Order a burger through a delivery app and the price you see for the burger itself - Before any delivery fee, service fee or tip - Is frequently higher than the price on the board in the restaurant. That gap is deliberate, it is widespread, and it is almost never explained.
Why the mark-up exists
Delivery platforms charge restaurants a commission on each order. The exact rate varies by platform, market and the tier of service a restaurant signs up for, and it is a substantial share of the order value rather than a token fee.
A restaurant has three ways to absorb that. It can take the hit on margin, which for a franchise operating on thin margins is often impossible. It can decline delivery entirely, which cedes a large and growing channel. Or it can raise its prices on the platform to cover the commission - Which is what most do.
The mark-up is not the platform charging you more. It is the restaurant charging you what the platform costs it.
The full stack of what you pay
| Layer | Who sets it | Visible before checkout? |
|---|---|---|
| Menu mark-up on item prices | The restaurant | No - It looks like the normal price |
| Delivery fee | The platform | Usually |
| Service fee | The platform | Usually, sometimes as a percentage |
| Small-order fee | The platform | Sometimes |
| Priority or peak surcharge | The platform | Sometimes |
| Tip | You | Yes, but often pre-set |
Only the first line is invisible, and it is the one that compounds - Because service fees calculated as a percentage are applied to the already-marked-up subtotal.
The same restaurant, three different prices
For many chains in many markets, one item now has three prices simultaneously:
- The counter price. The printed board. Usually the lowest.
- The own-app price. Often the counter price, sometimes lower with app-exclusive offers.
- The platform price. The counter price plus a mark-up, before fees.
The prices on this site are counter prices from published menus, which makes them a useful baseline. Open a menu page - McDonald's in the United Kingdom, say - And compare an item against what a platform shows you. The difference is the mark-up.
A two-minute check
Pick three items you would order. Look them up on the menu search here or on the restaurant's own site, then look at the same three on the delivery app. Do it once for a restaurant you order from regularly and you will know its mark-up for good.
The minimum-spend problem
Platforms use minimum order values and small-order fees to make small baskets unattractive, because the economics of delivering one coffee do not work. The predictable consequence is that customers add items they did not want to clear a threshold.
That is worth naming clearly: an order padded to avoid a small-order fee usually costs more than the fee. The fee is a nudge and it works on almost everyone.
What actually saves money
- Collection instead of delivery. Removes the delivery fee and usually the mark-up, since collection is generally priced from the in-store menu.
- The restaurant's own app rather than a platform. Chains want to own the customer relationship and price accordingly - See apps and loyalty programmes.
- Ordering less, not more. The genuine saving is in not clearing an artificial threshold.
- Checking whether the deal exists on the platform. Many in-store and in-app offers are explicitly excluded from delivery platforms.
How this differs by market
Delivery economics vary enormously across the markets we track. In several South-East Asian markets delivery is extremely well developed, competitive and comparatively cheap, with motorcycle fleets and dense urban geography making short deliveries viable. In lower-density Western markets the same service costs considerably more relative to the order.
What does not vary is the structure: commission to the platform, mark-up to recover it, fees on top. If you want the underlying counter prices for a market before you order, the country pages carry every brand we track with its cheapest and average price.
The fair version of the argument
None of this makes delivery a scam. Someone is riding to your door in the rain, and that has a real cost that has to be paid by someone. The reasonable complaint is not that delivery costs money - It is that the largest single component of the extra cost is presented as if it were the normal price of the food.
Transparency would fix most of the irritation. Until then, the two-minute check above is the only reliable way to know what you are actually paying for the food itself.
