/How to Get More Online Orders: Marketing, Marketplaces and Menu Engineering for UK Takeaways (2026)

The UK's meal delivery market is one of the fastest-growing parts of hospitality — market forecasts put UK food delivery growing at a compound rate in the mid-teens through the rest of the decade. Most of that growth still runs through three marketplaces. That's the opportunity and the problem in one sentence: marketplaces bring you volume you'd never reach on your own, and they take a third of the ticket for the privilege.

Getting more online orders isn't really one problem — it's four, stacked on top of each other:

1. Getting found in the first place (marketplaces, search, social)
2. Converting that attention into an order, quickly and without friction
3. Getting the next order to come direct, at full margin, rather than through a marketplace again
4. Making each order worth more, without discounting your way into a loss

This guide works through all four, in order, and ends with a link to our current guide to the best online ordering systems for UK restaurants — because a lot of what's below only works if the ordering system underneath it is actually good.

Part 1: what marketplaces really cost you

Before you can decide how to use marketplaces, it helps to know exactly what they cost, because none of them make it easy to find out.

Two things are easy to miss here. First, commission is quoted excluding VAT — a "30%" commission is closer to a 36% effective deduction once VAT is added on top. Second, every platform charges meaningfully less when you use your own drivers rather than theirs, which is worth checking even if you never plan to leave the marketplace entirely.

None of this makes marketplaces bad. It makes them expensive customer acquisition — which is a completely different way to think about them than as a place to run your business.

Part 2: treat marketplaces as lead generation, not a home

The operators who do best with marketplaces stop thinking of them as a sales channel and start thinking of them as an ad platform with unusually good targeting and a delivery fleet attached. You're not trying to maximise marketplace revenue for its own sake — you're trying to convert a stranger who searched "curry near me" into a customer who knows your name.

That reframe changes what you optimise for:

• Menu and photography on marketplaces exist to win the first order, not to maximise average order value. A slightly-too-generous marketplace-only offer for new customers can be a rational customer acquisition cost, the same way a paid ad would be — as long as you have a plan to bring that customer back direct next time.
• Every marketplace order is an opportunity to hand the customer something that gets them to your own channel next time — a discount code in the packaging, a QR code on the receipt, a loyalty scheme they can only join directly. Marketplaces make this harder than they used to (most restrict what you can put in packaging and won't hand over customer contact details), but a printed card or sticker with "10% off when you order direct at [yoursite].co.uk" is still allowed on every major platform as of writing, and it's the single highest-leverage thing most operators aren't doing.
• Track which marketplace customers convert to direct so you can see whether the acquisition cost is actually paying off. If nobody ever moves from Deliveroo to your own site, you're not doing lead generation — you're just paying 30% forever.

Part 3: a slick direct ordering system is the precondition for everything else

None of the tactics below work if your own ordering site is worse than the marketplace experience customers are used to. This is where most independent operators lose the battle before it starts — not on marketing, but on friction.

The things that actually move conversion on a direct ordering page:

• Mobile-first, genuinely fast. Most direct orders now start on a phone, often on a slow connection outside a venue. A page that takes 5+ seconds to load loses a meaningful share of visitors before they see the menu.
• Minimum possible steps to checkout. Guest checkout by default, saved card and address for returning customers, no forced account creation before someone can even see a price.
• Accurate delivery/collection time estimates. Customers forgive plenty; they don't forgive being told 25 minutes and waiting 55.
• Clear, current pricing and availability. An item that's "in stock" on the menu but gets cancelled after payment is one of the fastest ways to lose a customer back to a marketplace permanently.
• Upsells built into the flow, not bolted on. A prompt for a drink or side at checkout, sized reasonably, converts; a chaotic list of 40 add-ons does not.

If you're evaluating whether your current setup is good enough, the practical test is simple: order from yourself, on your phone, on mobile data, and time how long it takes from "hungry" to "paid." If it's slower or clunkier than ordering from a marketplace, that's the first thing to fix — before spending a penny on marketing to send people there.

Part 4: moving marketplace customers to direct ordering

This is the highest-value, least-used lever most takeaways have available to them. A few tactics, roughly in order of effort required:

Packaging and receipt inserts. A card or sticker in every marketplace bag, with a specific, time-limited offer for ordering direct next time (not a generic "visit our website"). Specific and time-limited outperforms generic every time.

QR codes that go somewhere useful. Not to your homepage — to a landing page pre-loaded with a first-direct-order discount code, so the value exchange is obvious in one scan.

Review responses that mention direct ordering. When you reply to a good review on Google or a marketplace, a brief, natural mention that you take direct orders (with a link, where the platform allows it) costs nothing and reaches people actively deciding whether to order from you again.

Email and SMS capture at the point of direct order — not before. The first direct order is where you get a customer's contact details on record for the first time. Make sure your ordering system actually captures and lets you use this, because it's the entire point of getting them off the marketplace.

A reason to come back, not just a discount to leave. "10% off your first direct order" gets someone to switch once. A loyalty scheme, a birthday offer, or early access to a new menu item gives them a reason to keep ordering direct rather than drifting back to whichever marketplace has a promotion that week.

Part 5: marketing that actually drives direct orders

Beyond marketplace-to-direct migration, a handful of channels do most of the work for delivery and takeaway businesses specifically:

• Google Business Profile, kept current. For "food near me" style searches, an accurate, photo-rich, regularly-updated profile with your direct ordering link in the primary website field is one of the highest-return, lowest-cost things a takeaway can maintain. Update hours, holiday closures and menu photos as routine, not an afterthought.
• Local SEO on your own site. A fast, indexable page for your postcode/area ("[cuisine] delivery in [area]") beats a marketplace listing for the searches that lead to direct orders, because it's the one result you fully control and monetise.
• Retargeting and email/SMS for people who've already ordered once. This audience converts far better than cold advertising — send them a genuine offer, not a generic newsletter, timed around when they're statistically likely to order again.
• Paid social and search, spent on driving direct orders specifically. If you're paying to acquire a customer, send that spend to your own ordering page, not to a marketplace listing you don't control and can't remarket to afterwards.

