How to add a marketplace channel without doubling your workload

Before you connect anything, tidy the menu you already have. Dead items, duplicate SKUs, modifiers that only half-exist — every one of them becomes a mismatch the moment a channel tries to map to it. A clean master menu maps cleanly; a messy one turns the marketplace's onboarding screen into an afternoon of manual fixes. Get the SKUs and modifier groups right once, in your catalog, and the channel inherits a menu that already makes sense.

A marketplace takes 15–30% of the order before you see a cent. Copying your dine-in prices straight onto that channel means selling at a loss on the items you thought were your winners. Work out the true take-rate first — commission, plus any packaging and courier costs the channel pushes onto you — and set channel prices from that number, not from the printed menu. If you want the arithmetic done for you, run your figures through the take-rate calculator before you publish a single price.

This is the step everyone skips, and it is the one that matters most. The new channel's orders should land in the order queue you already run — not on a fifth tablet next to the other four. When dine-in, takeaway, your own web orders and every marketplace arrive on one screen, a runner reads one list, the kitchen prints one stream of tickets, and nobody is reconciling four devices at 8pm. That is what a real marketplace integration buys you: another channel, not another tablet.

A new channel adds simultaneous pickups you did not have yesterday. Set honest prep times per channel so the marketplace quotes the customer a real wait and dispatches the courier when the food is actually ready — not ten minutes early, with a rider standing at your pass. Tie stock to availability too: when a line cook 86's an item, it should go dark on the channel automatically, so you are never cancelling an order you already took money for.

Switching on is not the finish line — it is the first day of data. Watch the true net per channel, not gross sales: what you actually keep after commission, packaging and any refunds, broken out by day-part. A channel that looks busy at lunch can be losing money at dinner once courier surcharges climb. Read those numbers weekly and turn promotions on or off deliberately, per channel, instead of leaving a launch discount running for three months because nobody checked.