How to take online orders in the Philippines without paying commission

9 min read · Updated September 2026

There are four realistic ways a small Philippine business takes an order that did not walk through the door: Messenger DMs, a food-delivery app, an online marketplace, or your own ordering link. They cost wildly different amounts per order, and most owners are on the expensive one by accident rather than by choice.

This guide lays out what each one actually costs you, what you get in return, and how to pick. We sell one of these options, so we have said plainly below where the others are the better answer.

The four options, side by side

Read the table by the last two columns, not the first. You are not choosing the cheapest channel — you are choosing what you are paying for.

1. Messenger orders are free, and they are not

Almost every Philippine small business starts here, and for the first handful of orders a day it is genuinely the right call: your customers are already on Messenger, and it costs nothing.

The bill arrives later, in ways that never show up as a fee:

• Every order is typed into your POS twice — once by the customer in chat, once by you at the counter.
• Stock does not move on its own, so your inventory drifts from reality within days.
• Orders get lost when a thread scrolls, and there is no list of what is still pending.
• Disputes are unwinnable: there is no record of what was ordered versus what was sent.
• You are the bottleneck. Orders only get taken while somebody is watching the inbox.

Most businesses hit the wall somewhere around 10–15 orders a day. If you are under that and answering DMs is not stressing anyone, stay put — you have bigger problems to solve than this one.

2. Delivery apps sell you customers, not software

Commission rates on Philippine food-delivery platforms are negotiated per merchant and are not published as a single public figure. Merchants commonly report rates in the region of 20–30% of order value, sometimes with additional fees on top. Check your own signed agreement — that is the only rate that applies to you.

Do the arithmetic on one order before deciding it is too expensive:

This is not automatically a bad deal. A delivery app puts you in front of people who have never heard of you and supplies a rider on demand. Acquiring a new customer is expensive by any other route, and running your own rider fleet is harder than it looks. If a marketplace order is genuinely incremental — a customer you would not otherwise have had — paying a quarter of it for the introduction can be a fine trade.

The mistake is paying that introduction fee over and over for the same person. A regular who orders from you weekly is not being introduced to you any more. That is the order worth moving.

3. Marketplaces are for shippable goods, not hot food

Shopee, Lazada, and TikTok Shop are the right answer if you sell something that survives a courier and a few days in transit — packaged food, retail goods, supplies. They come with real discovery and a courier network, and they cost a commission plus payment processing and whatever you spend on campaigns and vouchers to stay visible.

They are the wrong answer for prepared food, same-day service, or anything where the customer is within a few kilometres and wants it now.

4. Your own ordering link

A hosted ordering page sits at an address you control — for a Kassly store that is yourstore.kasslypos.com — and does one job: take the order properly and put it where you work.

• No commission. The order value is yours. You pay a flat software fee whether you take 5 orders or 500.
• Nothing to build. No website, no hosting, no app for the customer to install — they tap a link.
• The order lands in your POS. No re-typing. Accept it and it becomes a real order you finish like any other sale — stock comes off and the receipt is issued when you complete it.
• You get paid directly. Cash on delivery, GCash, Maya, bank transfer — straight to you, with no platform holding or settling your money on a schedule.
• The customer is yours. Their contact details and order history are in your own system, not a platform's.

The strategy that actually works: use both

These are not mutually exclusive, and treating them as a choice is the error. The pattern that pays:

1. Keep the delivery app for discovery. Let it do what it is good at — finding you people who do not know you exist.
2. Put your own link everywhere you already own: your Facebook page button, your Instagram bio, a QR code on the table, printed on the receipt, in the packaging.
3. Give repeat customers a reason to switch. A small discount for ordering direct still leaves you far ahead of a 25% commission.
4. Measure the mix. Track what share of orders comes from each channel. Moving even a third of your repeat orders to a zero-commission link is usually the largest single margin improvement available to a small food business.

Before you switch anything on: a checklist

1. Decide what you will actually sell online. Not the whole menu — the things that travel well and are worth preparing for one order.
2. Set a real delivery fee and a real delivery area. Hiding the fee until a phone call is the fastest way to lose the order; unclear costs are one of the biggest causes of abandoned carts.
3. Decide your payment rules. Cash on delivery is how most Philippine online orders are paid, so plan for it — and set a peso cap above which you require prepayment.
4. Decide who confirms orders, and how fast. An order nobody looks at for an hour is a cancelled order. Assign it to a person and a device.
5. Sort out delivery before you launch, not after. Your own rider, a third-party rider you book per order, or pickup only. Any of those is fine; not having decided is not.
6. Keep issuing your BIR-registered receipts. An online order is a sale like any other. See our BIR compliance guide.

How Kassly does it

Kassly's online store is included at no extra cost with any paid add-on or bundle — from ₱300/branch/month, and free during a 30-day trial. There is no per-order fee and no revenue share. You tick which products appear, switch the store on, and share the link.

Orders arrive as pending in your POS on mobile and on the web, and do not touch stock or your sales figures until you accept them. Accepting turns the order into an ordinary transaction you work through the usual way — stock comes off and the receipt number is issued at completion, not the moment you accept — and the customer gets a tracking link they can reopen at any time.

To be plain about the boundary: Kassly is the ordering page, not a delivery company. The store prepares the order, arranges its own delivery, and collects the payment directly. Kassly does not employ riders, does not dispatch, and never holds your money.

Frequently asked questions

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