Online ordering system for Tampa restaurants How Zayos works across Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Brandon
Published July 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026
An online ordering system is the software that takes orders on your own restaurant website. Zayos runs it across Tampa, St. Petersburg, Clearwater and Brandon for $499 to $699 per location per month with no commission. Diners pay $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery. You keep every food dollar.
No card. About 60 seconds. It reads your real marketplace numbers back to you.
What am I actually buying when I buy an ordering system?
Strip away the branding and every option in this category, from a free marketplace listing to a custom enterprise build, is the same four components sold in a different package. Name the four and the sales calls get much shorter.
The storefront
Photos, categories, modifiers, cart. On a marketplace it belongs to them and your competitors advertise on it. On a direct platform it lives on your own domain and nobody else is bidding for attention on your menu page.
The checkout
Payment, tip, tax, scheduling, fees. This is where every hidden cost lives. Two systems can both use the word commission-free and take very different amounts of your money here.
The routing
How a paid order becomes a ticket a cook can read. The number that matters is how many screens your expo watches at 7pm on a Friday. Zayos routes direct orders, and on the $599 plan the DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets, into one Otter tablet.
The customer record
Who ordered, what they ordered, how you reach them again. Owners undervalue this at signing and grieve about it at renewal.
A marketplace rents you demand for a percentage. A direct ordering system builds you a customer list you keep. Only one of the two is still yours after you cancel.
What does online ordering really cost a Tampa restaurant?
Marketplaces publish a 15% to 30% base commission, depending on which delivery tier you select. That published number is not what leaves your bank account. Add the promotions you had to run to stay visible, the sponsored placement, the card processing and the per-order charges, and the blended real cost lands between 25% and 35%. Whenever a rate is quoted at you, ask which of those two numbers it is. Most vendor decks quote base and most operator bank statements show blended.
A flat subscription inverts the risk. Zayos is $499 for Operator, $599 for Operator plus Marketplace and $699 for Concierge, per location, per month, month to month, no setup fee. The only per-order money is a small fee the diner pays 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.
The difference between a percentage and a flat fee is not the price, it is who carries the upside. A percentage takes more from you every time you get better at your job. A flat fee does not.
Run your own numbers on the commission calculator, read the exact diner fee schedule on fares, or see the full pricing page.
Why does Tampa Bay geography change the answer?
Most ordering vendors sell a template written for a dense grid city. Tampa Bay is not one. It is four trade areas separated by water, and that single fact rewrites the priorities.
Bridges turn short distances into long deliveries
The Howard Frankland, the Gandy and the Courtney Campbell are the only practical ways across, and they are the difference between twelve miles on a map and thirty five minutes in a car. Third party delivery is priced on distance and time, so the diner fee on a cross-bay order gets high enough that the order simply does not happen. The practical consequence is that in Tampa Bay a bigger share of your online mix is pickup and curbside than a national vendor will assume.
In Tampa Bay the smartest delivery setting is usually a tight paid radius, a strong pickup flow, and a wide scheduled catering zone. The bay decides your delivery economics before any software does.
Four cities means four different stores in one account
A Westshore lunch counter feeding the largest office concentration on the Florida west coast runs a weekday, 11am to 2pm business. A Clearwater Beach store runs a tourist evening. An Ybor City counter runs the historic lunch trade the Cuban sandwich was invented for. A Brandon or Riverview suburban store runs family dinner. Same operator, four completely different hours, prices and menus. If your ordering system cannot configure those independently under one login, you will end up running four accounts and reconciling them by hand.
The calendar here is public, which means you can sell against it
Raymond James Stadium, Amalie Arena, the Florida State Fairgrounds and the spring training parks in Tampa, Clearwater, Dunedin and Bradenton publish their schedules months in advance. Gasparilla is on the calendar every January. That is unusually legible demand, and a marketplace cannot help you with it, because a marketplace only sells on the day. Your own storefront can open pre-order windows, sell group trays with a lead time, and cap the number of pickup slots per fifteen minutes so the kitchen does not drown.
Breweries, food halls and shared kitchens
Seminole Heights and the surrounding corridors have an unusual density of taprooms without kitchens, plus food halls and operators cooking under more than one brand out of one line. That setup needs a system that can run multiple menus and multiple brand faces from a single kitchen without a second tablet. The Concierge plan at $699 exists for exactly that pattern, with up to five virtual brands per kitchen.
How do Florida seasons, hurricanes and sales tax affect the decision?
Your slow month is the honest test
Tampa Bay fills from roughly February through April on seasonal residents, spring training and beach traffic, then thins out in the late summer. A percentage model feels painless in March and a flat fee feels expensive in September. Neither feeling is the answer. Compare the two on a full twelve months of your own numbers, because that is the only comparison your accountant will accept.
A coastal metro has to be able to close fast and talk to people
Atlantic hurricane season runs June through November, and low lying parts of Pinellas and Hillsborough evacuate. The operational question for an ordering system is not whether it survives a storm, it is how many taps it takes to pause ordering, change your hours and tell your customers you are open again. On a marketplace you can close the store, but you cannot message a single guest, because you never had their contact information.
