The Real Cost of Aggregators Is What They Did to Your Direct Channel

This is something most independent restaurant owners in India have been saying privately for two years. The cost of being on a food delivery aggregator is now significant enough that it is changing what restaurants cook, what they list, and how often they make themselves available.

The numbers are real. Aggregator commissions run 15 to 30 percent depending on the agreement. Layered on top are payment gateway fees, packaging costs, and platform led marketing spends. The big "FLAT 60% OFF" banner customers see on the app is in many cases partially funded by the restaurant. Search ranking and category visibility are increasingly tied to paid promotion, which means smaller operators without marketing budgets get pushed down in discovery. Some restaurants disappear from the app on weekends. Some stop accepting orders during peak hours. Some quietly delist and try to move customers to direct ordering.

This is an aggregator problem. That framing is half right and half misleading. The aggregator economics are real. The more important story, the one almost no one is telling clearly, is what most independent restaurants are actually doing about it.

Two parallel businesses

Every Indian independent restaurant in 2026 is running two businesses at the same time.

The aggregator business is the one most operators talk about. Customer discovers the restaurant on Swiggy or Zomato. Order placed in app. Aggregator routes the order to the restaurant. Aggregator handles delivery. Aggregator takes 15 to 30 percent commission, plus payment fees, plus a share of the discount. The restaurant fulfills the order at compressed margin. The customer relationship belongs to the aggregator.

The direct business is the one most operators run badly. Customer calls the restaurant or messages on WhatsApp. Restaurant takes the order manually. Restaurant arranges delivery through Dunzo, Porter, or its own staff. Margin is preserved because there is no aggregator commission. Customer relationship belongs to the restaurant. In theory.

The problem is that the direct business almost never actually works for most operators, because the customer experience on the direct channel is dramatically worse than on the aggregator. The direct channel is usually a WhatsApp number printed on a menu insert, or a PDF emailed when asked. There is no easy way to browse. No filter for vegetarian or Jain. No photos. No clear pricing. No upsell. No way to track the order. No payment integration. No record of the customer's previous order.

So the customer goes back to the aggregator. The restaurant pays another 25 percent. The cycle continues.

What the aggregator actually replaced

This is the part most operators miss. Aggregators did not just provide delivery infrastructure. They replaced the entire ordering surface. Every piece of menu merchandising, photo presentation, price comparison, dietary filtering, and order placement now happens inside someone else's app, optimized for someone else's economics, with the restaurant treated as a commodity supplier.

When an aggregator surfaces a restaurant in search results, it is doing menu work the restaurant used to do for itself. When the aggregator's photo loads first, it is doing visual merchandising the restaurant used to control. When the aggregator filters by "high protein" or "under 30 minutes," it is doing dietary segmentation the restaurant menu used to handle on paper.

The aggregator economics feel painful because the restaurant gives up 25 percent of every order. But the deeper cost is that the aggregator now owns the entire menu surface. The restaurant has been quietly demoted from being a brand to being a SKU.

What going direct actually requires

When operators say they want to "move customers to direct ordering," what they usually mean is they want to escape the commission. That is the wrong frame.

Moving customers to direct ordering means rebuilding, on the restaurant's own channel, every piece of customer experience the aggregator was providing. Browsing. Filtering. Photographs. Pricing. Modifiers. Order tracking. Payment. Repeat ordering. Customer history. Personalization.

A WhatsApp number cannot do this. A PDF behind a QR code cannot do this. A simple website with a contact form cannot do this. Direct ordering only competes with aggregator ordering if the direct surface delivers an experience the customer would actually choose over the aggregator app.

That is the real moat the aggregators built. Not the delivery infrastructure. The ordering experience. And it is the moat most independent operators have not yet figured out how to cross.

What changes when the menu lives as data

The reason mid market and independent restaurants struggle on direct channels is almost never the food. It is the menu surface. A static PDF cannot do the things a customer now expects from a digital ordering experience.

A digital menu that lives as structured data closes most of that gap.

Filtering by vegetarian, Jain, eggless, high protein, or under 500 calories. Photos of every signature item, not just the half page hero shots. Modifiers and customizations that load instantly. Daypart aware menus that show breakfast, lunch, and dinner appropriately. Clear pricing with current promotions. Items tagged by occasion (solo, group, family, business lunch). A reorder shortcut for repeat customers. Loyalty integration that the aggregator does not control.

None of this requires building a Swiggy clone. It requires treating the menu as software instead of as a printed document. The same menu can power the restaurant's website, its WhatsApp ordering flow, its in store QR code, and even a simple branded app, all from one control panel.

What this gets the operator is something the aggregator economics will never give back. A direct channel that is actually competitive with the aggregator experience. A relationship with the customer that the operator owns. A margin profile that does not assume 25 percent comes off the top.

The math actually changes

Customer data lives on the aggregator. Repeat ordering happens through the aggregator's reorder button, not through the restaurant's relationship with the customer. Brand recognition gets diluted into a tile in a list of fifty restaurants. Pricing flexibility disappears because the aggregator's discount engine sets the expected price. The restaurant becomes economically dependent on a channel it does not control.

Operators who build a real direct channel do not eliminate aggregators. Aggregators are still where new customers find them. The shift is to mix. Instead of 95 percent aggregator and 5 percent direct, the goal is to move toward 60 percent aggregator and 40 percent direct, then 50 and 50, then better. Every order moved to direct is a 20 to 25 percent margin lift, plus a customer relationship the operator now owns, plus data the operator can actually act on.

That mix shift only happens if the direct channel is genuinely good enough to compete. Which means the menu has to do real work.

What this looks like in practice

The independent restaurant in Bengaluru that disappears from the aggregator on weekends is making a margin decision. The right next move for that operator is not just delisting. It is building a direct channel customers actually prefer.

The operator's WhatsApp number is the start, not the end. Behind that number, customers should land on a digital menu that loads in two seconds, lets them filter by what they actually want to eat, shows them the dish they are about to order, accepts payment, tracks the order, and remembers what they liked last time.

The operator running this stack does not need to choose between aggregators and direct. They can run both, and slowly shift the mix toward the channel they own.

That is what Menuthere was built for. Not to replace Swiggy or Zomato. To give Indian restaurants a direct channel that is finally competitive with what the aggregators built, so the operator gets to choose where each order ends up instead of being forced into the channel that takes 25 percent off the top.