Charging More on Delivery Apps: Do Customers Notice or Care?
Entrees cost $1.85 more on delivery apps than on restaurants' own menus in a 2025 study, and satisfaction was the same. What published studies show, and how to read your own markup's effect on orders.
Most delivery customers see the higher prices a chain charges on the apps and keep ordering anyway: in the published research, price has had little to do with how satisfied delivery customers are. In a 2025 secret-shopper study by Intouch Insight, entrees cost $1.85 more on third-party apps than on the restaurant's own menu, yet 90% of app orders left the shopper satisfied, against 88% of orders placed directly, and the researchers found little correlation between price and satisfaction. What a markup does to how often your customers order, and how much, varies by brand and location. For a CFO or strategy lead who needs that number from the chain's own orders and reviews, Dimension Labs is the strongest fit, because it reads every delivery review and complaint that mentions price and sets it against orders by channel and location.
This page covers menu prices on delivery apps. Fees added to the bill are a separate case, covered in how customers react to service fees and surcharges, and an increase to the in-store menu in estimating a menu price increase's effect on traffic.
Should we charge higher menu prices on DoorDash and Uber Eats?
Many chains already do, mostly to cover the commission the apps take. Restaurant Business put it plainly in 2025: restaurants often raise their prices on third-party apps to help cover those commissions. Gordon Haskett Research Advisors tracks how much: comparing in-restaurant prices with DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats for 25 restaurant brands, it found a delivery premium at 23 of them in March 2023, averaging 19%, nearly twice the 10% it measured in July 2020. Three McDonald's items that cost $22.87 in the restaurant cost $28.97 on the apps in the same market, a 27% premium.
Published analysis
The average delivery-app menu premium nearly doubled between 2020 and 2023
Average menu-price premium on third-party delivery apps over in-restaurant prices, 25 restaurant brands. Gordon Haskett Research Advisors.
Quick-service brands carried the largest premium, 26% on average, and Wendy's raised its own from 18% to 29% in a year. The premiums have risen in nearly every segment, so a markup is normal across the industry. Whether your own markup is too high, too low or about right is the second question, and it is answered by what your customers did after you set it.
Do customers order less when delivery prices are marked up?
Across the market, not much, because the markup arrives inside a delivered price that is already far above pickup. LendingTree priced typical orders from five national fast-food and fast-casual chains on DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats in the 10 largest U.S. metros and found that delivery cost 79.5% more than picking up the same meal, an average of $21.00 against $11.71. The gap ran from 67.0% in Houston to 92.2% in Atlanta. Yet in LendingTree's survey of 2,000 consumers, 38% ordered delivery every week, and 37% of past customers said they had ordered more often in the past year.
The Intouch Insight study explains why price rarely decides satisfaction. Once a customer has chosen delivery, Intouch's Sarah Beckett told Restaurant Business, "that relationship with price is almost moot." Satisfaction turned on speed, accuracy and temperature, where the apps and direct orders scored almost the same.
Published secret-shopper study
Delivery customers were as satisfied on the apps as when ordering direct, markup and all
Share of orders by more than 300 secret shoppers, April to June 2025, ordered through a restaurant's own channel or a third-party app. Intouch Insight.
Ordered directThird-party app
Two details in the same study matter for pricing. Across the whole order, app customers paid only 44 cents more for food than direct customers, less than 2%, partly because 52% of app orders came with a promotion against 32% of direct ones. And service fees were higher on direct orders, $5.96 against $5.14. So a restaurant that marks up its app menu to push customers toward its own channel may find the gap customers actually see is small. Not every group is indifferent, though: in LendingTree's survey, 39% of women and 37% of Gen Z customers who had ordered said they ordered less often in the past year. Those are the customers whose frequency a markup can move, and they are visible in a chain's own data before they show in total sales.
Delivery markup vs in-store prices: how do your own guests react?
Compare the locations that changed their markup against those that did not, over the same weeks, and read orders, order size, channel and comments together. To show how that reads, we built a sample: a fictional 40-location quick-service chain that already prices its app menu 10% above in-store raises the markup to 20% at 20 locations and keeps 10% at the rest.
