What a commission actually costs, over a year

Start with the number itself. A commission of fifteen per cent, with a payment fee of around three per cent on top, is roughly eighteen per cent of everything that goes through the channel. On two hundred thousand dollars of orders that is about thirty-six thousand dollars a year.

That is not a criticism of the model. Somebody built an audience of corporate buyers with purchase orders and expense accounts, and access to it is worth paying for. The question is not whether the first order was worth eighteen per cent. It is whether the fortieth was.

The two kinds of order inside the same number

Discovery. An office that had never heard of you, found you on a platform, and ordered. That order cost you eighteen per cent and it was worth it, because the alternative was no order.

Repeat. The same office, eight months later, ordering the same thing for the fourth time because they liked it. That order also cost you eighteen per cent, and the platform did substantially less to earn it.

Corporate catering is unusually repeat-heavy — the same buyer, the same office, the same Thursday. Which means that over time the second category grows and the first does not, and the effective cost of the channel goes up even though the rate never moves.

The comparison people skip

Selling directly is not free. You pay card processing, which in the United States is generally around 2.9 per cent plus thirty cents a transaction, and you pay for whatever brings people to your own site. But the gap between eighteen per cent and three per cent is fifteen points, and fifteen points of two hundred thousand dollars is thirty thousand dollars, which is a person.

The honest version of this argument has to include the part that works against it: some of those customers would never have found you, and if you left the platform tomorrow you would not keep all of them. That is the number only you can estimate, and it is the one that decides the answer. Our calculator makes it a field rather than an assumption, and at a low enough figure it tells you not to buy from us.

What most kitchens should probably do

Not leave. Both.

Keep the listing for what it is good at — reaching buyers who have never heard of you and who have an account with the platform already — and have somewhere of your own for the ones who have. The repeat order that arrives on your own site costs you three per cent instead of eighteen, and the customer does not care which route they took.

What makes that work is having somewhere for them to go that is as easy as the platform. A phone number is not as easy as the platform. A page with a PDF menu and a contact form is not as easy as the platform. Somewhere they can rebuild last month's order in ninety seconds is.