Selling direct, and what each route to the sale actually costs. Restaurant online ordering on your own site →
When a bot works a list of stolen cards, the payments are tiny, almost all declined, and none is an order. What can be left is an authorisation-fee bill and a queue of chargebacks.
A marketplace pays once a week, after commission, refunds and credits are netted off one invoice. The bills it has to cover are not on that cycle.
Switching on online ordering looks like a deploy. The guidance calls it a way of trading with a lead time attached, and assuming an existing registration covers it is the risk.
Ordering links a restaurant never chose can sit beside its name on Google, taking commission on orders it had won. Two settings say which link it asks Google to show first.
A card-free checkout removes the scheme fee from every order. The card-scheme dispute routine a restaurant answers a contested order with is not among the protections it names.
The kitchen fires the ticket four minutes after a direct order lands, and the guest rings five minutes later. With no stated cutoff, the refund argument falls to whoever answers.
The upsell a server makes by habit is easy to leave out of an online menu, and the loss is invisible: no abandoned basket, no complaint, just a smaller order nobody recorded.
Losing a merchant account stops the till, the checkout and every held deposit at once. A new statutory notice floor arrives in April, but the contract date decides who is exposed.
A \"free delivery over £40\" offer does not make the fee non-calculable: a mandatory delivery charge must stay in the running total until the basket reaches the threshold.
With some ordering arrangements a restaurant's takings sit with a payment firm, outside FSCS cover; firms that failed between 2018 and 2023 left average shortfalls of 65%.
The regulatory contactless ceiling was removed in March 2026; the number is now each provider's decision. Most are expected not to move it, and no restaurant is told either way.
The packaging fee on a restaurant's own order page was priced against a tax rate that has risen in four consecutive Aprils, and the cost is buried in the container price.
