London online ordering you actually own.

London is the delivery capital of the country and the marketplaces price accordingly. Commission runs as high as around 30 percent of an order when the platform handles the delivery, less when you deliver yourself, on top of the promoted placement you are encouraged to buy to stay visible in your own postcode. Check the rate on your own contract, because it is the only one that matters. In a city where rent, wages and ingredients already take their share, that commission is often the whole difference between an order worth cooking and one that is not.

Search for pizza in any London postcode and dozens of kitchens appear in an identical grid, ranked by an algorithm you do not control, with somebody else's promotion above your best seller. Years of reputation compress into a thumbnail and a number out of five. On your own page there is nobody else on it, and the customer who finds you once can be invited back by you rather than resold to the next highest bidder.

Street by street, never as a circle. The river, the Congestion Charge and ULEZ have made independent delivery a moped and bicycle business, so a zone that looks neat on a radius will have a rider stuck on a bridge with two cold orders. Set your own zones with their own fees, minimum orders and quoted times: free delivery to the immediate few roads, a higher minimum past the main road, and a hard edge where it stops paying. Live tracking answers the "where is it" calls so nobody is on the phone at half eight, and quoted times move with the actual kitchen queue rather than promising everyone forty minutes.

That the same customer has ordered nine times, always adds the same side, and has not been near you in three weeks. A marketplace will never tell you any of that, because that customer is their asset rather than yours. On your own channel it is all on your side of the fence, and the marketing acts on it: the lapsed regular gets their usual with a few pounds off, a new dish goes to the people whose order history says they will actually want it. After every order it asks how things went, sends the happy ones towards your public reviews and routes the unhappy ones to you privately first, so a problem gets fixed before it gets published.

Google, your socials, your shopfront and the bag, in roughly that order of effort. The page is built for local search, with fast loading and menu content search engines can actually read, so your own site competes for your own customers instead of ceding that ground entirely. The rest is unglamorous and it works: a code in every bag that only redeems on your page, a direct-only price or a free side, your web address on the packaging, staff mentioning it at collection. Expect this to take months rather than a fortnight.

No, and doing so on day one would be a mistake in a city this crowded. Keep the marketplaces for discovery, because they are genuinely how new customers find you. Every repeat order that moves across is margin recovered, and app orders land in the same kitchen display as direct ones, so nothing about your existing trade breaks while the balance shifts. One thing to be clear about: Eclyde is Dublin-built and trades in Ireland today, with the UK as its next market, so ask us about timelines before you plan around a date.