Build Your Own Ordering App (and Keep the Customer)

Third-party platforms can look like free growth. They aren’t.

For UK food businesses, marketplaces like Uber Eats and Deliveroo often become the default marketing channel: instant distribution, a steady stream of orders, and the comforting feeling that “someone else handles the hard bits.” But the hidden cost isn’t just commission. It’s brand dilution, lost customer data, and a customer experience you don’t control.

Michael Olaleye, founder of Tasty African Food, reached a point many founders hit sooner or later: the platform was getting the credit (and the relationship) for a customer experience his team worked hard to earn. So they built their own delivery and ordering app—despite not being a tech startup. That decision is a useful lesson for anyone in the Startup Marketing United Kingdom world: owning the customer journey is a marketing strategy, not just an ops decision.

The real cost of third-party delivery apps isn’t the 30%

The headline pain is obvious: commissions that can hit 30%+ per order. That alone can wipe out margin, especially if you’re selling labour-heavy food with volatile ingredient costs.

But the bigger problem is what those fees buy you: dependency. Third-party delivery apps become your discovery channel, your checkout, your CRM, and your customer support layer. That sounds efficient—until you realise you’ve outsourced the parts that actually build a brand.

Here’s what I’ve seen repeatedly across UK startups (food and beyond): when a platform owns the transaction, you’re renting demand, not building it. The moment you stop paying (via commission, ads, or preferred placement), demand drops.

Platform growth is paid growth

Most founders mentally categorise third-party apps as “sales channels.” In practice, they behave more like paid acquisition channels:

• You pay a variable CAC (commission) on every order
• You’re competing against substitutes in the same feed
• You’re one algorithm update away from losing visibility

That’s not inherently bad. It’s just not a complete marketing plan.

If your main growth engine is a marketplace feed, you don’t control your pipeline—you borrow it.

Customer experience is marketing (and platforms break it)

Tasty African Food’s frustration will sound familiar: customers complain about late deliveries, missing menu items, and “closed” status errors. The key detail: the customer blames the restaurant, even when the failure is upstream in the platform’s logistics or app listing.

That’s why this is a marketing issue. Because:

• Brand trust is built (or destroyed) at delivery time
• Repeat purchase depends on reliability, not just taste
• A single bad experience can reduce lifetime value far more than it reduces one day’s revenue

The menu is part of your positioning

Restaurants don’t just sell food; they sell choice architecture. How you group dishes, what you lead with, what you recommend, what you bundle—this is positioning.

When platforms restrict menu layout, hide items, or reorder based on what they want to promote, they distort your brand. If your jollof rice is your hero product but the app pushes “most popular near you” items first, your differentiation gets blurred.

Owning your own ordering app means your menu becomes a marketing asset again:

• Your hero dishes are featured intentionally
• Your story and provenance are visible
• Your add-ons and bundles are designed for margin and satisfaction (not platform convenience)

Data ownership: the customer isn’t theirs, it’s yours

Michael put it plainly: third-party platforms deliver traffic, but they don’t hand over the insights you need to build loyalty. And in 2026, that’s a strategic disadvantage.

If you don’t know:

• who your repeat customers are
• what they reorder
• how often they buy
• what promotions convert

…you can’t do modern lifecycle marketing. You can only do broad discounts and hope.

What “first-party data” actually enables

When a customer orders via your own app (or direct web ordering), you can build a simple, high-performing retention system:

1. RFM segmentation (Recency, Frequency, Monetary value)
   • Example: target “high frequency, low recency” customers with a win-back offer
2. Personalised recommendations
   • “You usually order suya—add extra pepper sauce?”
3. Offer testing
   • Test “free side” vs “10% off” and keep what drives repeat orders
4. Operational insight
   • Track prep-time bottlenecks and fix them before reviews suffer

This is where the startup marketing angle becomes obvious: direct ordering turns every order into future revenue, not a one-off transaction.

When does building your own app make sense?

Building an app isn’t a badge of honour. It’s a tool. Sometimes the right answer is a simpler direct channel (like a mobile-optimised ordering site). But there are clear signals that you should invest in owning the experience.

