The commission is charged on the menu price and paid out of your margin. Zayos charges neither.
Zayos is commission free online ordering for St Petersburg seafood restaurants, at a flat $499, $599 or $699 a month per location. You set and change market prices yourself. The diner pays $0.99 pickup or $2.99 delivery, and you keep 100 percent of food revenue and tips.
Free. About 60 seconds. No card.
Why does a percentage cost a fish house more than it costs a pizzeria?
Because the commission is calculated on the menu price but it comes out of the gross profit, and seafood has the least gross profit per dollar of menu price of anything on a Florida menu. Fish is bought at a price somebody else sets, it does not keep, and the yield off a whole fish is never what the invoice weight says. Food cost on a seafood entree commonly lands in the 30 to 40 percent range where a pizza sits nearer 25. Run one plate.
- A $26 grouper basket, run at a 35 percent food cost
- Food cost $9.10, so gross profit before labor and rent is $16.90
- A 28 percent blended marketplace cost on the $26 ticket is $7.28
- You are left with $9.62 to cover labor, rent, power and the boat
Modeled from the ticket size and food cost shown, not a customer result. 28 percent is the midpoint of the 25 to 35 percent blended real cost, once delivery, in app marketing and card processing stack on the 15 to 30 percent base commission. Substitute your own food cost and the answer moves. The free AI report runs it on your real numbers.
Twenty eight percent of the ticket is forty three percent of the gross profit on that basket, because a high food cost item hands the app a share of a smaller pie.
Put the same $26 through a 25 percent food cost item and the app takes about 37 percent of the profit instead. The plate did not change. The margin did. That gap is the reason seafood operators feel the apps more sharply than their neighbors do, and usually cannot explain why.
The dock price moved this morning. Can my menu move with it?
On your own site, yes, in about a minute, from a phone. That is not a small feature in Pinellas. Between the grouper fleet landing at Madeira Beach and John's Pass, the stone crab season that opens October 15 and closes May 1, and the state and federal seasons that shift year to year on gag grouper and other species, a seafood menu here is a live document pretending to be a printed one.
Market price is a price, not a word
A guest will pay today market for claws. What they will not do is add a mystery to a cart. On a Zayos menu you put the real number in, change it when the landings change, and the online order carries the same price the dining room is charging that night. Nobody has to call and ask.
86 is instant, and it has to be
When the item is gone it stops selling on your site the moment you mark it. Every seafood operator knows the alternative: an order comes in for something that ran out at seven, and now you are choosing between a substitution the guest did not agree to and a refund. On a marketplace that whole exchange also happens in public, inside the rating.
The items that travel
Smoked mullet, fish spread and claws are the Pinellas things visitors buy on the way to the airport. Those belong on a pickup menu with a lead time, not inside an app built to promise thirty minutes to a house four miles away.
When does a St Pete seafood restaurant actually make its money?
Not evenly. Pinellas runs a compressed season and a long shoulder, and the ordering setup should behave differently in each one.
| Window | What is happening | What it means for the kitchen |
|---|---|---|
| January to April | Snowbirds, spring training crowds at BayCare Ballpark in Clearwater and TD Ballpark in Dunedin, and the Firestone Grand Prix street race downtown. | Peak covers and peak waiting. Every seat is spoken for, so the money left on the table is the guest who will not wait 70 minutes. Pickup and a short takeout menu catch that person instead of losing them. |
| October 15 to May 1 | Florida stone crab claw season. The highest ticket item most Pinellas seafood houses will sell all year, at a price that moves with the landings. | A menu you can reprice yourself in a minute is the difference between selling claws at today market and selling them at last week price. |
| May to September | Locals only. Heat, daily afternoon storms, and the tourist half of the dining room simply gone. | This is when a customer list you actually own earns its keep, because the people still eating out live here and can be reached directly. |
| June 1 to November 30 | Hurricane season, with the peak from August through October. Pinellas took direct disruption from Helene and then Milton in 2024. | You need one switch that turns delivery off, keeps pickup on, or closes ordering entirely, and it has to be a switch you control rather than a platform policy. |
Season dates are the published Florida stone crab harvest window and the standard Atlantic hurricane season. Everything else here is the shape of the Pinellas calendar, not a promise about your covers.
What do I do the week red tide or a storm empties the waterfront?
Two different problems, one requirement. A red tide bloom off the Gulf beaches does not close you, it just makes an open air deck unbearable and quietly deletes the walk up trade for as long as it lasts. A named storm does close you, and it closes you on a schedule nobody controls.
Both are survived the same way: talk to your own customers, change your own rules. A red tide week is a takeout and catering week, and that message goes out to a list that belongs to you. A storm week needs one switch that turns delivery off, keeps pickup running, trims the menu to what the coolers can support, then closes ordering when it is time. Marketplaces make those calls on their own timeline and tell you afterward.
A seafood restaurant on the Gulf coast will lose weeks it did not plan for, and the only asset that survives every one of them is a customer list you own outright.
What does it cost, and what does the guest pay?
Operator is $499 a month per location: a branded ordering site on your own domain, the menu with modifiers and prices you control, pickup and delivery with a radius you set, the kitchen tablet, and a customer list that belongs to you. Operator + Marketplace is $599 and adds Otter ingestion so app tickets land in the same feed. Concierge is $699 with up to five virtual brands out of one kitchen.
All three are per location, month to month, no setup fee, no commission at any volume. The guest pays a flat fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing on dine in and 10 percent on catering, and you keep 100 percent of food revenue and tips. See pricing, the fee breakdown and how it works.
Who is running Zayos today, and where?
Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, is live and taking orders on Zayos right now, and keeps $48k+/yr that used to leave as marketplace commission at roughly 3,000 orders a month. Seven more storefronts are built and open ordering at their own launch dates. Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale company on the Atlantic side of the state.
We do not have a customer in Pinellas County and will not pretend otherwise. What we can commit to is the timeline: most operators are live in under 2 weeks, with a first direct order usually inside the first week. The plain definition of the product is on what Zayos is.
Questions Pinellas seafood operators ask.
Can I change a price myself, or do I have to send it to somebody?
What happens when the boat does not come in and I have to 86 grouper at 6pm?
Does online ordering even make sense for a sit down waterfront restaurant?
Do I have to leave DoorDash and Uber Eats?
My real season is four months long. Is month to month actually month to month?
Do you take any part of the tips?
Is there a St Petersburg seafood restaurant on Zayos I can call?
Put your own food cost in it.
The free report takes your real order count and average ticket and shows what the apps took last month, and what a flat monthly fee would have cost instead.