In Palm Harbor the tickets are big. Zayos is the fee that does not grow with them.
Zayos is commission free online ordering on a Palm Harbor restaurant's own website. A percentage commission grows with your ticket. Zayos does not: $499 to $699 a month per location, and the diner pays $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery. You keep all food revenue and every tip.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does commission hurt more here than in the rest of Pinellas?
Because Palm Harbor orders for the whole house. This is an affluent, unincorporated, heavily residential corner of north Pinellas: Lansbrook, Ridgemoor, Westlake Village, the East Lake corridor, the golf communities around Innisbrook. The customer is rarely one person grabbing a $14 lunch. It is a family of four or five on a Friday, a tray for a holiday, a spread for a tournament weekend or a neighborhood get together.
That is a great restaurant to own and a bad one to run through a marketplace, because the bigger the household order, the bigger the number the app deducts before your kitchen turns on a burner.
A percentage commission is a tax on your best tickets. A flat plan costs the same at $28 as it does at $128.
| Order | Marketplace, at 28 percent | Zayos |
|---|---|---|
| $28 pickup order | $7.84 | $0.99, paid by the diner |
| $62 weeknight family order | $17.36 | $2.99, paid by the diner |
| $95 Friday order for five | $26.60 | $2.99, paid by the diner |
| $400 catering tray order | $112.00 | 10 percent, paid by the diner |
Basis: marketplace commission is 15 to 30 percent base and 25 to 35 percent blended once delivery, in app marketing and processing stack. The table uses 28 percent, the middle of the blended range. On Zayos the restaurant pays nothing per order and the diner pays the fee shown.
Half my zip code is on the other side of US 19. Does online ordering reach them?
This is the Palm Harbor problem nobody outside Pinellas understands. US 19 runs through town as a grade separated highway with overpasses and frontage roads, and it splits the community in half. A household off East Lake Road is a ten minute drive from a restaurant in Old Palm Harbor village, but it does not feel like one, so that trip never gets made on a weeknight.
Ordering flattens that. Somebody who will not cross six lanes for a sandwich will happily order the same sandwich to the kitchen table, and a delivery radius does not care about left turn access. Tampa Road, Curlew, Alderman and Nebraska carry the local traffic, Alt 19 carries the village, Ozona and Crystal Beach. Set the radius once and the highway stops deciding who your customers are.
Who takes the blame when a courier cannot get through the gate?
You do. That is the honest answer, and it matters more in Palm Harbor than almost anywhere in the county, because so much of the housing sits behind a gate or a guardhouse or deep inside a subdivision where the building numbers make no sense to a driver from out of the area. The food gets cold at the gate and the review lands on your name.
On a direct order the gate code, the callbox name and the "park by the side door" note live in your own customer record, so the second delivery to that address is easier than the first. You choose the driver, your own or a dispatched one, and you set the radius that makes it pay.
And what happens when season ends?
North Pinellas empties out in spring and fills back up around November. Seasonal residents are the most valuable list a restaurant here can hold, and a marketplace does not hand it to you. If those households order on your own site you have their email and phone, and one message in October brings them back before they have picked a new favorite.
A marketplace rents you the order. Direct ordering leaves you the customer.
What does Zayos cost a Palm Harbor restaurant?
Operator is $499 a month per location: branded ordering site on your own domain, full menu with modifiers, pickup and delivery with a radius you set, kitchen tablet, and a customer list that belongs to you. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub print in the same feed. Concierge is $699 and covers up to five virtual brands out of one kitchen.
Month to month, no setup fee, no commission at any tier. The diner pays $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing on dine in and 10 percent on catering, and the restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and tips. See the full pricing breakdown, or the catering playbook if tray and party orders are a real part of your week.
Who is behind Zayos, and where is it live?
Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company, builds and runs Zayos. Naya Grill is the restaurant live and taking orders on it today, at its Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach locations, and it keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates.
There is no Palm Harbor customer to point at. We are a South Florida company serving north Pinellas, and the commitment we can make is the build: live in under 2 weeks for most operators, first direct order usually inside the first week. For the plain definition first, read what Zayos is.
Questions Palm Harbor owners ask.
Why would a flat monthly plan beat a percentage for my restaurant?
Most of my customers live behind a gate. Does that cause problems?
Does this work for the season, roughly November through April?
Do I have to leave DoorDash and Uber Eats?
How much does Zayos cost and what does the diner pay?
Is there a Palm Harbor restaurant on Zayos I can talk to?
Find out what your best orders are costing you.
The free report runs your restaurant's real numbers and shows what the percentage took out of your biggest tickets last month.