Use this decision checklist

Building your own ordering app is usually justified when you have at least two of these:

• Strong repeat behaviour (customers order weekly/fortnightly)
• Brand-driven demand (people search for you, not “African food near me”)
• Complex menu or customisation that platforms handle poorly
• Multiple sites where consistency matters
• High-margin add-ons (sides, drinks, desserts) you want to promote
• A clear loyalty play (stamps, points, tiers, subscriptions)

If you’re early-stage with low repeat, one location, and most customers arriving via discovery, third-party apps can still be useful. The mistake is treating them as permanent infrastructure.

Third-party platforms are fine for discovery. They’re terrible as your only retention strategy.

How to build a direct ordering channel without breaking the business

Tasty African Food partnered with a small tech team and launched a branded app that wasn’t perfect on day one—but it was theirs. That’s the right mindset. You don’t need perfection. You need control, iteration, and a plan to migrate customers.

Step 1: Design the experience you want (before choosing tech)

Start with the customer journey, not features. Map:

• how customers browse (dietary filters, spice level, best sellers)
• how they reorder in two taps
• how they get support when something goes wrong
• how they earn rewards

Write it down. If you can’t describe the flow in plain English, the app won’t save you.

Step 2: Launch an MVP that earns repeat orders

A minimal direct ordering setup that works in the UK usually includes:

• Apple Pay/Google Pay checkout
• click-and-collect plus delivery
• clear delivery time estimates
• reorder button
• basic loyalty (even if it’s simple points)

Tasty African Food added click-and-collect, pre-ordering, and loyalty rewards. Those features aren’t “nice to have.” They’re retention drivers.

Step 3: Migrate customers deliberately (don’t hope they’ll switch)

Most companies get this wrong. They build direct ordering, then wait.

Switching behaviour needs a nudge. Use a three-part migration plan:

1. At the point of delivery
   • Put a card/sticker in every bag: “Order direct for loyalty points + full menu.”
2. Inside the product
   • Make reordering faster on your channel than on the marketplace
3. Offer a reason, not just a discount
   • Loyalty points, members-only dishes, priority slots at peak times

Discounting alone trains people to chase the cheapest option. A better approach is benefits: faster checkout, full menu, rewards, and reliability.

Step 4: Keep marketplaces, but change their job

The most profitable setup for many scaleups is hybrid:

• Marketplaces for discovery and incremental demand at off-peak times
• Direct ordering for repeat customers and higher LTV

Treat third-party apps like top-of-funnel. Treat your app like the engine room.

What UK founders can learn from Tasty African Food’s approach

Tasty African Food isn’t a tech startup. It’s a family-run business that scaled to 27 restaurants, built a catering arm, landed ready meals in Sainsbury’s, and hit around £7m revenue with 250+ staff—then still decided it was worth investing in owning their digital channel.

That’s the lesson: digital independence is no longer optional once you’re scaling.

In the Startup Marketing United Kingdom context, building your own ordering channel is the same strategic move as:

• moving from rented audiences to an email list
• building a content hub instead of only posting on social
• owning analytics instead of trusting platform dashboards

It’s all the same principle: own the relationship, and your marketing gets cheaper over time.

Practical next steps (this week) if you’re platform-dependent

If you’re reading this and thinking “we’re too small to build an app,” good. You might not need one yet. But you do need a plan.

Do these five actions in the next 7 days:

1. Calculate platform dependency
   • What % of orders come from marketplaces?
2. Estimate the commission burden
   • Total monthly commission paid ÷ gross profit
3. Start capturing direct data
   • Even a basic email/SMS opt-in on receipts is progress
4. Create one direct-order incentive
   • Loyalty points or a members-only item beats a constant discount
5. Set a migration target
   • Example: “Move 15% of repeat customers to direct ordering in 90 days.”

If you hit that target, you’ve built a real asset: a customer base you can market to without paying a toll on every sale.

The question for 2026 isn’t whether platforms are useful—they are. The real question is: are you building a brand, or feeding someone else’s marketplace?