Saint Paul restaurant online ordering, run on Zayos.
Zayos is commission free direct online ordering for Saint Paul restaurants. Diners order on your own branded site, so you keep 100% of food revenue and tips. Plans run $499 to $699 per location per month. Zayos is a Fort Lauderdale company serving the Saint Paul market.
No card. The report runs on your own numbers in about a minute.
Why do my orders keep showing up under Minneapolis?
Because delivery apps organize the Twin Cities by zone, and the zone is usually named after the bigger twin. Your Grand Avenue dining room, your Payne Avenue counter and your University Avenue noodle house all end up as rows inside somebody else's city page. You pay a quarter of the ticket for discovery, and the discovery is not even labelled with your city.
That is a strange thing to rent. Saint Paul is not a suburb of Minneapolis. It is the state capital, a city of roughly 310,000 people with its own restaurant culture, and the neighborhood names carry real search weight. People look for a Cathedral Hill dinner, a West 7th pre game bite before a Wild home date at Xcel Energy Center, a Lowertown lunch near CHS Field. None of those phrases belong to a marketplace. They belong to you.
A direct ordering site puts the city back in your hands. The domain is yours, the customer record is yours, and the reorder button sits on a page that says Saint Paul in the copy, in the schema and in the URL. Zayos builds and runs that page.
How much does a Saint Paul restaurant actually lose in a year?
Nobody should quote you a number without showing the inputs, so here are ours. This is a worked model at a modest Saint Paul volume, not a customer result. Change any line to match your own week and the arithmetic still holds.
Run the number on your own ticket
| Orders sent through the apps | 900 per month |
|---|---|
| Average ticket | $26 |
| Marketplace gross | $23,400 per month |
| Blended commission rate | 27% |
| Paid to the marketplace | $6,318 per month |
| Annualised | $75,816 per year |
Seventy five thousand dollars is a sous chef, a walk in cooler and a bad January, and it left the building nine hundred orders at a time. The Operator plan is $499 a month, which is $5,988 a year. The gap is the whole argument.
At a $26 average ticket and a 27% blended marketplace rate, a Saint Paul restaurant pays about $7 in commission per order, and the $499 Zayos plan breaks even at roughly 71 direct orders a month.
Which Saint Paul corridors does Zayos cover?
All of them, plus the inner ring. The grid below is how we write your local schema so a search for your street reaches your page and not a marketplace category.
Plus Maplewood, Roseville, Falcon Heights, West Saint Paul, Woodbury and the rest of Ramsey County.
Does this work for Little Mekong and the Hmong marketplaces?
Saint Paul holds one of the largest urban Hmong communities in the United States, and the food economy that grew around it is a genuine asset of the city. University Avenue between Mackubin and Galtier carries the Little Mekong business district. Hmongtown Marketplace and Hmong Village run food stalls at volumes a full service dining room would envy, and the same corridor now carries Karen, Somali, Vietnamese and Lao kitchens.
These operations share one commercial shape: many orders, small tickets, tight family margins. A percentage commission punishes that shape harder than any other. Twenty seven percent of a $12 bowl is not a marketing expense, it is the profit. Flat monthly pricing inverts the incentive, because the thousandth order in a month costs the same as the first, which is to say nothing.
There is a second reason a branded site matters here. Marketplace apps flatten a menu into whatever category tag their taxonomy already has. On your own site you name the dish the way your community names it, you explain it once for the neighbor who has never tried it, and the photo is yours.
What happens to my ordering volume over a Minnesota winter?
It moves off premise, and it stays there for months. From November through March, Saint Paul dining rooms give up covers to takeout and delivery, which means the share of your revenue carrying a marketplace commission goes up exactly when your total revenue goes down. The commission bill peaks in your worst quarter. Most owners feel this and never see it on a single line, because the deduction happens inside four different payout statements.
The practical conclusion is about timing. Building a direct channel in October is cheap. Building one in January, while you are short staffed and the salt trucks are running, is not. Zayos onboarding takes under two weeks and most operators take a first direct order inside a week of signing up, so there is a version of this that is finished before the first hard freeze.
What kind of Saint Paul kitchen is this built for?
Any kitchen that takes an order it would rather not pay a percentage on. The menu builder does not assume a cuisine.
What does Zayos cost a Saint Paul restaurant?
Operator is $499 per location per month. Operator plus Marketplace, which adds Otter ingestion of DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub into one kitchen tablet, is $599. Concierge is $699 and includes up to five virtual brands per kitchen. No setup fee, month to month, no contract.
The diner pays a small flat service fee at checkout: $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine in, 10% catering. The restaurant is never charged a commission and keeps 100% of food revenue and 100% of tips.
Saint Paul owner questions
Do you have any Saint Paul restaurants running on Zayos right now?
Why do my orders show up under Minneapolis instead of Saint Paul?
My tickets are small. Is a flat monthly fee worse for me than a percentage?
What happens to my numbers over a Minnesota winter?
Does this fit a Little Mekong or Hmong marketplace kitchen?
Do I have to leave DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub?
Who pays the service fee on a direct order?
I run two Saint Paul locations. How is that priced?
See your own Saint Paul number
The free report reads your restaurant the way a search engine and a delivery app read it, then puts a dollar figure on the gap. It takes about a minute and you keep it whether or not we ever speak.