Selling direct, and what each route to the sale actually costs. Restaurant online ordering on your own site →
A service charge, a packaging fee and a card fee arrive after the guest has already chosen. The risk is refunds on every affected order, a penalty on top, and the basket abandoned.
A £62 order fails at the last screen with money still on the card. The guest reorders through a commission-charging app, and the restaurant never learns why the basket was lost.
Twenty-three days after a guest collected the bag, the issuer pulls the money back. The dispute is answered from whatever the system recorded that night.
Whether voucher VAT falls at sale or at redemption turns on a two-limb statutory test. Guess wrong and an unused voucher can leave tax paid with nothing to reclaim.
The collection or eat-in toggle records a tax fact, not a delivery preference. Most order pages keep no record of what the guest did next, and the risk sits with the restaurant.
Your order screen takes a postcode and a card but never records a time the guest agreed to. When the kitchen runs ninety minutes late, the law fills that silence and your staff absorb the cost.
A restaurant can budget card payments from a single headline percentage, then meet premium, international, conversion and dispute charges that were never in the sum.
A promotional POS bundle headline covers hardware. The recurring licences, payment contract terms and the work to connect a restaurant website arrive later.
A late-night ordering window can accept a hot-food order that cannot be supplied in time, creating guest disputes, staff rework and licensing risk.
Set up a structured menu, service window, payment route and kitchen order queue, then run one complete test before opening direct online ordering on your TableSpark restaurant website.
Build the best-value complete restaurant website from £19 a month excluding VAT; Full adds direct online ordering at £69 a month excluding VAT. TableSpark commission is 0%. Stripe's standard card-processing fees apply to online payments.
Compare a marketplace order with a direct order on the restaurant's own site, using each platform's current first-party pages and your own contract — then make the repeat order yours with TableSpark Full at £69 a month excluding VAT.