The unifying principle: every marketing channel you run should be pointed at growing your own list of direct customers, because that's the only list you actually own.

Part 6: loyalty and retention — where the real margin lives

The economics here are stark enough to be worth stating plainly: industry data consistently shows repeat customers generate the large majority of restaurant revenue (commonly cited estimates put it at roughly two-thirds to three-quarters, varying by format), and existing customers spend meaningfully more per order than first-timers. Separately, research on direct-versus-marketplace ordering has found customers spend around a third more per order when they order directly rather than through a third-party platform — which stacks the case for retention even further in favour of your own channel.

Practically, that means:

• A loyalty scheme doesn't need to be sophisticated to work. A simple points-per-pound or "every 10th order free" scheme, visible and easy to understand, outperforms a complicated tiered programme nobody bothers to learn.
• Make it live on your direct ordering system, not a separate app. Friction between "where I order" and "where my points are" is where loyalty schemes quietly die.
• Personalise where you can. A returning customer who always orders the same three items responds better to "your usual, 15% off today" than to a blanket promotion.
• Track order frequency, not just revenue. A customer ordering fortnightly who could be ordering weekly is a much cheaper win than acquiring a new customer from scratch.

Part 7: smart deals and discounting, without discounting your way into a loss

Discounting is where most operators either leave money on the table or actively destroy margin. A few principles that hold up:

• Discount the slow times, not the busy ones. A Tuesday-lunch offer fills genuinely empty capacity. A Friday-night discount just reduces margin on demand you already had.
• Prefer value-adds over blanket percentage cuts. "Free side with any main" or "add a drink for £1" increases average order value and feels generous, while a flat "20% off everything" simply erodes margin on every single order, including the ones that would have happened anyway.
• Reserve the deepest offers for acquisition, not retention. A generous first-order discount is a customer acquisition cost you can measure. The same discount repeated for existing customers is just a permanent margin cut with no acquisition benefit.
• Bundle rather than discount where you can. A meal deal at a fixed price that combines a plowhorse (see menu engineering, below) with a higher-margin side or drink increases spend per head while feeling like better value than a straight discount.
• Set an end date on everything. Open-ended discounts become the expected price. Time-boxed offers create urgency and a natural point to stop.

The test for any deal before you run it: would you be comfortable if every single customer who was already going to order took you up on it? If the answer is no, it's not really an acquisition or occasion-based offer — it's just a margin cut with a marketing name.

Part 8: menu engineering for online ordering specifically

Menu engineering is an old restaurant discipline, but it applies directly — arguably more directly — to an online ordering menu, because you control layout, imagery and order in a way a printed menu never allowed.

The standard framework sorts every item on two axes — popularity and profitability — into four categories:

• Stars (high popularity, high profitability): your best items. Feature them first, photograph them well, and don't mess with them.
• Plowhorses (high popularity, low profitability): customer favourites that don't make you much money. Look at portion size, ingredient cost and small price increases before considering removal — customers rarely notice a modest price rise on something they already love.
• Puzzles (high profitability, low popularity): items that make good margin but aren't selling. Usually a visibility or description problem, not a quality one — better photography, a clearer description, or moving it higher in the category often fixes this faster than changing the dish.
• Dogs (low popularity, low profitability): candidates for removal, unless they exist for a strategic reason (a vegetarian option that rounds out the menu, for instance).

Applied specifically to an online ordering system:

• Item order within a category matters more online than on a printed menu, because attention drops off fast as customers scroll. Stars and puzzles belong at the top; dogs, if they stay on the menu at all, belong at the bottom.
• Photography does more work online than in person, where a server or the smell of the kitchen can sell a dish a bad photo can't. Every star and puzzle should have a genuinely good photo; items without one consistently underperform their in-person popularity.
• Modifiers and upsells are where puzzles and plowhorses can be rescued simultaneously — a plowhorse paired with a higher-margin add-on at checkout improves the economics of the item without touching its price or popularity.
• Review this quarterly, not once. A menu engineering exercise done once and never revisited drifts out of date within a couple of menu changes; the categories are only useful if the data behind them is current.

Putting it together

Roughly in the order most operators should tackle it:

1. Fix the direct ordering experience first — speed, checkout friction, accurate availability — before spending anything on driving traffic to it.
2. Add a genuine reason for marketplace customers to switch (packaging insert, QR code, first-direct-order offer) before trying to reduce marketplace dependence any other way.
3. Get Google Business Profile and local SEO right, since they're free-to-low-cost and compound over time.
4. Stand up a simple loyalty scheme on the direct ordering system itself.
5. Run a menu engineering pass on the online menu specifically, not just the in-venue one.
6. Replace blanket discounts with targeted, time-boxed offers built around slow periods and first-time acquisition.

None of these require a platform migration to start — most can be done on whatever system you're already running. But if you're evaluating whether your current ordering system can actually support this (loyalty built in, real customer data, decent checkout conversion, marketing tools that reach your direct customer list), that's exactly what we compare in our guide to the best online ordering systems for UK restaurants in 2026.

Related guides

• Best Online Ordering Systems for Restaurants in the UK (2026)
• Best restaurant loyalty software in the UK
• Best delivery integration software in the UK
• Best direct ordering platforms for multi-site restaurant groups