05 · Delivery channels
Three tablets screaming on the pass
A menu you update in four places, prices that revert overnight, and commission on the ones that do come through.
“Every time I change the pricing in the Uber Eats menu, it works for a day or so, and then reverts back to the original.”cheebachad — Square merchant community, 2 November 2024
Why it happens
Aggregators are deliberately not neutral. Direct POS integrations exist, but menu authoring stays partly on the aggregator’s side, so price and availability drift. And the sync is one-directional and periodic — a change you make in the portal gets overwritten by the next push from your POS. Then each side tells you to talk to the other.
What we'd do about it
Get the tablets off the pass
Marketplace orders arrive as ordinary tickets in the same queue, routed to the same stations.
One number, with the working shown
Click the consolidated figure, drill to the venue, to the shift, to the transaction. A dashboard isn’t the same as a number you’d bet on.
Make the till suggest, so your staff don’t have to remember
Modifiers, upsells and combos prompted at the point of order. The nineteen-year-old on their third shift lands the upsell because the screen asked, not because they were brave.
The objection this page has to beat
“Integrations to the aggregators break, and then I’m worse off than with the tablet.”
So show the failure mode, not the happy path. When a channel goes down, does an order vanish or does it fall over visibly with someone told about it? Show one menu with per-channel pricing as a rule rather than a re-entry. Then show the tablets in a bin.
What we can actually stand behind
Every claim below is labelled by how solid it is. The grey ones are where we looked and found nothing credible — those stay off the page rather than getting rounded up into a statistic.
- Operator
“I’m having trouble adjusting my Menu pricing on Uber Eats… Uber Eats support told me I have to go through Square to adjust prices.”
Scoopsontap — Square merchant community, 21 June 2024 - Vendor study
81% of operators report growth in the takeout and delivery channel; average takeout and delivery sales up 33%.
TouchBistro, 2026 — the channel is growing, so the pain is growing - No data
Commission rates are commonly quoted at 15–30%, but every source found was a vendor or comparison blog. No independent Australian figure exists.
Do not state a specific percentage as fact. - No data
No credible data on order error rates caused by re-keying from a tablet.
Anecdote only, however loud.