Your menu changes every week. Zayos keeps up. The apps do not.
Seminole Heights restaurant online ordering means taking orders on your own branded site instead of paying a delivery app a cut. Zayos gives a Florida Avenue kitchen that site, live menu and 86 control across every channel, and a flat $499 per month per location with no commission.
Free, no card, about 60 seconds.
Why does a chef driven kitchen lose more per order than a chain does?
Because the delivery apps were designed around a menu that never moves. A national chain publishes the same 90 items in every market for a year, so a marketplace listing built once stays correct. Seminole Heights does not work that way. The Florida Avenue and Nebraska Avenue corridor is one of the most concentrated stretches of owner operated, chef led kitchens in Tampa, mixed in among bungalows, and the whole appeal is that the board moves. Small menus. Daily specials. A dozen portions of something because that is what came in.
Put that kitchen on a platform built for fixed menus and you get a second cost on top of commission. The app listing lags the real menu. An item that sold out at 7:40pm keeps selling online until someone catches it, and the fix is a refund, a support ticket and a one star review that describes a restaurant you do not run. Substitutions get flattened on import, so a guest orders something you cannot make the way the app said you would. None of that shows up on a commission statement, and all of it is money.
The second thing about this corridor is scale. A twenty to forty seat room with a line of two or three people has a hard ceiling on orders per hour. The marketplaces have no idea what that ceiling is and no reason to respect it. Volume arrives in a wall, ticket times slide, and the same platform that sent the wall then rates you for being slow.
What actually goes wrong between your board and the app?
Every one of these is a normal Tuesday in a chef driven kitchen, and every one of them is a defect on a marketplace listing. On Zayos your own site is the menu of record, and the kitchen tablet edits it in real time.
The board changes weekly
A chef menu rewrites itself around what came in. Marketplace menus are edited by hand, so the app listing is almost always a week behind the kitchen.
Items 86 mid service
Twelve portions of the special sell out at 7:40pm. On an app that item keeps selling until someone notices, and the fix is a refund and a one star review.
Prep sets the ceiling
A twenty seat kitchen has a real orders-per-hour limit. Apps push volume at you whether or not the line can take it.
Modifiers are the dish
Substitutions and dietary swaps are half the order in this corridor, and they are the first thing that gets flattened in a marketplace menu import.
Eighty sixing an item on Zayos is one tap on the tablet, and it drops off your site and off the connected marketplaces at the same moment. You are not maintaining four menus in four dashboards, which is the actual reason most small kitchens stop updating three of them.
What is app commission costing a Seminole Heights restaurant a year?
Take 600 marketplace orders a month at a $27 average ticket. At a 28 percent effective rate that is about $4,536 a month, roughly $54,400 a year. Twenty eight percent sits inside the 25 to 35 percent blended range once delivery, marketing and card processing stack on the base commission of 15 to 30 percent. This is a model with every input printed, not a customer result.
Every order you move onto your own site is worth about $7.56 at that ticket, so the $499 Operator plan breaks even at roughly 66 direct orders a month, a little over two a day. Run your own numbers on the commission calculator.
How do you take a Friday rush without wrecking your ticket times?
You set the ceiling yourself. Zayos lets you throttle how many online orders land per fifteen minute window and set prep times per channel, so the site quotes a pickup window your line can actually hit. A guest who is told 35 minutes and gets 35 minutes comes back. A guest promised 20 by an app that never asked your kitchen does not.
All of it lands in one place. Direct orders and, on Operator plus Marketplace at $599 a month, your DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets come through Otter into the same kitchen tablet, so the line reads one queue instead of watching four screens on a Friday. If you already run Otter, the setup is documented on the Otter integration page.
Which Seminole Heights streets does Zayos cover?
Your site is built on your own domain with the neighborhood in the page structure, so a search for your food plus your street has somewhere to land that is not a marketplace tile. Seminole Heights sits between downtown and Hillsborough Avenue, so we also set up for the adjoining Tampa Heights and Riverside Heights blocks that order into the same kitchens.
Who runs Zayos, and who is live on it today?
Zayos is built by Zay Revenue Group, a Fort Lauderdale, Florida company. We are not a Tampa business and we are not going to pretend we have a room on Florida Avenue. We serve the Tampa market from South Florida, and onboarding is remote, which is why most operators are live in under two weeks and take a first direct order within a week of signing up.
One restaurant is live and taking orders on Zayos today: Naya Grill, in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach. On the commission model run at about 3,000 orders a month it keeps more than $48,000 a year that used to leave as marketplace commission. Storefronts are built and ordering opens at launch for Shishka Lebanese Grill, La Vie Mediterranean, Yummy Grill, aura, Courtyard Cafe, Mr. Smoke across 13 locations, Yalla Market and Tap That Ash. That is the whole list. We have no Seminole Heights customer yet and will not invent one. If you want the product defined in plain terms first, read what Zayos is.
What does Zayos cost a Seminole Heights restaurant?
Operator $499. Operator plus Marketplace $599, which adds DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub tickets ingested through Otter into the same tablet. Concierge $699, with up to 5 virtual brands per kitchen. Per location, month to month, no setup fee, and no commission on food revenue at any tier. The diner pays the flat service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, $0 dine-in and 10 percent on catering. The restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and 100 percent of tips.
Full pricing breakdown →What Seminole Heights owners ask before they switch.
Is there a Seminole Heights restaurant on Zayos right now?
My menu changes every week. How much work is keeping the site current?
What is marketplace commission costing a Seminole Heights kitchen?
How many direct orders does the $499 plan take to pay for itself?
Can I cap how many online orders come in during a rush?
Do I have to leave DoorDash and Uber Eats to do this?
See what last month on the apps actually cost you.
The free report reads your restaurant and shows what the marketplaces took. No card, about 60 seconds.