Restaurant tech leaders push cooperative digital ordering model to escape 30% delivery fees and $100 customer acquisition costs

The business of digital food ordering has reached a costly crossroads, forcing restaurant operators to choose between two expensive extremes: paying high commission fees to third-party delivery aggregators or spending heavily to acquire customers on proprietary apps that consumers rarely keep. Industry executives describe the third-party relationship as “renting” the guest—a model where the restaurant must continuously pay the marketplace to reach the same consumer for repeat business.

Third-party marketplaces frequently charge commissions of up to 30% per order. Beyond the immediate financial toll, these platforms create an existential data hurdle for restaurants. Because the aggregator controls the transaction and customer account, the restaurant does not own the customer’s data. In response to these persistent fees, several major U.S. cities, including New York and San Francisco, enacted permanent or temporary commission caps to protect local businesses.

To resolve this impasse, technology developers are looking to the retail e-commerce space for a blueprint. In retail, independent merchants have bypassed traditional marketplaces like Amazon by leveraging shared infrastructure. A key example is Shopify’s “Shop” app, which acts as a centralized shopping assistant, allowing consumers to track orders, discover independent merchants, and check out seamlessly using saved billing information—all while the individual brands retain direct ownership of the customer relationship.

For the past decade, and particularly since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, third-party marketplaces like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub have served as the primary digital storefronts for thousands of restaurants. As inflation and operating costs squeeze profit margins across the food service industry, a growing movement of restaurant technology executives and brands is advocating for a structural shift. The goal is to move past the traditional binary system of first-party and third-party commerce and establish cooperative “second-party networks” modeled after modern retail platforms.

Today, roughly 82% of restaurant brands mark up their menu prices on third-party delivery apps to offset these commissions. More than half of those establishments implement markups ranging from 20% to 30%, passing the cost directly to consumers already squeezed by inflation. While these platforms provided a crucial lifeline during indoor dining shutdowns, they came with steep financial trade-offs.

The push for this third ordering model comes as the restaurant tech sector reaches maturity. The concept of remote digital ordering dates back to 2005—two years before the release of the first iPhone—when Noah Glass founded GoMobo, a service that pioneered text-message ordering for mobile phones. That early venture eventually evolved into Olo Inc. (NYSE: OLO), a New York-based restaurant software giant that went public in 2021.

Conversely, the alternative of first-party ordering—encouraging consumers to use a restaurant’s own proprietary mobile app or website—presents a different set of financial obstacles. To bypass third-party fees and retain ownership of customer data, brands must invest heavily in digital marketing. Industry estimates show that acquiring a single new customer through a proprietary app can cost a restaurant up to $100. Furthermore, consumer app fatigue is high; after downloading a specific restaurant’s app, users rarely open it again, frequently reverting to multi-brand aggregators for convenience.

A second-party network for restaurants would function similarly, serving as a cooperative bridge between independent brands. Within this ecosystem, consumers could access multiple restaurant brands from a single interface, utilizing saved payment details and receiving personalized offers without navigating third-party markups or platform-specific advertisements. Such a network is designed to solve a persistent personalization problem in digital ordering.

Currently, customer data remains siloed. For instance, a customer who follows a strict vegan diet might order from a new brand for the first time and receive generic promotional materials for meat dishes because the platform lacks cross-brand intelligence. In a second-party network, consumer preferences and dietary choices would securely travel with the guest, allowing new brands to offer relevant, tailored menus from the very first transaction.

Today, Olo operates as the digital middleware for some of the largest chains in the United States, managing transactions and point-of-sale integrations for over 800 restaurant brands across more than 90,000 locations. Its client portfolio includes household names such as Shake Shack, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel, Five Guys, and Panda Express. As the enterprise software powering these brands, Olo is positioned at the center of the industry’s digital evolution.

Additionally, this infrastructure is being built with an eye toward future technology. As artificial intelligence assistants and voice-activated ordering systems become more integrated into daily life, a unified second-party data standard would allow these AI tools to seamlessly place orders across different brands without requiring dozens of individual app integrations. For the major chains anchor-powering these platforms, the shift toward a collaborative, non-commission digital marketplace represents the next logical phase of growth—one where scale is achieved through shared digital infrastructure rather than costly, fragmented applications.