Why does a destination district lose more per order than a neighborhood spot?
Anaheim recognized Little Arabia as an official district in 2022, roughly the stretch of Brookhurst Street between Ball Road and La Palma Avenue. That designation put a name on something the community already knew: this is where people drive to. Families come from Los Angeles County, from the Inland Empire, sometimes from San Diego, and they do not come for a single sandwich. They come for the bakery, the butcher, and dinner, in one trip.
That order profile is the worst possible fit for percentage commission. A neighborhood counter loses a fixed percentage of a small ticket many times a week. A destination business loses that same percentage of a very large ticket, on a customer who was always going to come anyway. Take a $65 family pickup order. At 25%, the bottom of the 25% to 35% blended range once delivery, marketing and card processing fees stack, the platform keeps about $16 of it. On Zayos the kitchen keeps all $65 and the diner pays $0.99 at checkout for pickup.
On a destination order, the commission is not paying for demand. The customer already chose the street.
What does a Brookhurst order actually look like?
Little Arabia is not one kind of business, and most of the corridor does not fit the shape a delivery app expects. Here is the trade as it actually runs:
Family platters, mixed grill by the tray, rice and salads on the side.
Knafeh, baklava and maamoul by the tray, usually ordered days ahead.
Small tickets all day, then a long late evening peak.
Meat by the pound alongside cooked food on the same receipt.
Manakish, sandwiches and prepared trays next to the shelves.
Fast, cash heavy, phone heavy, almost all pickup.
Four of those six sell things a marketplace menu cannot price properly: a tray, a pound, a scheduled pickup two weeks out. So that revenue never goes online at all. It stays on the phone, on a paper pad, and in the owner's head. The opportunity in Little Arabia is not only moving app orders to direct. It is putting the half of the business that was never online in the first place onto a page that takes payment.
How do I keep the customer who drove forty minutes to eat here?
When that order goes through a marketplace, the app has the name, the phone number and the order history. You have a ticket. The next time that family is planning a trip to Brookhurst, the app decides which restaurant on the street they see first, and it will happily show them your neighbor.
A direct order works the other way. The customer record is yours: what they ordered, how often, which location, whether they schedule ahead. Before Eid or Ramadan you can message the people who bought trays from you last year, which is the single highest value list a Little Arabia bakery has and the one most owners never built. That list does not exist on a marketplace, because building it for you was never the deal.
What happens to my Eid trays and catering orders?
Catering runs on its own rails. Orders are scheduled, paid in advance, and confirmed with a deposit or in full, and the diner pays 10% on a catering order instead of the flat pickup or delivery fee. For a shop that books forty tray orders in the ten days before Eid, the win is less about fees and more about not losing an order because two people wrote in the same notebook.
Do I have to leave DoorDash and Uber Eats to do this?
No, and you should not. Keep them for the person who has never heard of your street. On Operator plus Marketplace at $599 per month, Otter pulls your DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets into the same kitchen tablet as your direct orders, so the line sees one queue. The strategy is to move the regulars over, one printed insert and one text message at a time, while discovery keeps running on the apps. See how the Otter integration works for the mechanics.
What does Zayos cost, and who pays the fee?
Operator is $499, Operator plus Marketplace is $599, Concierge is $699. All three are per location, per month, month to month, with no setup fee. The restaurant never pays a commission. The diner pays a small service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing on dine-in, 10% on catering. You keep 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. Full detail is on the pricing page.
Are you actually in Anaheim?
No, and we will not pretend otherwise. Zayos is built and operated by Zay Revenue Group in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and no restaurant in Anaheim or Orange County is live on Zayos today. Onboarding runs remotely. The restaurant live and taking orders on the platform right now is Naya Grill, a Lebanese kitchen with two locations in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, keeping over $48,000 a year that used to leave as commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. If you want a local vendor with a rep on Brookhurst, we are not that. If you want the ordering stack without the commission, we can be live with you in under two weeks.