Online ordering for your restaurant with no per-order commission (charging on your own website)

You’re doing the math on a Sunday night. Sales were good all week on the delivery app, but when you see how much actually gets deposited, about a quarter of it is missing. It’s not your imagination: between the per-order commission and the delivery fee, the apps keep 25 to 30% of every ticket. On a 180-peso dish, that’s almost 50 pesos you never see. And those 50 pesos are yours — from a customer who already knows you, already knows how to get there, and was going to order from you anyway.

This post is about how to take online orders for your restaurant with no per-order commission, charging directly on your own website. This isn’t WhatsApp ordering — we’ve already covered that, and it works well to get started. This is the next step: the customer picks, pays, and confirms right on your site, and the money lands with you.

What’s the difference between WhatsApp orders and orders paid on your website?

The difference is who does the work and who keeps the commission. On WhatsApp, you answer, confirm what they want, add it up, tell them the total, wait for the transfer, and check that it actually went through. On your website, the customer builds their own order, sees the total come up automatically, pays by card right there, and an already-paid order lands in your hands, with the address and what they want, ready for the kitchen.

Chasing down a transfer is fine when you have five orders. When it’s forty on a Friday, that back-and-forth eats you alive. Charging on your own website moves the work somewhere else: you’re not chasing transfers, you’re not adding up totals by hand, and above all, you’re not paying anyone a commission just for letting your own customer buy from you.

That’s the part people miss. The delivery app doesn’t charge you for bringing you new customers — it charges you for every order, even the ones from customers who were already yours. Your own website only charges whatever the payment gateway charges, once, and that’s it.

”No commission” — does that mean charging online is free?

No. I’m not going to tell you that charging online is 100% free, because it isn’t, and I’d hate for you to find that out later.

What you do save is the delivery app’s commission: that 25 to 30% per order disappears. That’s real, and it’s a lot.

What you will pay is the bank’s fee for processing the card. Every payment gateway (Stripe, Mercado Pago, whichever) charges something to move the money — around 3 to 4% per transaction in Mexico. That’s not the website’s cut, it’s the bank’s, and anyone who accepts cards pays it, even the big apps.

Do the math with your own ticket: on that 180-peso dish, the app was taking about 50; the gateway takes about 6. The difference is what you keep. That’s why “no per-order commission” doesn’t mean “no cost” — it means you stop paying a middleman you don’t need, and only pay the real cost of accepting a card.

What does a restaurant website need to take orders and charge online?

It needs five pieces, and every one of them has to be there:

A menu with clear prices and real photos. If customers can’t see clearly what they’re ordering, they won’t finish the order. Your own photos, not ones from the internet.
A cart. One where they can add three tacos, a drink, and a dessert, and watch the total add itself up. Without this, there’s no online ordering — just a price list.
The delivery method. Pickup at the restaurant, or do you deliver? If you deliver, how far and how much it costs. Make that clear before they pay, not after.
Card payment on the same page. They enter their card and that’s it. No sending them somewhere else, no “deposit to this account and send me the receipt.”
The confirmation that reaches you. The paid order has to land somewhere you’ll actually see it — WhatsApp, email, or a screen in the kitchen. If it ends up in a dashboard you never open, an order goes cold and you lose a customer.

A concrete example

Say you run a rotisserie chicken place in Guadalajara, in the Chapalita neighborhood. You sell whole roasted chickens, half orders, rice, tortillas, and aguachile on weekends. Right now you take orders by phone and WhatsApp, and Saturdays overwhelm you: you’re answering calls, jotting things down on scraps of paper, and sometimes one slips through.

You describe that to Proyecta — “a website for my rotisserie place with the menu, photos of the chickens, a cart so people can build their own order, pickup or delivery within Chapalita, and card payment right there; have the order land on the business WhatsApp” — and out comes a real, published site with its own link. You tweak it just by talking: “set delivery at 40 pesos,” “whole chicken at 240,” “take aguachile off on weekdays.” The following Saturday, half your orders come in on their own, already paid, while you’re in the kitchen instead of glued to the phone.

You still use WhatsApp for customers who’d rather message you. But the ones who already know what they want order and pay on their own. And on every one of those, you keep the 50 pesos that used to go to commission.

When do I NOT need online ordering with built-in payment?

If you’re purely counter service — comida corrida, grab-and-go tacos, people who walk in, eat, and leave — charging online won’t move the needle for you. Nobody prepays by card for tacos they’re about to eat in three minutes. In that case, you’re better off just having your menu, address, and WhatsApp clearly visible.

Online payment starts to pay off once you’re already taking remote orders (takeout or delivery), once your average ticket is high enough that the app’s commission actually hurts, or once the back-and-forth of confirming WhatsApp transfers is pulling hands away from the kitchen right when you need them most. If you recognized yourself in any of those three, this is your moment.

Try it before you decide

You don’t have to commit to anything today. Describe your restaurant to Proyecta — your menu, how you deliver, and that you want payment to happen on the page — and see what comes out. Compare: how much the app’s commission is costing you right now in a normal week, against what the gateway would cost you charging it yourself. If the numbers add up, publish it (proyecta.dev) and start keeping what was always yours. And if they don’t, you haven’t lost anything by checking.