Coffee shops are adding their own ways to take orders because delivery apps charge high fees, and those fees hurt small orders the most. Say SkipTheDishes, Uber Eats, or DoorDash keeps 15% to 30% of a $9 order. Once the milk and cups are paid for, the café has little left. A direct ordering coffee shop takes orders through its own website, its own app, or a code customers scan at the counter. The café keeps the wholesale and gets to know who its customers are.
Habit is the other reason. Canadians have been ordering ahead on the Tim Hortons and Starbucks apps for years. Small cafés want to offer the same thing under their own name.
Quick Answer
- What it is: Direct ordering means customers order and pay through your café’s own website, app, or QR code, not through a delivery app.
- Who it’s for: Small cafés, local coffee chains, and bakery-cafés in Canada that get regular pickup or delivery orders.
- When to use it: When delivery app fees are eating your profit, your regulars like to order ahead, or your morning line is costing you sales.
TL;DR
- Coffee orders are small, so a 15% to 30% delivery app fee takes a big chunk of each one.
- That’s why more cafés now take orders on their own website, app, or QR code.
- When customers order from you directly, you keep the whole sale and build your own customer list.
- Regulars can order ahead and walk right past the morning line.
- Most shops still keep SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats for new customers and ask their regulars to order directly.
Key Points
- 300 online orders a month at $11 each, with a 25% fee, costs a café about $825 a month. That’s roughly $9,900 a year.
- Tim Hortons and Starbucks already got Canadians used to ordering ahead, so small cafés don’t have to teach the habit.
- For coffee, pickup matters more than delivery. Hot drinks don’t travel well, and most customers live or work nearby.
- Coffee orders come with lots of changes, like oat milk and extra shots, so your ordering page has to handle them and charge for them.
- When people order from you, you get their contact details, so you can offer rewards and let them reorder their usual.
- The catch: your own ordering page won’t bring in new customers by itself. You’ll need to tell people about it on Google, on Instagram, and in the shop.
What Direct Ordering Means for a Coffee Shop
Direct ordering means a customer places the order with your café and nobody else. No delivery app sits in the middle taking a cut.
These orders can come in from a few places. Some customers tap the order button on your café’s Google page. Others find the link on your Instagram, or scan a QR code taped to the counter. A few shops go further and have their own app that regulars keep on their phone. Wherever it starts, the order comes to you and the customer pays you.
Delivery apps work differently. On SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats, your café is one choice among dozens nearby. The app keeps the customer’s details and sends them the receipt. You get paid once the app’s fee comes off.
Those apps aren’t useless (more on that further down). They’re built to help the app grow, though, and that isn’t always what’s best for your café.
The Fee Math Behind Direct Ordering for Coffee Shops
Most coffee orders are small, and that’s where the trouble starts.
Delivery apps in Canada usually take somewhere between 15% and 30% of each order, depending on the plan. This cut is called a commission. On a $60 dinner order, a restaurant has some room to cover it. A café selling a latte and a muffin has far less.
Take a café getting 300 online orders a month through a delivery app, at about $11 per order. With a 25% fee, it pays about $825 a month. That works out to roughly $9,900 a year, taken from orders the shop already made and handed over.
One drink tells the same story. On a $6.50 oat latte, a 25% fee is about $1.63. The milk, beans, cup, lid, and the barista’s time all come out of what’s left. On some drinks, the fee ends up bigger than the profit.
Most direct ordering services charge one flat monthly price instead of a cut of each sale. Your 300th order costs the same as your first. So the more people order from you, the less each order costs you.
Provinces have stepped in on this before. During the pandemic, Ontario and British Columbia both put limits on how much delivery apps could charge restaurants.
Big Chains Already Taught Your Customers to Order Ahead
Tim Hortons and Starbucks did a lot of the hard work for you. They spent years getting Canadians to open an app, choose a drink, and walk in to pick it up. For many people, that’s now the normal way to buy coffee.
