Why does white label matter to what a restaurant keeps?
Money follows the name on the checkout page. When a diner pays on a marketplace, the marketplace owns the transaction, the customer identity and the pricing conversation, and it charges for that position: 15 to 30 percent base commission, and 25 to 35 percent blended once delivery, in app marketing and card processing stack on top. On a $40 ticket at 30 percent, $12 leaves before the burner turns on.
A white label channel moves the same transaction under the restaurant's own name. That does not automatically make it cheaper, and any vendor who says otherwise is selling you the label instead of the math. What it does is change what you are buying. On a marketplace you rent demand and pay a share of every sale forever. On a white label channel you buy software, and software has a price you can write on a whiteboard.
There is a second, slower payoff that owners underrate. A diner who orders on your domain is a name in your list. A diner who orders on an app is a name in the app's list, and the app will happily sell that name back to you as an ad next month.
What does it look like on a Friday night?
It looks like nothing. That is the tell. At 7:40pm a regular opens your site on her phone, taps the same three items she always orders, pays with Apple Pay and puts the phone down. The confirmation email comes from your address. Her bank statement will say your restaurant. On the line, the ticket lands on the same tablet as every other ticket, in the same format, with the same alert sound, and the cook does not know or care which channel it came from.
White label is invisible in the dining room and invisible in the kitchen. It only becomes visible in the back office on Monday, when the regular's name, phone number and eleven previous orders are sitting in a list you can filter, export and text.
Which four layers actually have to be white labeled?
Vendors use the phrase loosely. These are the four places to check, in the order that matters. A setup that misses the fourth one is a paint job.
-
1.The address the diner types
A real white label channel lives on your domain, yourrestaurant.com or order.yourrestaurant.com. If the ordering link sends a diner to vendorname.com/yourrestaurant, the vendor owns the address, the search traffic and any link anyone ever builds to it.
-
2.The checkout and the card statement
Ask what the diner sees at payment and what prints on the bank statement two days later. Your restaurant name on both means the transaction is yours. A vendor name on either means the diner will call the vendor when something goes wrong, and will remember the vendor as the place they ordered from.
-
3.The email and text receipts
Confirmation emails, ready-for-pickup texts and refund notices are the only mail most diners ever get from a restaurant. On a white label setup they come from your address with your logo, so the next promotion you send is not the first message they have seen from you.
-
4.The customer list underneath
The layer that decides everything else. Name, phone, email, order history and lifetime spend either sit in a list you can export to a spreadsheet today, or they do not. Ask for a sample export before you sign, not after.
What do owners usually get wrong about it?
“White label means commission free.”
It does not. White label describes whose name is on the checkout. Plenty of white label vendors still take a percentage of every order underneath their own branding. The two questions are separate, so ask both: whose brand, and what is the per order cost in dollars.
“White label means I own the software.”
You own the brand, the domain, the menu and the customer list. The vendor owns the code, the servers and the updates. The practical test is not ownership, it is exit: can you export your customers and repoint your domain next month without asking permission.
“My listing on a delivery app is white label because my logo is on it.”
A logo is not a channel. If the checkout, the receipt and the card statement say the marketplace, the diner ordered from the marketplace. Your logo was the product being sold.
“White label only makes sense for chains.”
A single location runs one the same way a fifty unit brand does. The setup work is the menu, the hours and the payment account, and that work is the same size at one location.
Where does Zayos fit?
Zayos is a white label ordering platform for independent restaurants, built by Zay Revenue Group in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Each restaurant gets its ordering site on its own domain, its own checkout, its own receipts and an exportable customer list. Pricing is flat: $499 Operator, $599 Operator plus Marketplace, $699 Concierge, per location per month, month to month, no setup fee. The restaurant keeps 100 percent of food revenue and tips, and the diner pays the service fee at checkout, $0.99 pickup, $2.99 delivery, nothing dine in, 10 percent catering. Most restaurants are live in under two weeks.
Related reading: what a direct ordering channel is, how the branded site gets built, and the full restaurant online ordering glossary.