number in their phone. The second worry is the calendar: winter visitors and spring break stack demand from roughly November through April, and late summer is a different business entirely.
Which Clearwater customer should the apps get?
The most useful decision a Clearwater operator can make, and it is not all or nothing. Sort your demand into two piles and treat them differently.
The beach visitor
- Here three days, in a hotel or a rental on the sand.
- Higher ticket, often a group, often to a room number.
- Repeat value close to zero. You will not see them again.
- Discovery is all that matters, and discovery is what a marketplace is genuinely good at.
The year-round local
- Lives in Countryside, Morningside, Belleair or off Gulf to Bay.
- Orders on a rhythm, most weeks, all year, including the slow months.
- Worth dozens of tickets a year, which is where a percentage compounds.
- Already knows your name. You are not buying discovery, you are renting a relationship you own.
A commission on a visitor you were never going to keep is an advertising cost. The same commission on a Safety Harbor regular is rent on a relationship you already own. Zayos ends the second one without touching the first.
Does a flat monthly fee work in a seasonal market?
Take 650 marketplace orders a month at a $38 average ticket. At a 25 percent effective rate that is about $6,175 a month, roughly $74,000 a year. Waterfront tickets run above the inland Tampa Bay average, so a percentage takes more per order here than almost anywhere else in Pinellas. Modeled, with every input printed, not a customer result.
The honest part: a percentage falls when your volume falls and a flat fee does not. Each order moved off an app keeps about $9.50 at that ticket, so $499 breaks even at roughly 53 direct orders a month. Check that against your slowest September, not your best March. If a slow month clears it, every other month is margin.
Why is delivery on Clearwater Beach so hard to get right?
Because the geography fights you. Everything to the sand crosses a causeway that stacks up on a good weather afternoon, beach parking is paid and scarce, and many of the addresses are high-rise hotels, resorts and rental condos where a driver cannot reach a door. Sand Key and Island Estates add water on both sides and one way in. A courier who has never done that run will be late, and the review lands on your listing, not on the app that dispatched them.
On your own site you get the controls back: your delivery zones, your prep times, a required unit or room number at checkout, and timed pickup windows when the causeway is jammed. None of it requires turning the marketplaces off. 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 tablet as your direct orders. One queue on a March Saturday.
The sand, the Cleveland Street District, and everything inland.
Waterfront on one side of the causeway, a full year-round city on the other. Zayos ranks your restaurant in the Clearwater pocket a diner actually searches, whichever of the two they are.
Plus Safety Harbor, Dunedin, Largo, Palm Harbor, Tarpon Springs, Oldsmar and Seminole.
Who builds Zayos, and who is live on it?
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company serving the Tampa Bay market from the other coast. One restaurant is live and taking orders today: Naya Grill, a Lebanese fast-casual brand in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps more than $48,000 a year that used to leave as commission. We have no Clearwater customer yet. When we do, they will be named on this page.
Day one you get a branded ordering site on your own domain, one kitchen tablet, a customer list you own, and DAVO sales-tax set-aside so the state share moves out before it can be spent in a slow month. Most operators are live in under two weeks, which comfortably beats the start of season.
What does Zayos cost in Clearwater?
Operator $499, Operator plus Marketplace $599, Concierge $699 with up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen. Per location, month to month, no setup fee, no commission at any tier, and you keep 100 percent of tips. The diner pays the small flat fee, $0.99 pickup and $2.99 delivery, never the restaurant.
Full pricing breakdown →The questions we get from north Pinellas.
Do you have a Clearwater restaurant live on Zayos?
Should a Clearwater Beach restaurant stay on DoorDash and Uber Eats?
How much is the marketplace cut costing a Clearwater kitchen?
My business is seasonal. Does a flat monthly fee make sense in September?
Does it help with deliveries to beach hotels and condos?
What about the Greek and seafood restaurants in this part of Pinellas?
Keep the tourist. Stop renting the local.
The free AI report reads your restaurant and shows what the marketplaces took last month. No card, about 60 seconds.