After a storm, the restaurants that recover fastest are the ones that can email their own customers the day they reopen. A commission is the price of never being able to do that.
Sales tax is a per location setting
Florida charges 6% state sales tax on prepared food, plus a county discretionary sales surtax that is set locally. Hillsborough, Pinellas, Pasco and Hernando do not all sit at the same rate, and Florida counties vote these surtaxes up and down. An operator with a Tampa store and a St. Pete store is collecting two different totals, so tax has to be a per-location setting rather than a company-wide one. Zayos also sets the collected tax aside automatically through DAVO, so it leaves the operating account before it can be spent. Confirm your current county rate with the Florida Department of Revenue.
What does each model cost as I add locations?
This is the comparison that actually decides it for a Tampa Bay group. A commission scales with your volume. A flat plan scales with your door count. Below are modeled scenarios at a $28 average ticket and a 25% blended marketplace take, with the inputs stated so you can substitute your own. These are illustrative calculations, not customer results.
| Scenario | Online food revenue | Marketplace cost | Zayos cost | Which wins |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 location, 400 online orders a month | $11,200 at a $28 ticket | About $2,800 a month at a 25% blended take | $499 a month flat, plus $0 per order to you | Flat wins by roughly $2,300 a month |
| 1 location, 900 online orders a month | $25,200 at a $28 ticket | About $6,300 a month at a 25% blended take | $499 a month flat | Flat wins by roughly $5,800 a month |
| 3 locations, 600 orders each | $50,400 across the three | About $12,600 a month at a 25% blended take | $1,497 a month, billed $499 per location | Flat wins by roughly $11,100 a month |
| 5 locations, 600 orders each | $84,000 across the five | About $21,000 a month at a 25% blended take | $2,495 a month, billed $499 per location | Flat wins by roughly $18,500 a month |
| 1 location, 60 online orders a month | $1,680 at a $28 ticket | About $420 a month at a 25% blended take | $499 a month flat | The percentage wins. Stay on the apps for now |
Modeled at a $28 average ticket and a 25% blended marketplace take, using the Operator plan at $499 per location. Your ticket, mix and marketplace tier will differ. The last row is included deliberately: below roughly 71 orders a month, the percentage model is cheaper and you should stay on it.
What should I ask an ordering vendor before I sign?
Six questions, tuned for a bay market. Ask them of us too, and hold us to the same standard.
- 01
Can I set hours, menus and prices per location?
In Tampa Bay this is not a nice to have. A Westshore lunch counter and a Clearwater Beach store do not keep the same hours or sell at the same price. Ask to see two locations configured differently in the same account before you sign.
- 02
How does the system handle a delivery zone I need to shrink?
Ask whether you can draw a delivery radius, set a minimum by zone, and price delivery differently across a bridge. If the answer is one flat radius, your margin on the far side of the water is being decided by the software.
- 03
What does the diner pay, and what do I pay?
Get both numbers on the same page. Ask for commission, card processing, per-order platform fees, ads, and any percentage marketing add-on, added up as one figure. That total is your real rate.
- 04
Can I export my customer list today, by myself?
Names, emails, phones and order history, to a CSV file, without opening a support ticket. If exporting requires permission, the list is not yours.
- 05
How fast can I pause ordering and message everyone?
Tampa Bay evacuates. Ask how many taps it takes to close the store, post a message and email your customers from a phone with one bar of signal.
- 06
What is the term, and what leaves with me?
Ask the contract length, the auto-renew clause, the early-termination fee, and who keeps the domain, the menu data and the reviews when you go.
When should a Tampa restaurant not choose Zayos?
When your online volume is small. Under about $2,000 a month in online orders, a percentage costs you less than any flat subscription including ours. The last row of the table above says so on purpose. Stay on the apps, build the habit, and come back when the arithmetic flips.
When you want one vendor for the whole restaurant. If a single contract for point of sale hardware, payroll, gift cards and ordering is worth more to you than per-order economics, a POS-led platform like Toast or Square is a fair choice. You pay for the convenience in processing rates and in switching cost later.
When you are a large chain. At dozens of locations with your own developers and a custom mobile app, an enterprise platform like Olo is built for that and Zayos is not. We build for independents and small groups who want to be live in under two weeks.
And keep DoorDash and Uber Eats switched on. For a first time visitor at Clearwater Beach or a convention guest downtown, the marketplaces earn their commission by finding you someone you would never have met. The goal was never zero marketplace orders. The goal is that your regulars stop arriving through a toll booth.
Is Zayos live in Tampa right now?
No. We have no Tampa Bay customers. Zay Revenue Group is a Fort Lauderdale company that serves the Tampa market. 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. That is the whole list, and we would rather publish it than invent a local logo.
Questions Tampa Bay owners actually ask
What is an online ordering system for a restaurant?
How much does an online ordering system cost a Tampa restaurant?
Is Zayos live in Tampa today?
Why does delivery cost more across Tampa Bay?
Does an ordering system help with game days and spring training?
Can I keep DoorDash and Uber Eats and still run direct ordering?
How far into Tampa Bay does Zayos reach?
Find out what the apps took last month.
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