Think about the last few times you picked somewhere to eat.
“Cafe near me open now.” “Restaurants in Indiranagar with parking.” “Best filter coffee near me.” “Breakfast places open at 7am Koramangala.” “Rooftop restaurant HSR.”
None of those searches happen inside Zomato or Swiggy. They happen on Google and Google Maps, they are made by somebody who is already out of the house or about to be, and the aggregator is not competing for them.
That is a stream of high intent demand sitting right next to your business, and it costs you no commission at all. Most restaurants in Bengaluru have never once been optimised for it, because all the effort went into the apps.
Why this is worth an hour of your week
Because of what the apps cost, which is worth stating precisely rather than complaining about vaguely.
Reported commission for a typical single outlet restaurant runs around 25% to 27% of order value on both major platforms, with the broader range roughly 22% to 32% on one and 20% to 28% on the other. After payment gateway charges, collection fees, discount funding, platform ads and GST on the platform fees, effective deductions commonly land somewhere in the 25% to 35% band.
Put it on a real business. A hundred orders a day at Rs 500 average is Rs 15 lakh of monthly order value. The reported platform cost on that is somewhere around Rs 4.4 to Rs 4.5 lakh a month. The comparable cost of taking those orders directly, meaning the technology and nothing else, is closer to Rs 30,000.
Chains with ten or more outlets negotiate down to something like 18% to 22%. A single cafe in Jayanagar does not.
Now the fair half, because the argument gets silly without it. The aggregators bring you customers who were never going to find you, they handle delivery logistics you do not want to run, and for a new outlet with no footfall they are the fastest way to exist. They are earning that money.
The problem is not using them. It is being unable to get a single order without them.
Everything below is about building the other channel, starting with the one that is free.
The five restaurant specific things on your profile
I went through the Business Profile fields most Bengaluru businesses never touch separately, so I will not repeat the general ones. These five are the restaurant versions.
Attributes, because they are filters. Dine-in, takeaway, delivery, outdoor seating, serves breakfast, serves vegetarian, wheelchair accessible, parking available, good for groups. People genuinely filter by these on Maps, and an unticked box removes you from a result you would have won. It takes ten minutes to fill in all of them.
Hours, and special hours. The most expensive small error in this entire category. If you are shut on Monday and Google says open, you have collected a bad review from somebody standing outside your door. Set special hours for festivals now rather than on the day, because on the day nobody will.
Photos that answer a question. Not fifty plated dishes. The storefront from the street, so somebody arriving can identify the door. The interior, so they know whether it suits the occasion. The menu board. Two or three signature dishes shot in daylight. Storefront photos matter more than owners expect, because the last twenty metres of a journey are where people give up and go elsewhere.
Your menu as a real web page. This is the one nobody does properly. Not a PDF. Not a photograph of a printed menu. An HTML page on your own domain with the dish names and prices as text, so both Google and the assistants can read it. Menu queries are enormously common and a menu locked inside an image is invisible to everyone except a human who already found you. Restaurant and menu structured data on top of that helps, but the text itself is the part that matters.
Posts, for the thing that changes. Today’s special. The weekend brunch. Festival timings. A post takes ninety seconds on a phone and it is the only part of your profile that can say something is happening now.
The direction request is your real conversion
For a restaurant, the useful number is not clicks to your website.
It is direction requests and calls from the profile, both of which are in your Business Profile insights. Those are people deciding to physically come to you, and they are as close to a booking as a free channel gets.
Watch that number weekly. It responds to photos and hours faster than to anything else, and it tells you whether the profile work is doing anything at all.
Getting to direct orders without pretending you can leave
The realistic goal is a share, not an exit. Something like a quarter of your orders coming direct changes your economics without putting your volume at risk.
Three mechanisms, in order of how quickly they work.
WhatsApp, on everything. Your number on the bill, on the packaging sticker, on a QR code on the table and by the counter. “Order direct on WhatsApp, same menu” is enough of a message. Indian customers are already comfortable ordering this way and it costs you nothing to run at low volume.
Give the direct channel a reason. Not a discount that undercuts the platforms, which starts a war you lose. Something the app cannot do. A free add-on, a loyalty card, priority on the Sunday brunch table, a regular’s usual remembered. The switch has to feel like a small upgrade rather than a coupon.
ONDC, as the middle path. Food delivery commission on the network is reported at around 3% to 5%, against 25% to 30% on the big two, and it is live across several hundred cities. Volume is thinner and the experience is less polished, so treat it as a second channel rather than a replacement. On the margin arithmetic above, even a modest share moving across is meaningful.
And do the boring thing that makes all of this compound: capture the phone number. Every direct order, every table booking, every walk-in who asks about a party. That list is the only asset in this discussion that no platform can price.
Reviews, briefly
Ask, in person, at the moment the meal went well. From the person who served them, not from a poster on the wall.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones, because the next customer reads your reply rather than the complaint. And keep replies short and human, since a restaurant review thread is read by people deciding where to eat in the next twenty minutes.
Before lunch, which for you is a strange phrase
Four things, about an hour.
Open your Business Profile and tick every attribute that applies. Then set your special hours for the next two festivals.
Add a storefront photo taken from across the road, if you do not have one.
Then look at whether your menu exists as readable text anywhere on your own website. If it is a PDF or an image, that is this week’s job, and it is the highest return thing on this list.
Last, put a WhatsApp QR code on the counter today. Not as a campaign. Just so the option exists for the people who already like you.
The same logic applies to any Indian local business fighting an aggregator, which I went through for clinics and Practo, and my notes on SEO cover where local search sits alongside everything else.
If you’d like to think through your own channel mix, drop me a line on email, WhatsApp or LinkedIn and we can have a quick chat. I’m contracted full time so this isn’t a pitch.