What Swiggy and Zomato actually cost you per order
Commission is the number everyone quotes. It is rarely the number that decides whether the order made money. Here is the full arithmetic.
MantraEdge Product Team · 8 Jul 2026 · 6 min read
Ask an operator what an aggregator costs and you will hear a commission percentage. That number is real, but it is only the first line of the calculation. By the time an order reaches your bank account, several other deductions have happened, and a dish that looked profitable on the menu can arrive at break-even or below.
The deductions that actually apply
- Commission on the item value, at your negotiated slab.
- Payment gateway charges on the collected amount.
- Packaging — containers, bags, cutlery, seals — which you buy and rarely re-price.
- Discounts you funded, as opposed to discounts the platform funded.
- Advertising spend on the platform, which is a real cost of that channel.
- Refunds and cancellations charged back to you.
- Taxes, which flow differently on aggregator sales than on your own counter sales.
Why the menu price is not the answer
Most operators pad aggregator prices to absorb commission. That is sensible, but it is usually done as a flat percentage across the whole menu. The problem is that packaging cost is not proportional to price — a ₹90 dessert and a ₹450 biryani may use the same container. Flat padding over-prices your cheap items and under-prices the expensive ones.
Channel margin is a per-item number, not a per-restaurant number. Averages hide the dishes that are losing you money on delivery.
What to measure instead
Net contribution per item, per channel. Take the amount the platform actually settles, subtract the recipe cost of that dish, subtract its packaging, and subtract the share of platform advertising attributable to it. Do that for your top thirty items and you will usually find a handful that should be repriced, reformulated or removed from the delivery menu entirely.
RestroMantra nets these out per channel automatically, which is the only practical way to keep the number current when prices and commissions change.
The case for your own ordering channel
Direct ordering — a QR menu for the table and a takeaway micro-site for delivery — carries gateway charges and packaging but no commission and no platform advertising. It also gives you the customer's phone number, which the aggregator does not. You will not replace the platforms; they bring discovery you cannot buy cheaply. But shifting even a fifth of repeat orders to a direct channel changes the economics of the whole operation.