Deliverect vs Flipdish: Which Restaurant Technology Platform Is Better?
Deliverect vs Flipdish: the short version
Deliverect takes orders from marketplaces like Uber Eats, Deliveroo and Just Eat and pushes them into the POS you already have. Flipdish gives you your own ordering channels - a website, an app, kiosks, a phone line that answers itself - along with a POS to run them on. Customers order from you directly, and no marketplace sits in the middle.
So Deliverect makes marketplace orders easier to handle. Flipdish is there to get you fewer marketplace orders and more of your own.
If your real problem is the commission line on your monthly statement, that's the difference that counts.
What Deliverect does
Deliverect started in Belgium and now operates across Europe, the UK and further afield. The problem it solves is easy to picture. A restaurant on three marketplaces usually ends up with three tablets on the counter, each one beeping on its own schedule, and somebody re-typing every order into the till. Deliverect pulls those orders into a single feed and sends them straight through to the POS. Nobody re-types anything. Fewer orders go out wrong because someone misread "no onions" on tablet number two during the rush.
It also handles menus from one place. Change a price, or mark the lamb as sold out, and the change goes to every marketplace you're connected to. When the kitchen runs out of something at 8pm on a Friday, that saves someone going into three separate apps.
You pay Deliverect a monthly subscription linked to your order volume. It doesn't process payments. It doesn't sell you a POS, and it doesn't build you a branded website or app. It sits between the marketplaces and your till, and that's the whole job.
For a restaurant doing big numbers across several marketplaces, it's a useful tool. The tablets go away and the counter is quieter.
What it can't touch is the commission. Marketplaces typically take 25-35% of every order, and that cut is exactly the same whether the order lands on a tablet or comes through Deliverect. The customer is still the marketplace's customer, too. You cook the food, but the relationship stays with Deliveroo or Uber Eats.
What Flipdish does
Flipdish is a restaurant technology platform where the restaurant owns the ordering, end to end. It includes:
- A restaurant POS system for in-venue orders
- A branded online ordering website
- A branded mobile app with your name on it
- Self-service kiosks
- An AI phone ordering agent that takes phone orders without a member of staff picking up
- AI marketing and customer retention tools
- Loyalty and customer data management
Flipdish customers in the UK and Ireland range from single-site independents to national QSR chains, franchise groups and other hospitality businesses.
Every one of those channels puts the order on something the restaurant controls. The customer types their email into your website, not Deliveroo's. They download your app. That's the part that matters later.
Feature comparison
| Capability | Deliverect | Flipdish |
|---|---|---|
| Marketplace order aggregation | ✓ | Via integrations |
| First-party online ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded mobile app | ✗ | ✓ |
| Branded website | ✗ | ✓ |
| Restaurant POS | ✗ | ✓ |
| Self-service kiosks | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI phone ordering | ✗ | ✓ |
| Customer data ownership | ✗ | ✓ |
| AI marketing and loyalty | ✗ | ✓ |
| Multi-location management | ✓ | ✓ |
| Kitchen display system | Via integration | ✓ |
The table looks lopsided, and it is. That's mostly because the two products aren't trying to do the same job. Deliverect has one main row - aggregation - and it does that well. Flipdish covers aggregation through integrations and then adds everything a restaurant needs to take orders on its own terms.
Running a restaurant on Deliverect
Day to day, Deliverect cuts out a lot of small annoyances. One screen instead of four. One menu to update instead of four. New staff learn one system instead of four, which matters more than it sounds when you're onboarding seasonal hires in December.
Those are real gains. A busy kitchen running several marketplaces at volume has a genuine problem, and Deliverect fixes it.
The economics don't change, though. Every marketplace order still carries the same commission it did before. You still don't know who's ordering. A customer who ordered from you every Friday for six months and then stopped is invisible - you can't see that they've gone, and you've no way to get in touch and ask them back. You can't offer them a reason to order direct next time. There's no loyalty scheme, because they're not your customer to reward.
Deliverect makes the marketplace model run smoother. It's still the marketplace model.
Running a restaurant on Flipdish
When someone orders through a Flipdish-powered website or app, the restaurant keeps their email address, what they ordered, how often they order, and what they like. That record is the restaurant's.
