Talk to any independent grocery or restaurant owner in Calgary long enough and the conversation eventually turns to commissions. Not rent, not staffing — commissions. The 15 to 30 percent cut that DoorDash, Uber Eats, Skip, and Instacart take off the top of every order placed through their apps.
It is easy to wave that number away as "the cost of doing business online." It is harder to wave away once you run the math against a real menu or a real grocery basket.
The math independent stores are quietly doing
Take a $45 grocery order. At a 20% aggregator commission, the store loses $9 before it has paid for the item cost, the packaging, or the labor to pick and pack it. On a grocery business already running 15-25% margins, that single order can go from marginally profitable to a loss the moment it touches a third-party app.
Restaurants feel it even harder, because kitchens already operate on thin margins after food cost, labor, and rent. A $60 dinner order that nets $9-18 in commission fees on top of the usual 28-35% food cost can leave almost nothing for the business that actually cooked the meal.
Why store owners stay on the apps anyway
Almost no independent owner we've talked to loves the commission structure. Most stay because the alternative — building an online storefront, a delivery network, and a POS system from scratch — is a full-time job they don't have time for on top of running the store.
That's the actual gap: it's not that owners don't understand the cost of aggregator commissions. It's that "own your own delivery presence" has historically meant assembling four or five separate vendors — a Shopify site, a POS system, a delivery-routing tool, a driver payout system — and hoping they talk to each other.
What "owning the relationship" actually changes
When a store runs its own storefront and delivery instead of renting space inside an aggregator's app, three things change:
- The customer relationship becomes the store's, not the app's. Order history, repeat customers, and loyalty data live with the business instead of disappearing into a platform that can raise fees or deprioritize the listing at any time.
- Margin comes back. Even a modest subscription plus a delivery fee for the actual driver run is usually a fraction of a 20-30% per-order commission once order volume is more than a handful a week.
- Local delivery becomes reliable instead of dependent on gig availability in the store's specific neighborhood. Aggregator coverage in some Calgary neighborhoods is inconsistent, particularly for smaller specialty and ethnic grocery stores that aren't a marquee account for the app.
This is the gap BuyNearby exists to close
We built BuyNearby because Calgary has dozens of independent grocery, restaurant, butcher, and specialty stores doing everything right in-person and losing online revenue to either (a) staying offline entirely, or (b) handing 20%+ of every online order to an aggregator that owns the customer relationship. BuyNearby gives a store its own branded storefront, POS, and delivery network in one system — so going online doesn't mean signing up for a second job or a permanent commission tax.
If you run a local Calgary store and want to see what the numbers actually look like for your business, reach out — we'll walk through it honestly, including the cases where staying on an aggregator still makes sense for you right now.