Online ordering system for Orlando restaurants What Zayos is, what an ordering system actually costs, and how to pick one
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
An online ordering system lets Orlando diners order from your own website instead of DoorDash, so you keep the full ticket. Zayos costs $499 to $699 per location per month, flat, with no commission. Diners pay $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery. You keep 100% of food revenue.
No card. About 60 seconds. It reads your real marketplace numbers back to you.
What is an online ordering system, and what am I really choosing between?
Every online ordering system, from a $0 marketplace listing to a six figure enterprise build, is the same four parts in a different wrapper. Once you can name the four parts you stop comparing logos and start comparing terms.
1. The storefront
The page the diner looks at. Photos, categories, modifiers, an add to cart button. On a marketplace this page is theirs and you rent a slot on it, sitting between two competitors with a promo badge. On a direct platform this page is yours, on your domain, and nobody else is advertising on it.
2. The checkout
Payment, tip, tax, scheduling and fees. This is where money actually changes hands and where every hidden cost lives. Two systems can both say commission-free and charge you wildly different amounts here.
3. The routing
How the ticket gets in front of a cook. A printer, a kitchen display screen, a tablet, or a push into your point of sale. The number that matters is how many separate screens your expo has to watch during a rush. Four tablets on a shelf is not an integration, it is a staffing problem. Zayos routes direct orders and, on the $599 plan, the DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets into one Otter tablet.
4. The customer record
Who ordered, what they ordered, how to reach them again. This is the part owners undervalue at signing and grieve about at renewal.
A marketplace rents you demand. A direct ordering system builds you a customer list. The first is faster and the second is the only one you still have after you cancel.
How much does online ordering really cost an Orlando restaurant?
There are only two pricing shapes in this category. A percentage of every sale, or a flat monthly fee. Everything else is a variation.
Marketplaces publish a 15% to 30% base commission, depending on which delivery tier you pick. That is not the number that leaves your account. Once you add the promotions you had to run to stay visible, the sponsored placement, the card processing and the per-order charges, the blended real cost lands between 25% and 35%. When a vendor quotes you a rate, always ask which of the two they are quoting.
A flat subscription reverses the shape. Zayos is $499 a month for Operator, $599 for Operator plus Marketplace, and $699 for Concierge, per location, month to month, with no setup fee. Direct orders carry a small fee paid by the diner at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% on catering. The restaurant never pays it and keeps 100% of the food revenue and 100% of the tips.
Where does the flat plan overtake the percentage?
Do the arithmetic once and you never have to argue about it again. A 25% blended take on $2,000 of monthly orders is $500. That is the crossover.
A flat $499 a month costs less than a 25% blended marketplace take as soon as a restaurant does about $2,000 a month in orders, which at a $28 average ticket is roughly 71 orders. Every order after that is margin the percentage model would have taken.
Run your own numbers on the commission calculator, see the exact diner fee schedule on fares, or read the full pricing page.
Why does Orlando change the math?
Orlando is not a normal restaurant market and a generic vendor pitch will get the strategy backwards here. Four things are genuinely local.
The tourist ticket and the neighborhood regular are different businesses
A visitor staying near International Drive or Lake Buena Vista will eat with you once, maybe twice, and then fly home. A family in College Park, Audubon Park, Baldwin Park, Winter Park or Lake Nona might order from you forty times a year. Charging the same 28% on both is the mistake.
Commission on a tourist is a customer acquisition cost you paid once. Commission on a regular is rent you pay forever on a customer you already earned.
That single distinction is the whole Orlando playbook. Keep the marketplaces pointed at the visitor corridors, where they earn their percentage by finding you someone new. Move the neighborhood regular onto your own site, where a repeat order costs you nothing.
UCF makes a late night, low ticket, high frequency market
The University of Central Florida is one of the largest universities in the country by enrollment, and the Alafaya and Waterford Lakes trade around it runs on small tickets ordered late and often. Small tickets are exactly where marketplace fees hurt most, because a $2.99 delivery fee and a 28% commission are not the same burden on a $14 order. A student who reorders weekly is worth building a list for.
The convention and corporate calendar is published months ahead
The Orange County Convention Center, the Lake Nona medical and corporate campuses, and the Maitland and Heathrow office parks all generate scheduled group food. Those orders are known weeks in advance, need a headcount, and often need a deposit. No marketplace app was designed for that. A branded storefront with future dated ordering, catering lead times and a quote step is the right tool, and the reason our catering fee is a separate 10% line rather than a delivery fee pretending to cover a $900 tray order.
Sprawl makes delivery expensive for everyone
Metro Orlando is a driving market. The distance from a Mills 50 kitchen to a Lake Nona house is a real trip, and third party delivery is priced by distance. In practice that means two things for an Orlando operator: pickup is a bigger share of your online mix than a vendor from a dense northern city expects, and your delivery radius decision is a margin decision. An ordering system that lets you set a pickup-first storefront, a tight paid delivery zone and a wider scheduled catering zone is worth more here than in a market where everything is within two miles.
How do Florida seasons, storms and sales tax hit an ordering system?
Orlando peaks when school is out, not when the snowbirds arrive
South Florida fills up from January through April with seasonal residents. Orlando runs the opposite calendar: spring break, summer and the holiday weeks are the crush, and September is quiet. If you are comparing two ordering systems on cost, compare them on your slowest month, not your best. A percentage model looks harmless in July. A flat fee looks expensive in September. The honest test is the twelve month total.
Hurricane season is an operations question, not a weather question
Atlantic hurricane season runs June through November. Inland Central Florida takes flooding and multi day power loss rather than storm surge, and the practical consequence for an ordering system is simple. You need to pause ordering, change hours and tell your customers, all within a few minutes, from a phone. If your only channel is a marketplace, you can pause the store but you cannot reach a single customer, because you never had their contact information.
