Friday night is your biggest night of the week. More orders, more revenue, more energy in the kitchen. It's also, quietly, your most expensive night because the busier you are on third-party apps, the more you're paying out in commission. Here's the maths most owners never stop to run.
Your busiest night is your most expensive
Most pizzeria owners think about commission as a fixed cost of doing business. It shows up on statements, it gets noted, and then it gets filed away. What's harder to see is what that commission actually looks like when your volume is highest.
A 30% commission on a slow Tuesday with 20 orders hurts. The same rate on a Friday night with 80 orders is a different conversation entirely. Commission scales with volume. So does the leak.
This isn't an argument against being busy. It's an argument for understanding where the revenue from that busyness is actually going and how much of it you could be keeping.
Run the numbers on a single Friday night
Let's use a realistic Friday night for an independent Australian pizzeria. Eighty orders. Average order value of $55. All coming through a third-party delivery platform at standard commission rates.
$1,320 gone in a single night. Before wages, ingredients, packaging, power. That's not a fee — that's a significant portion of a night's trading handed to a platform that did nothing more than take the order.
Now consider that this happens every Friday. And Saturday. And in school holidays, and in the weeks leading up to Christmas, when your volume is highest of all.
It compounds every single week
$4,400 Friday night
Fridays alone
$1,320 a week across 52 Fridays is $68,640 a year. That's before you add Saturday nights, long weekends, and every other order that went through a third-party platform across the rest of the week.
For most independent pizzerias, the total annual commission bill runs into the hundreds of thousands. Most owners know it's significant. Very few have stopped to calculate exactly what it looks like broken down by their best trading nights — because when you do, the number is confronting.
Why busy nights hide the problem
Here's why this leak goes unnoticed for so long: Friday nights feel good. The kitchen is running, the phone is going, the numbers look healthy. It's hard to feel like something is wrong when you're busy.
The problem is invisible because the commission comes off before you see the revenue. You don't watch $1,320 leave — you just receive $3,080 and get on with the night. The gap between what you earned and what you kept never fully registers.
Slow weeks make owners think about costs. Busy weeks should too — because busy weeks on third-party platforms are when the leak is at its worst.
What moving even 30% of Friday orders to direct looks like
You don't need to eliminate third-party platforms to change the maths. You just need to shift a meaningful portion of peak-night volume to direct orders — where you keep 100% of every transaction.
| Friday night scenario | 100% via third-party apps | 30% shifted to direct |
|---|---|---|
| Gross revenue | $4,400 | $4,400 |
| Commission paid | $1,320 (30% of all orders) | $924 (30% of 70% of orders) |
| Revenue kept | $3,080 | $3,476 |
| Weekly improvement | — | +$396 per Friday |
| Annual improvement (Fridays only) | — | +$20,592 per year |
Shifting 30% of a single night's volume to direct orders recovers over $20,000 a year — just from Fridays. Add Saturdays and you're looking at a number that funds a staff member, a fit-out, or simply a better margin on the work you're already doing.
Plugging the leak starts with giving customers a direct option
The reason most Friday night orders go through third-party apps isn't preference — it's habit and availability. Customers use the app because it's the easiest option they know about. Give them a direct option that's just as easy, and a portion of them will use it.
That means having your own ordering page, making sure your regulars know about it, and nudging people toward it every time you have contact with them — on packaging, on your socials, on your Google listing.
It doesn't happen overnight. But every Friday night where even a handful of regulars order direct instead of through an app is a Friday night where you keep more of what you earned. Multiply that across a year and the number is material.
Crusto gives independent Australian pizzerias a direct ordering page that plugs into their existing POS setup. 0% commission on every direct order. Every customer who orders through your page is one less commission payment on your biggest nights of the week.