Ask a restaurant owner what commission they pay and most will tell you the percentage without hesitating. Ask what it costs them and the answer takes longer, because the percentage is charged on revenue and margin is what is left after everything else has taken its share first.
So here is the arithmetic, worked on a business shaped like most of the independents we talk to.
The example
A takeaway turning over £5,000 a week through online orders. Food cost 32%, labour 30%, rent, utilities and everything else 22%. That leaves a 16% operating margin before any platform takes anything — which is a healthy, unremarkable position for a well-run independent.
Now apply a 14% commission to the order value. That is £700 a week, taken off the top.
£800 of weekly profit becomes £100. The business did not get worse. The rate did.
Nomvo doesn't apply a percentage at all — a flat £69 a month regardless of how many orders come through it. On the same £5,000 a week, that's roughly £16 a week against the £700 a 14% commission takes. The difference over a year is £35,500 or so — considerably more than a full-time salary, or the entire kitchen refit that has been postponed twice.
Why the percentage feels smaller than it is
Commission is quoted against revenue, and revenue is the biggest number on the page. Fourteen percent of it sounds like a slice. But it is not charged against revenue in any meaningful sense — it is charged against the only part of revenue you actually keep.
Expressed properly: a 14% commission on a business with a 16% operating margin takes 87.5% of the profit. That is the sentence worth putting in front of anyone who says the rate is the cost of doing business.
Three things that make it worse
- It scales with your good weeks. A quiet January costs you less in commission and more in fixed costs. A strong December costs you the most, precisely when the extra margin should be funding the year.
- It applies before refunds settle. Cancelled and refunded orders still cost you time, food and, in many arrangements, part of the fee.
- It buys you nothing durable. The customer belongs to the platform. Next week they see four competitors on the same page, and you pay again for the same person.
What to do about it
Nobody sensible switches everything off overnight. Marketplaces bring discovery, and discovery has value for a new site or an unfamiliar cuisine in a quiet area. The mistake is paying a discovery rate on customers who already know exactly who you are.
Look at your repeat customers — anyone who has ordered three times or more in the last quarter. You are paying full commission to reach people who would have found you anyway. That group is where owning your own ordering site pays for itself first.
The practical route is boring and it works: keep the marketplace listing for discovery, put your own site on the receipt, the bag, the door and the reply text, and move the repeat business across one order at a time. Six months later the split has usually flipped. We cover exactly how that first move works in switching from a marketplace: what actually changes on day one.
The number worth tracking
Not orders. Not revenue. Repeat rate within 30 days, and the share of those repeats coming through a channel you own. If that second figure is climbing, the commission line stops being the thing that decides your year.
No setup fee, no contract, cancel any time. Nomvo is £69 a month, or £54 a month equivalent billed annually — no commission on any order. Card processing is charged separately by Stripe at their own published rate.