Those same customers arrive at your coffee shop. When they encounter a lineup and cannot pre-order it feels even slower to them, even if your coffee is a lot better.
You do not need to teach anyone anything you are getting ready to teach them the way to order up ahead of the time with you. An ordering page that opens fast and remembers their usual drink is often enough to get regulars using it.
Pickup Comes First in Direct Ordering for Coffee Shops
Consumers purchase their coffee relatively close to where they live or work. They take it with them on the way to their desk, the way to school, the way to their meeting. They’re passing your door anyway. Nobody wants to wait 35 minutes for a driver to bring a flat white. They want it ready when they walk in.
So pickup should be the main thing you set up. Parents place their orders using their phones, select a pick-up time, and arrive when the food is ready. Several shops also bring the order to the parents’ parked vehicle, if they’re feeling too lazy to redetach the baby’s car seat. Others put a pickup shelf by the door.
Delivery still has a place, mostly for big orders. An office manager ordering eight drinks and a box of pastries for a 10 a.m. meeting would rather have it brought over. Letting customers order for later helps here too. They can place tomorrow’s order tonight, and your team knows it’s coming.
Hot drinks don’t travel well, either. After 30 minutes in a delivery bag, a latte has lost its foam and most of its heat.
Coffee Orders Need Room for Extra Shots and Milk Swaps
Few orders get changed as much as coffee orders.
One person wants a large. The next wants oat milk, an extra shot, half sweet, no foam. Someone else wants decaf with vanilla. Each change can affect the price or how the drink is made. If your ordering page can’t keep up, you get wrong drinks and extras you never charged for.
Delivery apps often make this harder. The choices get cut down, and the price of extras gets set once and never checked again. When a drink comes out wrong, the customer doesn’t blame the app. They blame your café.
When you take orders yourself, you can set up every choice the way your baristas make drinks. Sizes, milk swaps, extra shots, and syrups can each have their own price. The order slip tells the barista exactly what to make. Fewer drinks get remade, and you get paid for every pump of syrup.
Getting to Know Your Regulars
Coffee is a habit. A good regular might come in three or four times a week for years. That makes them worth far more than any one order.
On a delivery app, the app keeps that customer. You see the order, but usually not an email or phone number, and not much about what they’ve ordered before. Want to thank your best customers, or tell them the iced drinks are back? There’s no easy way to reach them.
Taking orders yourself changes that. You can see who orders, what they like, and how often they come back. With that, you can:
- Let regulars reorder their usual with one tap
- Give a free drink after a set number of orders
- Send past customers a quick note when fall flavours return
- Offer something small to a regular who hasn’t ordered in a month
You don’t need a marketing team for any of this. A customer list and a few minutes a week will get you started.
Getting Through the Morning Rush Without Adding Staff
For most cafés, early morning is the busiest time, and that’s when things go wrong. The line goes out the door. Someone looks through the window, sees it, and heads to the place down the street. Baristas rush and drinks get remade.
Ordering ahead spreads things out. Customers choose a pickup time, so your team can see what’s coming instead of getting hit with it all at once at the till. They’ve already paid, too, so nobody is digging for a card at the counter.
The front of the shop starts to feel different. Fewer people wait to order, and more come in, grab a cup off the shelf, and head out.
It won’t save a shift when someone calls in sick. It does let the staff you have spend more of their time making drinks.
Should a Coffee Shop Stop Using SkipTheDishes and Uber Eats?
Usually not, at least not right away.
Delivery apps do one thing well. They show your café to people who don’t know it yet. Someone who just moved to the neighbourhood might find you while scrolling Uber Eats, and that’s worth something even after the fee.
What works for many coffee shops is using both. Stay on the apps so new people can find you. Then give every app customer a reason to order from you directly next time. Some easy ways to do it:
- Tuck a small card with your QR code into every delivery bag
- Offer a discount on someone’s first order through your own page
- Price your own orders a little lower, since you’re not paying the app’s fee on them
- Ask customers in the shop to save your ordering link
Give it a few months and many of your regulars will be ordering from you directly. The apps then mostly bring you first-time customers, and fewer of your orders carry a fee.
