Zayos vs DoorDash: keep both.

These are not competitors. They are two different jobs.

Most owners frame this as a fight. It is not. A marketplace is an app where people browse restaurants they do not know yet, like DoorDash, Uber Eats, or Grubhub. That is a real service and it has a real price. DoorDash sells you attention. It is good at putting your name in front of someone who has never eaten your food, and if a serious share of your volume comes from first-time diners, switching that off would hurt.

Zayos sells you the opposite thing. It does not find you new customers. It stops you from paying a finder’s fee on the customer you already found. When a regular who has ordered from you eleven times opens the app for order number twelve, the marketplace still takes its cut. That order was never in question. You already earned it with the food.

So the honest answer to should I replace DoorDash is usually no. Replace what DoorDash is doing to your repeat orders. Leave what it does for your new ones.

The economics, with the two numbers labeled

Commission gets quoted two ways, and the gap between them is where operators get caught. The base rate is what the published rate card says: roughly 15% to 30% of food revenue, depending on which tier your store sits on. The blended rate is what actually leaves your account: roughly 25% to 35% once delivery fees, card processing, and any promotion you are running are layered on top. Whenever a number gets quoted at you, including by us, ask which one it is.

Run it on one ticket. A $40 order at a 25% blended rate loses $10 before anyone turns on a burner. The same $40 order on Zayos loses nothing. The diner pays $2.99 for delivery or $0.99 for pickup at checkout, and you keep the full $40 plus 100% of the tip. Modeled across a year, the difference lands somewhere between $48,000 and $300,000 or more per location per year, at 3,000 to 12,000 orders a month. Naya Grill, our live operator in Pompano Beach and West Palm Beach, keeps $48k+ a year that used to go to commissions.

Note what the monthly fee does not do: it does not move. $499, $599, or $699 per location per month is the same number at 500 orders and at 5,000. Commission is the opposite. It grows with every good month you have. That is the entire argument, and it is arithmetic, not a pitch.

Why we tell operators to keep DoorDash

We could sell more by telling you to cancel it. We do not, for three reasons.

One, discovery is not free anywhere. If you switch off the marketplace, you have to replace those first-time diners with something, and that something costs money too. Better to let DoorDash keep doing the expensive introduction and stop paying it for the introductions it already made.

Two, the shift is gradual and it should be. Nobody moves 80% of their volume direct in week one. Your regulars learn your site over months, through the receipt, the QR code on the table, the reorder text, the sign at the counter. Keeping the app on means the transition costs you nothing if it takes a while.

Three, one bad month should not be a crisis. Running both means you always have two order sources. Turning one off to save money is a decision you can make later, from data, once you can see what share of your volume is genuinely new customers versus regulars paying a toll.

One queue, not two

The reason most owners never add a direct channel is the kitchen, not the money. Nobody wants a fourth tablet on the pass. So Zayos does not add one. Direct orders route through Otter, the order ingestion service that pulls tickets from DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub into a single screen. Ingestion is just the industry word for orders being pushed into one place instead of each app running its own device.

If you already run Otter, your Zayos tickets appear in the same feed, in the same format, on the same tablet your line reads today. Your expo does not learn a new system. Your cooks do not know which channel a ticket came from, and they should not need to. More on that on the Otter integration page and in how it works.