If a quarter or more of every delivery order is disappearing before you’ve paid for ingredients, you’re not imagining it. SkipTheDishes — Canada’s homegrown delivery marketplace, now owned by Just Eat Takeaway — charges restaurants a commission on every order, and for an independent café that number adds up fast.
The tricky part is that Skip doesn’t publish a public rate card, so owners often don’t know what they’re really paying until they read their statement. This guide lays out the fee structure as restaurants and industry guides consistently report it, works a real example in Canadian dollars, and shows how to keep the orders you can serve directly.
How much does SkipTheDishes charge?
There’s no official public number, but the reported ranges are remarkably consistent across restaurant guides: commission of 20% to 30% of the order subtotal, depending on how the delivery is fulfilled.
- Full-service delivery — Skip provides the courier. This is the most common arrangement and the most expensive, typically 25% to 30% commission.
- Self-delivery — you provide your own driver, and Skip is just the order channel. Lower commission, usually 15% to 20%.
Your specific rate is set in your agreement and varies by location, cuisine category, promotional commitments, and monthly volume. Two cafés on the same street can be paying different rates.
The commission in your contract is not your total cost. It’s the starting line, not the finish line.
What are the fees beyond commission?
Commission is the headline, but three other line items quietly raise your effective rate:
- Payment processing. The card transaction itself carries a processing cost, layered on top of commission.
- Sponsored listings and promotions. If you buy visibility inside the app or run a discount to climb the rankings, that’s an additional, often percentage-based, cost. It’s optional — but in a crowded category it can feel mandatory.
- Refunds and adjustments. When an order is refunded or corrected, you typically absorb that cost. A handful of these a week chips away at margin you can’t see on the menu.
Add it up and a café quoting “27% commission” is often paying an effective rate several points higher once processing and promotions are included. This is the same dynamic we break down for the big two in what DoorDash and Uber Eats really cost restaurants.
A worked example in CAD
Numbers make it concrete. Take a café doing 300 delivery orders a month at a $25 average ticket through SkipTheDishes — $7,500 in monthly delivery sales — on a representative 27% full-service commission.
- Commission: $7,500 × 27% = $2,025/month
- That’s about $6.75 lost on every $25 order, before you’ve paid for coffee, milk, cups, or labour.
- Add even a modest 3% in processing and promotional costs and you’re closer to $225 more, for roughly $2,250/month all-in.
Now compare the same $7,500 in sales through a commission-free direct channel paying only Square’s Canadian online processing of 2.8% + 30¢:
- Processing on sales: $7,500 × 2.8% = $210
- Per-order fee: 300 × $0.30 = $90
- Total: ~$300/month
That’s a difference of roughly $1,950 every month — about $23,000 a year — on the same order volume. The figures above are illustrative and depend on your real rate, but the shape is always the same: a percentage commission scales against you, a flat processing fee does not.
SkipTheDishes vs DoorDash vs Uber Eats
For Canadian cafés, all three marketplaces sit in a similar band. None publishes firm rates, so treat these as the commonly reported ranges, not quotes.
| Marketplace | Reported commission (full-service) | Self-delivery option | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| SkipTheDishes | ~25–30% | Yes (~15–20%) | Canadian-founded; owned by Just Eat Takeaway |
| DoorDash | ~15–30% by tier | Yes (Storefront/self-delivery) | Largest Canadian share in many markets |
| Uber Eats | ~25–30% | Yes | Bundled with the Uber app |
Ranges reflect publicly reported figures, 2026. Confirm your own rate in writing.
The takeaway isn’t “Skip is uniquely expensive” — it’s that every marketplace charges roughly the same percentage, so switching between them doesn’t fix the underlying math. Changing which channel your regulars use does.
When is SkipTheDishes worth the fee?
Marketplaces earn their commission for exactly one job: putting you in front of people who would never have found you otherwise. Skip has a large Canadian audience actively browsing for somewhere to order. For net-new discovery, paying 27% on those first orders can be a fair customer-acquisition cost.
The mistake is paying that same 27% forever on a regular who already knows your name, orders the same oat latte every Friday, and would happily order direct if you gave them a reason to. That’s not acquisition — that’s a tax on loyalty. The fix isn’t to quit the marketplace; it’s to stop letting it own your repeat customers, which we cover in marketplace vs direct ordering and who owns the customer data.
How to keep more of every order
The durable move for a Canadian café is to run two channels with two different jobs:
- Keep the marketplace for discovery only. Treat Skip’s commission as a paid-acquisition line, and judge it on net-new customers, not total orders.
- Stand up a commission-free channel you own. A free Square Online ordering site is the fastest start; a branded order-ahead app is the most durable, because it adds loyalty and push so you can bring people back without paying per order. Either way you pay ~3% processing instead of 20–30% commission. Our commission-free online ordering guide walks through every option.
- Give regulars a reason to switch. A first-order discount on your direct channel, a loyalty stamp, and an “order ahead” link on your receipts and Google profile move repeat demand off the marketplace deliberately.
For a Square café that wants the branded version of step two, Tany builds a white-label order-ahead app for iOS and Android plus web ordering on top of your existing Square POS — self-running loyalty, eGift cards, and push included — live in about a day for $99 CAD/month per location with 0% commission. The point stands without any one vendor: keep paying the marketplace for strangers, stop paying it for regulars.
The bottom line
SkipTheDishes typically costs Canadian restaurants 20–30% of each order’s subtotal, plus processing and optional promotion fees — often an effective rate north of 30%. That’s defensible as acquisition for brand-new customers and indefensible as a recurring charge on loyal ones. The most profitable delivery strategy isn’t picking the “cheapest” marketplace; it’s owning a direct channel for your regulars and letting the marketplace do the one thing it does best: introduce you to someone new.
Sources
- SkipTheDishes Fees and Commissions for Restaurants — 2025 Guide (Menuviel)
- SkipTheDishes 101: The Essential Guide for Restaurants 2025 (Deliverect)
- SkipTheDishes Fee Calculator 2026, CAD (DeliverGuard)
- Quebec moves to lower SkipTheDishes / delivery fees (Global News)
- Square Pricing (Canada) — online processing rates