The Core Challenge

Commissions, ads, packaging, and customer-funded discounts routinely consume 25–35% of an aggregator order's value. Yet most owners can quote their commission rate but can't say what an aggregator order actually earns after all deductions and ingredient costs. That gap — between assumed margins and real margins — is where profit leaks and bad menu decisions happen.

A worked example: A biryani sells at ₹320 on Zomato. Commission (25%) takes ₹80. Restaurant-funded discount averages ₹20. Packaging ₹15. Ingredient cost ₹128 (40%). What's left: ₹77 — a 24% margin, before staff and rent. The same biryani at the counter leaves ₹157. Neither number is wrong; the mistake is not knowing them.

Five Rules for a Profitable Aggregator Channel

1. Price the online menu separately. Build the commission into the price dish by dish, not as a flat 20% bump — low-margin dishes need more, stars need less.

2. Treat restaurant-funded discounts as a marketing budget with a cap. Decide monthly what you'll spend, and track it as its own line — it is invisible inside 'sales' otherwise.

3. Reconcile every payout cycle. Deduction errors, missed refunds and wrongly-attributed cancellations are common enough that a monthly hour pays for itself.

4. Convert repeat aggregator customers to direct. A QR card in the delivery bag with a first-direct-order incentive moves your best customers to a commission-free channel.

5. Know your dish-level numbers before negotiating. Commission renegotiations and ad-spend pitches are won by owners who can show which orders lose money. Data beats sentiment.

What's in This Hub

Registration Guide — Documents needed, timeline, onboarding fees, and five settings to get right on day one.

Commission Structure — What the headline rate hides: gateway fees, ads, discounts, and how to compute your true take-home.

Dashboard Guide — The five numbers that matter weekly and the vanity metrics to ignore.

Payout Reconciliation — Step-by-step monthly method to catch missed orders, wrong deductions, and refund leakage.

Commission Calculator — Enter your own numbers and see your true deduction rate, per-order profit, and monthly channel profit.

Where Software Fits

You can run all of this on spreadsheets — the guides show you how. The honest limit of spreadsheets is time: dish-level costing across a 60-item menu, updated when ingredient prices move, reconciled against two aggregators weekly, is hours of clerical work every week.

F&Bos automates this: Every order (counter or aggregator) is recorded against recipe-level ingredient costs, commissions are tracked per order, and MarginMind shows which dishes earn and which leak — live. See how aggregator integration works →