Putting a direct ordering system in is the easy part. Getting people to use it is the actual job, and it's where most takeaways quietly give up — they launch a website, tell nobody, take four orders in a month, and conclude it doesn't work.

Here's what does work, roughly in order of how much it returns for the effort.

First: you can afford to bribe people

This is the thing that makes everything below possible, so start here.

On a £25 order, a marketplace at 30% leaves you about £17.50. The same order through your own site leaves you about £21.20 once you've paid your own driver — £3.70 of headroom — or about £22.80 if they collect, which is £5.30. Collection is where the room is, and that shapes everything below.

Which means you can offer a real discount and still be ahead — but size it to the channel. Give 10% off a delivered order and you keep £18.89 against the app's £17.50: ahead, but only by £1.39 once the driver's paid. Give the same 10% off collection and you keep £20.49, which is £2.99 up. That's the whole reason the offers below lean on collection.

And your customer isn't just £2.50 better off, because they're also not paying the app's service fee and delivery fee. On the same meal from the same kitchen, they're often £6 or £7 better off.

That's not a loyalty gimmick. That's a genuinely better deal for both of you, funded by money that used to leave the building. Every tactic below works about three times better with a real discount attached.

(One caution: discount your own channel rather than putting your app prices up. Several marketplace agreements expect price parity — check yours.)

1. A card in every single bag

The highest-returning thing on this list, and the cheapest.

Every order that goes out — including the marketplace ones — has a card in the bag. Your web address, a QR code, and the offer: "Order direct next time and get 10% off. Same food, same kitchen, no service fee."

That's it. You're reaching a person who has just chosen your food, at the moment they're most positively disposed towards you, for about 2p.

Do it for marketplace orders too. It's your bag, your food, your card.

What makes the difference: a specific offer beats a web address on its own by a mile. "thechesterchippy.co.uk" is information. "10% off your next order, order direct" is a reason.

2. A QR code on the counter and in the window

Collection customers are the easiest to move because they've already decided to deal with you directly. They're standing in your shop.

A5 card by the till, and one in the window. Same offer. People will scan it while they're waiting for their chips, which is otherwise dead time they'd spend on their phone anyway.

3. Tell people on the phone

Every phone order is a conversation with someone who has demonstrably not switched to an app. These are your most switchable customers and they cost nothing to reach.

"There's a website now if you'd rather — it's a bit quicker and it's 10% cheaper than ordering through the app."

Two sentences at the end of the call. Get everyone who answers the phone saying it. It's worth writing on a card by the phone for the first month until it's habit.

4. Fix the reorder

Your regulars order the same thing. Not roughly the same thing — the same thing.

A "reorder your last" button that takes one tap is worth more than any discount, because the friction of rebuilding a five-item order with modifications is the single biggest reason people default back to the app where their history lives.

This is a feature, not a campaign — but it's the reason people stay moved. Getting someone to order direct once is marketing. Getting them to do it every Friday is the reorder button.

5. One email to people who've gone quiet

Once you have a customer list, this is the highest-returning thing you can do with it, and almost nobody does it.

Anyone who ordered three or more times and hasn't in eight weeks gets one email: "We've not seen you in a while — here's £3 off if you fancy it."

Set it once, it runs on its own. The people it reaches already liked your food; something ordinary intervened. A small nudge brings a good proportion of them back, and it costs you £3 only when it works.

You cannot do this at all on a marketplace, because you don't know who they are.

6. Make the direct price visibly better, and say so

Don't be coy about it. Put it on the card, on the counter, on the website: ordering direct is cheaper for you.

The apps have trained customers to believe the restaurant's own site will be more expensive or more awkward. It isn't, and saying so plainly is doing your customer a favour.

If you want the strongest version: put your app prices and your direct prices side by side on the card. It looks aggressive written down, but customers appreciate being told where the money goes, and it reframes the discount as honesty rather than a sales tactic.

What doesn't work

Worth saying, because these absorb a lot of effort:

Social media posts about your new website. Your followers are mostly people who already order from you, and a post reaches a fraction of them once. It's not nothing, but it's not a strategy.

Waiting for Google. Nobody searches for "the chester chippy online ordering". They search your name, or they don't search at all. Your ordering page is a destination, not a landing page.

A grand launch. There's no launch. There's a card in every bag, every day, for six months.

Deleting the apps to force people over. They don't come over. They order from someone else. We've written about that at length.

What to expect

Be realistic about the shape of it.

Month one: a trickle. Mostly collection customers and phone regulars. Don't read anything into it.
Months two and three: the cards start compounding. People who took one three weeks ago order now.
Months four to six: this is where it becomes visible. Direct orders as a share of the total start climbing properly.

The number that matters is the share, not the total. If direct is growing as a proportion while total orders hold up, it's working — even in a quiet month.

An established shop with a decent local reputation can get to roughly half its orders direct within a year of trying properly. On £10,000 a month of orders, moving half across is worth about £744 a month — after paying your own drivers on the half you've moved, and with the other half still earning on the app. That's the whole exercise.