It's easy to think of delivery as one fee, because it arrives on the bill as one number. In practice a marketplace-brokered delivery is usually two charges stacked on top of each other: the platform's order commission, and a separate courier fee for whoever actually rides the order over. Running your own drivers doesn't shrink that second fee — it removes it.
What a courier marketplace actually charges for
A third-party courier fee is priced for a stranger to be dispatched, on demand, with no relationship to your restaurant beyond the one order. That's a reasonable thing to charge for — dispatch, routing and driver availability all cost money to run — but it's a cost your own drivers don't create, because they already work for you and already know the area.
What changes when it's your own driver
- The ticket goes straight to them. Once a kitchen ticket is marked ready, it's visible in the driver app immediately — see a day using the kitchen display system for what that ticket looked like a minute earlier.
- Turn-by-turn directions to the customer, in the same app they use to see the order — not a separate consumer maps app juggled alongside a delivery job.
- No dispatch fee per run, and no per-order commission either. Delivery is covered by the flat monthly plan — there is no second, separate courier line, and nothing charged per order.
The maths, worked through
Take a £22 delivery order. On a marketplace charging, say, 14% commission plus a flat £3 courier fee, that's roughly £6.08 gone before any food or fuel cost is counted. On Nomvo, the same order carries no commission at all — just whatever you actually pay your own driver, which for most independents already on the payroll is a marginal cost per run, not a per-order fee stacked on top.
The commission rate gets compared often. The courier fee almost never does — and it's usually the bigger number on a short-distance order.
Where this doesn't apply
If you don't have your own drivers, or delivery volume doesn't justify hiring one yet, a courier marketplace still has a place — it's a genuine service, priced for on-demand dispatch. The point isn't that third-party couriers are bad value in every case; it's that if you already run your own delivery, paying a stranger-dispatch fee on top of a platform commission is two charges for a job your own staff are already doing.
Same principle as the commission itself
This is the same logic covered in what a 14% commission actually costs a small takeaway — a fee that made sense for discovery and dispatch on a stranger's behalf stops making sense once the customer, and the driver, both already belong to you.
No setup fee, no contract. Nomvo is £69 a month, or £54 a month equivalent billed annually — the driver app is part of the one plan, not a separate add-on, and there's no commission on any order.