Here's what you can do with it. Send that customer a promotional email when you've a slow Tuesday to fill. Give them loyalty points that build up toward a free meal. Spot that they haven't ordered in five weeks and send them a discount to come back. Tell them when the new menu launches, or when you open a second location two streets from their house.
None of that is possible with marketplace orders, however neatly those orders are aggregated.
Flipdish's AI marketing tools use that customer data to run targeted campaigns automatically, so a lapsed-customer offer goes out without someone remembering to send it. The AI phone agent picks up phone orders and sends them straight into the POS. On a Saturday night, that's one less person stuck on the phone reading out the specials when they should be on the pass.
The POS ties it together. Orders from the website, the app, the kiosk, the phone and any connected marketplace all end up in the same place, alongside walk-in and table orders.
The numbers on direct ordering
The maths is simple enough to do on the back of a receipt.
Take a £30 order through Deliveroo at 30% commission. The restaurant gives up £9 and keeps £21.
The same £30 order placed through a Flipdish-powered website carries a platform fee of a few percent instead. Say, for the sake of the example, it's 5%. That's £1.50, and the restaurant keeps £28.50 before card processing. The gap is £7.50 on a single order.
Now scale it. A takeaway doing 200 marketplace orders a week at an average of £30 is handing over £1,800 a week in commission. Nobody expects every one of those customers to switch overnight. But if 50 of those orders a week move to the restaurant's own website or app, the saving is around £375 a week - about £19,500 over a year. If 100 move, double it.
Those figures are illustrative, and your own commission rates and order values will be different. The pattern holds, though. Every order that moves from a marketplace to a direct channel puts most of the commission back in the restaurant's pocket, and adds one more customer to a database you can market to for as long as they keep ordering.
The honest catch is that customers don't find your website by accident. Marketplaces are good at getting a restaurant in front of new people, and plenty of restaurants will keep using them for that. The work is getting existing customers - the ones who already know you and already like the food - to order direct the next time. That's what the app, the loyalty points and the automated campaigns are for.
Moving marketplace customers to direct
Start with the people already eating your food. Put your web address and a QR code in every marketplace bag, on the menu in the restaurant, and on the receipt. Give them a reason to use it - a discount on the first direct order, or loyalty points they can't earn on Uber Eats. A customer saving a couple of pounds on their usual Friday order will switch. A customer who gets nothing for switching mostly won't.
Then make ordering direct as easy as ordering through the marketplace. If your website is slow, or the app makes people create an account before they can see the menu, they'll go back to what they know. Flipdish's websites and apps are built for ordering, so the menu, the basket and the payment are the whole point of the page.
Phone orders count too. Plenty of regulars still ring up, especially for collection. With the AI phone agent taking those calls, a busy evening no longer means missed calls and customers giving up and opening Just Eat instead.
Once someone has ordered direct, they're in your database. From there the marketing tools can keep them coming back without anyone on your team writing an email by hand.
For multi-site operators, this compounds. A customer who orders from your Dublin site and then moves to Cork is still your customer, and still in the same system. On a marketplace, they'd just be another anonymous order at a different branch.
Can you use both?
Yes, and some restaurants do. They keep Deliverect to manage their existing marketplace volume while they build up direct ordering through Flipdish. Over time the direct share grows and the marketplace share shrinks, and nobody has to switch everything off on a Monday morning and hope for the best.
Flipdish also integrates with the major delivery marketplaces, so if you'd rather not run two systems, marketplace orders can flow into the Flipdish POS alongside your direct orders. One screen either way.
Deliverect or Flipdish: which one should you pick?
Pick Deliverect if what's hurting right now is the mess of managing several marketplaces at once - too many tablets, too many menus, too many re-typed orders - and you're not ready to put money into direct ordering yet.
Pick Flipdish if you want to own your customers and take more orders without paying 25-35% on each one. It also makes sense if you want your website, app, kiosks, phone orders and POS all on one platform rather than stitched together from separate suppliers, and if you're planning more locations and want customer data that follows you to each one.
They aren't really direct competitors. Deliverect solves an operations problem: orders arriving in too many places. Flipdish solves a commercial one: paying a third of every order to a company that keeps your customers. For a restaurant that cares about margin over the next few years, the second problem is the expensive one, and Flipdish is the one built to fix it.
See how Flipdish can help your restaurant build direct ordering