ETNOWE for Restaurants: Why Local Owners Are Joining

Pull up your favorite local restaurant on one of the big delivery apps. Then walk past the place and look at the menu taped inside the window.

The prices are not the same.

I used to think that was greed. It is not. It is arithmetic.

Every delivery platform takes a cut of the order. The question almost nobody asks is whether that cut is small enough to absorb.

When it is not, it has to go somewhere.

It does not come out of the rent. It does not come out of the cost of goat meat or palm oil or the gas bill.

It comes out of the only number the owner controls, which is the price on the menu.

So the plate that costs one thing in the dining room costs more on the app. The owner did not want to do that. The owner did the only thing left.

And here is the part that keeps me up.

The customer sees the higher number and orders less often. The owner sees fewer orders and blames delivery.

Nobody blames the commission, because by then the commission is invisible. It got buried in the price before anyone ever saw it.

That is the problem ETNOWE ("EAT-NOW") was built to solve for restaurant owners, and it is why local owners are joining.

A cut you can decide about

There are really only two kinds of commission.

One is small enough that an owner can look at it and make a choice.

Absorb it. Pass a little of it on. Leave the menu alone entirely.

The other is too big for that. It cannot be absorbed, so it was never a choice. It goes into the price, and then the price does the talking.

ETNOWE was built for the first kind on purpose.

Not as a launch promotion. Not as a discount that expires once you depend on us. As the design.

I am not going to print our rate in an article, and I would rather tell you why than be coy about it.

Rates are set per store. The honest answer for your kitchen is the one you see when you put your own menu in and look at your own payout.

A number in a blog post is marketing. A number on a plate you actually sell is information.

What I will give you is the test. Ask any platform what happens to your menu price after you join. If the answer is that the price has to go up, you already know which kind of commission you are holding.

The result is that the same dish, from the same kitchen, ends up cheaper on ETNOWE. Not because we subsidized it. Because we did not take enough to force you to raise it.

Cheaper food sells more. That is not a growth theory. That is the oldest thing in the restaurant business.

The part owners actually ask about first

I expected the first question to be about commission. It usually is not.

It is usually about how much work this is going to be.

Every owner I have talked to has been burned by a platform that promised a simple onboarding and then handed them a spreadsheet, a photography requirement, and three weeks of back and forth. They are running a kitchen. They do not have three weeks.

So we built the joining part to be short, and honest about what it needs.

There are no listing fees to get started. You are not paying us to sit on the app before you have made a dollar from it.

If you run Square or Shopify, you connect your register and your items come across. You are not retyping a menu you already typed once.

If you do not run either, you upload the menu file you already have. A photo of a printed menu, a spreadsheet, a PDF from whoever built your website.

Our system reads it and lays out your items, and you correct what it got wrong.

That correction step matters and I want to name it. A system that reads a smudged printout and then publishes a price with no human looking at it will eventually publish the wrong price.

So a person always looks. That person is you.

Most shops finish setup in under five minutes. Approval comes back within two business days.

What we keep, plainly

I would rather you hear this from me than discover it later.

Our commission is on the goods. The food you sold.

When a customer pays for delivery, that delivery money goes to the delivery. When they pay sales tax, that tax goes where tax goes.

We are not taking a cut of your food and then also treating the courier fee as revenue we share with you.

So your payout is the food you sold, less our commission on it. It is a boring sentence and it should be. The platforms that make this complicated are usually complicated on purpose.

What ETNOWE is not, yet

If I only told you the good parts you would be right not to trust me.

We are not DoorDash. We do not have their order volume and I am not going to pretend a new listing on ETNOWE replaces it next week. What we have is a customer who came looking specifically for your food, in a place where your food is hard to find, and who is not being shown a burger chain three slots above you because the chain outbid you.

That is a smaller pond. It is also a pond where you are the fish people came for.

And we are opening in the markets where that is most true. Dallas, Houston, Atlanta, Washington, Baltimore. Places where a family will drive forty minutes for the right store, because the right store is forty minutes away.

Why I care about this more than I probably should

I did not set out to build a delivery app. I set out to fix a grocery run.

My wife was having a difficult pregnancy and every week meant two stops. One for the regular shopping. One for the African store that closes early and is nowhere near the first one.

That is a two hour errand for food that should have been on one screen.

When I started looking at why nobody had built it, I kept ending up in the same place. The economics of the big platforms do not work for the stores and kitchens that serve specific communities.

A commission built for a million identical sandwiches does not fit a kitchen selling egusi soup to the two hundred families in your county who know what egusi soup is.

Those kitchens are not a market segment to me. They are the reason.

So when an owner tells me they have been quietly losing money on delivery for two years and could never work out where it went, I know exactly where it went. It went into the price. And then it went into the silence of a customer who stopped ordering.

If you run a kitchen or a store

Come and look at your own numbers. Do not take my word for any of this. Put your menu in and see what your payout is on a plate you actually sell.

Download the ETNOWE Merchant app, register your business, and connect your register or upload your menu. If it takes you more than five minutes, tell me, because that is a bug and I want to know about it.

You built the food. You should get to keep more of it.

By Ebenezer Oyinlade, Founder of ETNOWE