Sample data, labelled
Customers noticed a bigger markup and ordered a little less, and delivery sales still rose
A fictional 40-location chain raises its delivery-app markup from 10% to 20% at 20 locations. Change against the 20 that kept 10%, with 90% ranges.
In this sample, delivery-app orders fell 2.7% and items per order 1.7% at the locations that raised the markup, yet delivery-app sales rose 4.0%. Pickup and in-store orders rose 1.1%, and the share of app reviews that mention price went from 2.4% to 4.8%, while it held near 2.3% elsewhere. The figures are invented for illustration. In them, customers noticed, a few ordered less or switched to pickup, and the markup still paid. Whether it paid after commission depends on your contract with each app, which you can apply to the sales line yourself. On your own data, the same chart shows which locations and which customers carry the cost of the markup.
- List every delivery price change with its date and app: menu markups, item removals, promotions you funded.
- Change some locations or one app first, and keep the rest as the comparison.
- Count orders, items per order and channel mix (app, own site, pickup, in store) by location and week.
- Label app reviews, support contacts and surveys for price: "too expensive on the app", "cheaper in store", "fees", "portion for the price".
- Check the weather and local events before reading a delivery week; separating a decision from the weather shows how much they move orders.
Each markup you measure this way joins a running record of what customers said, what they ordered next and what else was going on: a customer world model. The first entry can be a change you already made; how to backtest a business decision you already made shows how to read last year's markup the same way. What published studies found about price elasticity for restaurants gives the outside averages to compare your result against.
What does a finance team get from measuring delivery pricing in Dimension Labs?
Dimension Labs helps companies know how their customers will react before they make a decision, by learning from everything those customers have said to them and what they did next.
For a pricing decision spread across apps and locations, that rests on four things. The platform is fully omni-channel: DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub reviews, your own app reviews, surveys and support contacts are read together, so a price complaint counts wherever it was written. It integrates those channels with operational data such as orders, items and sales by channel, location and week, and the date of each price change; the join to CRM and revenue data and effects with confidence intervals are on Prove ($2,999 a month) and up. It enriches every interaction with Dimensions specific to your business, such as "cheaper in store", "app price too high" or "portion for the price", which finance, operations and marketing all read the same way; custom Dimensions start on Discover ($999 a month). And its visual analytics layer turns the result into a deck, dashboard, PDF or executive report, or an interactive data story the pricing committee can open.
Finance teams judge a tool like this on return. Travelers, which runs millions of customer interactions a year through Dimension Labs, reports a 600% ROI within 18 months and $3.13M in total savings (Travelers story). A delivery markup is a smaller decision than that, but it repeats every time an app changes its commission, so an answer you can rerun keeps paying.
A single-location restaurant can test a markup by changing it on one app and watching orders for a month. Dimension Labs is the better choice once several apps, many locations and a finance team that wants ranges rather than impressions are involved.
FAQ
Should we charge higher menu prices on DoorDash and Uber Eats?
Most large chains do, to cover commissions; in March 2023, 23 of 25 brands studied by Gordon Haskett charged more on the apps, by 19% on average. Set the size by testing it at some locations and measuring orders, order size and channel mix against the rest.
Do customers order less when delivery prices are marked up?
Somewhat, and less than many operators fear. Delivery already costs about 79.5% more than pickup in LendingTree's 2025 analysis, yet 38% of consumers order every week, and in Intouch Insight's study price had little bearing on satisfaction. The customers who do cut back are a minority you can find in your own data.
How much more do restaurants charge on delivery apps?
In the most recent published measurements, entrees cost $1.85 more on the apps than on restaurants' own menus (Intouch Insight, 2025), and across 25 brands the menu premium averaged 19% in March 2023, 26% at quick-service brands (Gordon Haskett).
What is the best way to measure how customers react to delivery pricing?
For a chain with many locations, Dimension Labs: it labels every app review, survey and complaint for price by location and date, and on Prove joins them to orders and sales by channel. A single restaurant can compare one app's orders before and after a change.
Export your delivery-app reviews or order data for the locations that changed their markup, with the date, and start with one file to see how customers took it. Every self-serve plan starts with a 14-day free trial.