A $13 Paterson halal order cannot carry 30%. Zayos takes none of it.
Zayos replaces percentage commission with a flat monthly price, which matters most where tickets are small. On a $13 Paterson halal order, a 30% marketplace cut is $3.90. On Zayos the kitchen keeps all $13 and the diner pays $0.99 for pickup.
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Why does commission hurt a small ticket more?
Because your cost of making the food does not shrink when the platform takes its cut. The labor, the packaging, the bread and the meat cost the same on a $9 sandwich as they would if the app took nothing. The commission comes out of what is left, and on a small ticket what is left is thin. Here is the same four items, at a 30% base commission, which is the top of the 15% to 30% base range marketplaces charge before delivery, marketing and processing fees push the real blended cost to 25% to 35%.
| Order | Ticket | App keeps | You keep, app | You keep, direct |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Falafel sandwich | $9.00 | $2.70 | $6.30 | $9.00 |
| Chicken over rice | $13.00 | $3.90 | $9.10 | $13.00 |
| Mixed grill plate | $18.00 | $5.40 | $12.60 | $18.00 |
| Family shawarma order | $26.00 | $7.80 | $18.20 | $26.00 |
Illustrative arithmetic at a 30% base commission. Your real rate is on your marketplace statement. The direct column is the full ticket, with the diner paying $0.99 at checkout for pickup.
At a $13 average ticket, every order you move to your own site keeps about $3.90 that used to leave the building. The Operator plan is $499 a month, so roughly 128 direct orders a month, about four a day, covers it. That is a threshold you can check against your own tickets before you talk to anyone. The commission calculator will run it on your real numbers.
What is actually competing with your ordering page?
Not DoorDash. The phone. South Paterson is walkable and the trade is built on people who already know you, so a large share of the volume on Main Street and the blocks around it arrives as a walk-in or a call. That is a strength, and it is also where the losses hide. When two lines ring at seven on a Friday and one of them gets a busy signal, that order is gone and it never shows up in any report, because nothing recorded it.
A branded ordering page takes those calls in parallel. The order is typed by the customer, so nobody mishears a modifier, it is paid before the food is made, and it prints to the same kitchen tablet as everything else. The cashier stops taking dictation during the rush. For a kitchen doing steady volume across Paterson, Clifton, Passaic, Prospect Park and Haledon, that alone tends to justify the setup before the commission argument even starts.
The second thing you get is the list. Every direct order attaches to a customer record you own: what they ordered, how often, which nights. Before Ramadan you can message the people who ordered from you last Ramadan. No marketplace will ever hand you that file, and building it is not something you can start retroactively, which is the argument for starting now rather than next year.
What does $499 a month actually include?
A branded ordering site on your own domain, the kitchen tablet feed, the customer list, scheduled and catering orders, and automatic sales tax set aside through DAVO so the money owed to the state is moved out before you spend it. Operator is $499 per month per location. Operator plus Marketplace is $599 and adds DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub ingestion through Otter, the order aggregator most kitchens already run. Concierge is $699 and covers up to five virtual brands from one kitchen.
Every plan is month to month with no setup fee, and no plan takes a commission. You keep 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips. The diner pays a flat service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing on dine-in, 10% on catering. Full detail on the pricing page, and the setup sequence is on how it works.
Check it against your own tickets
The free report takes your monthly order count and average ticket and shows what the commission actually cost. About a minute, no card, and the numbers are yours to keep.