On a marketplace you can close your store during a storm, but you cannot message one customer, because the customer list was never yours. That is the cost of commission nobody puts on the invoice.
Sales tax is charged per location, not per company
Florida charges 6% state sales tax on prepared food, plus a county discretionary sales surtax that differs by county. Orange, Seminole, Osceola and Lake counties do not all sit at the same rate, so an operator with three locations across the metro is collecting three different totals. Your ordering system has to compute tax by location, not by brand. Zayos also sets the tax aside automatically through DAVO, so the money is moved out before you can spend it. Confirm your current county rate with the Florida Department of Revenue, because surtaxes are voted on and they change.
What should I ask any ordering vendor before I sign?
Six questions. Ask them of us too. If a vendor gets vague on any of them, that is your answer.
- 01
Is the percentage really zero, or just renamed?
Ask for the total of every percentage on the invoice: commission, card processing, ads, delivery marketing, and any "service" or "technology" percentage. Commission-free with a 4% marketing add-on is not commission-free.
- 02
Who owns the customer record?
Ask whether you can export names, emails, phone numbers and order history to a CSV file on your own, today, without asking support. If the answer involves a request form, you do not own the list.
- 03
What is the contract term and the exit?
Ask for the term, the auto-renew clause, the early-termination fee, and what happens to your domain and your menu data on the day you leave.
- 04
How do orders reach the kitchen?
Ask whether direct orders land on the same screen as the marketplace orders. Two tablets on one shelf is how a Friday rush turns into a missed ticket.
- 05
Who pays the payout delay?
Ask when money hits your bank. Weekly payout schedules are common and they are a working-capital problem, not a rounding error.
- 06
What happens on a hurricane day?
Ask how fast you can pause ordering, change hours and message your customer list. In Central Florida this is an annual question, not a hypothetical.
Which online ordering system fits an Orlando restaurant?
Five models, what each one charges, and the case where it is the right answer. Vendor plans change, so treat this as a map of the models and confirm current terms on each vendor page before you sign.
| Model | What you pay | Who pays per order | Best fit in Orlando | Skip it if |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zayos | Flat $499, $599 or $699 per location per month. No setup fee, month to month. | Diner pays $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in, 10% catering. Restaurant pays nothing per order. | An Orlando independent with real repeat traffic that wants the marketplaces kept for discovery and ingested into one tablet. | You want a single vendor for POS hardware, payroll and ordering under one contract. |
| DoorDash or Uber Eats marketplace | Commission per marketplace order, 15% to 30% base depending on the tier you pick. | Restaurant pays the commission. Ads, promos and processing stack on top, which is why the blended real cost lands at 25% to 35%. | Pure new-customer discovery. On I-Drive or near the parks, a visitor who has never heard of you genuinely finds you there. | Regulars. You pay the same percentage on the customer who already knows your name. |
| POS-led ordering (Toast, Square) | Subscription tied to the POS, plus card processing at the POS rate. Some tiers add a per-order charge. | Restaurant pays processing on every order. Check whether your tier also carries a per-order fee. | Operators already committed to that POS and its hardware, who value one throat to choke over per-order price. | You want to keep your POS and change only the ordering layer. |
| Flat-fee direct ordering (ChowNow, Owner.com class) | Flat monthly subscription. Setup fees and annual terms are common, so read the term length. | Usually card processing only on direct orders. | Single-unit operators who mainly want a better direct checkout and some marketing help. | You need marketplace orders pulled into the same kitchen screen as your direct orders. |
| Enterprise ordering (Olo class) | Custom contract, implementation project, annual commitment. | Negotiated. Assume a real integration budget on top. | Multi-unit brands with dozens of locations and in-house developers. | You run one to five Orlando locations and want to be live in weeks, not quarters. |
Model level summary as of July 2026. Marketplace commission tiers and vendor subscription plans are published by each vendor and change over time. Confirm the current rate, setup cost, contract term and payout schedule directly with any vendor, including us.
When is a competitor the better answer than Zayos?
Three cases, honestly.
You do very little online volume. If your online orders total under about $2,000 a month, a percentage model costs you less than any flat subscription including ours. Stay on the marketplaces, build the habit, and revisit when you clear the crossover. We would rather you come back at the right time than churn in month three.
You want one vendor for everything. If you value a single contract covering point of sale hardware, payroll, gift cards and ordering, a POS-led platform like Toast or Square is a legitimate choice. You will pay for it in per-order economics and in switching cost later, but the convenience is real.
You are a large multi-unit brand. At dozens of locations with in-house developers and a custom app, an enterprise platform like Olo is built for you and we are not. Zayos is built for independents and small groups who want to be live in weeks.
And the case nobody else will say plainly: keep DoorDash and Uber Eats running. In a tourist market, the discovery is worth the commission on a first time visitor. The goal is never zero marketplace orders. The goal is that your regulars stop arriving through a 28% toll booth.
Is Zayos live in Orlando right now?
No. We have no Orlando customers. Zay Revenue Group is a Fort Lauderdale company that serves the Orlando market, and the only restaurant live and taking orders on Zayos today is Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, which keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to commissions. Storefronts are built for several other Florida brands, with ordering opening at each launch. We would rather show you the method than invent a local case study.
Questions Orlando owners actually ask
What is an online ordering system for restaurants?
How much does an online ordering system cost an Orlando restaurant?
Is Zayos live in Orlando today?
Should an Orlando restaurant drop DoorDash and Uber Eats?
Does an ordering system handle Orlando catering and convention orders?
How long does it take to go live?
What Orlando area does Zayos serve?
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