There’s a catch, though. Your own ordering page won’t bring in strangers by itself. You’ll have to tell people about it on Google, on social media, and in the shop. You keep more money this way, but you also take on a bit of promotion.
How to Set Up Direct Ordering for Your Coffee Shop
Setting it up takes less work than most owners expect, and most of it only has to be done once.
First, pick an ordering service made for food businesses, not a general online store. Make sure it lets customers change their drinks, order for later, and earn simple rewards. Check that it charges a flat monthly price, not a cut of every order. It should also work in Canadian dollars and add Canadian sales tax correctly.
Then set up your menu the way you make drinks. Add every size, milk choice, and extra with its real price, plus clear photos of your best sellers. If your pastries are gone by 10 a.m., make sure you can mark them sold out from your phone.
After that, put your ordering link wherever people already find you. On your café’s Google page, it can show up as an order button. Add it to your Instagram. Print QR codes for the counter, the tables, and your takeout bags.
Before you start, walk your team through it. They need to know where online orders show up and how pickup times work. Set aside a spot for finished orders too, so nobody is hunting for a cup with a name on it.
Last, let your regulars know. A sign by the till helps, and so does a barista mentioning it while handing over a drink. That often does more than a paid ad.
How iShopo Helps Canadian Coffee Shops Take Direct Orders
iShopo is an online ordering service for Canadian restaurants, cafés, and food businesses that charges no commission. It lets coffee shops take orders under their own name without giving away part of every sale. Best for: small cafés, local coffee chains, and bakery-cafés that want to stop paying delivery app fees and keep their regulars.
Your café gets its own ordering page, with your name on it. Customers order and pay you directly, so the full sale and the customer’s details stay with you.
iShopo is made for Canadian businesses. It’s a direct alternative to SkipTheDishes, Uber Eats, and DoorDash for food businesses that want control of their online orders. Coffee shops can use it for pickup orders, QR code ordering in the shop, and delivery when it makes sense.
You don’t have to leave the delivery apps overnight, either. You can use iShopo alongside them and move your regulars over at your own pace.
Conclusion
Coffee shops are taking orders directly for a plain reason. When a delivery app keeps a quarter of a small order, there isn’t enough left. Your customers already order ahead at the big chains. Let them do it with you. You keep the sale, and you get to know the people buying from you.
Ready to stop paying fees on every latte? Get started with iShopo and start taking orders directly at your café.
FAQs
What is direct ordering for a coffee shop?
Direct ordering is when customers order and pay through a coffee shop’s own website, app, or QR code instead of a delivery app. The order goes straight to the café. There’s no app fee, and the shop keeps the customer’s details.
Is direct ordering worth it for a small coffee shop?
For most small cafés that get regular online orders, yes. Coffee orders are small, so a 15% to 30% fee takes a big bite out of each one. A flat monthly price pays off more as your regulars start ordering from you.
Can I use direct ordering and SkipTheDishes at the same time?
Yes. Many coffee shops stay on SkipTheDishes or Uber Eats to reach new customers and take orders directly from regulars. A QR card in the bag and a first-order discount help move repeat customers over.
Do customers actually use a café’s own ordering page?
They do if it’s quick and easy to find. Canadians are used to ordering ahead on big chain apps, so the habit is already there. Put the link on Google, on Instagram, and on a QR code at the counter, and have your baristas mention it.
Is direct ordering only for coffee delivery?
No. For most coffee shops, pickup is the main use. Delivery helps with office and group orders, but most regulars want to skip the line on their way past.
How long does it take to set up direct ordering?
That mostly depends on your menu. A café with a short menu can often be ready within a week once drinks, extras, and photos are added. Bigger menus with lots of extras take a little longer.
