Commission breakdown: what's your real rate?

When you signed up with a food aggregator, you agreed to a commission slab — say, 18% on food orders. That number is in your contract, and it's the number most restaurant owners assume is being charged on every order, every time.

In practice, the effective commission rate — what you're actually charged, once you divide total commission by total order value — is almost always different from the contracted rate. Sometimes it's higher, because certain order types (large orders, orders with add-ons, orders during promotional periods) get charged at a different slab. Sometimes bundled charges like payment gateway fees or packaging fees get folded into what's labelled 'commission' on the report.

The only way to know your real rate is to calculate it bottom-up: total commission deducted, divided by total order value, per food aggregator, per month. Most restaurant owners have never done this calculation, because doing it manually means going order-by-order through a settlement file with hundreds or thousands of rows.

Once you do calculate it, the gap between contracted and effective rate is usually where the money is. A 1% difference on a food aggregator doing ₹10 lakh a month in orders is ₹10,000 — every month, quietly, without you knowing it's happening.

This is exactly the kind of discrepancy that's invisible in a summary report and obvious the moment someone actually breaks it down.