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Solutions · Cloud Kitchens

Direct phone orders, without a POS terminal.

You don't have a counter. You don't have a card reader. Every dollar that comes through Uber Eats or DoorDash hands ~30% to the aggregator. Pay-E gives you a direct channel without buying hardware.

Cloud kitchens are built for delivery aggregators. The catch: every aggregator order skims 25–32% off the top. Regulars who learn your number want to bypass that — Pay-E lets you take their call without buying a $1,800 POS terminal.

The problem

Where the money quietly leaks.

  • 30% to the aggregator

    Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Menulog take 25–32% per order in Australia. On a $40 order, that's $10–$13 of margin you'll never see again.

  • No POS, no direct sales

    Without a counter, you have no way to take a card. Every direct customer either pays cash on delivery (and sometimes doesn't show) or routes back through the aggregator.

  • Brand confusion

    Aggregators own the customer relationship. You don't see the number. You can't message them when prep is delayed. Repeat business is the platform's, not yours.

How Pay-E helps

Money lands first. Prep starts second.

  • Phone-order capture, no hardware

    Take the order on a phone or tablet. Send a paylink by SMS. The customer pays through Stripe Checkout — no POS, no card reader, no install.

  • Direct customer database

    Their number, their order history, their dietary preferences — yours, not the aggregator's. Run targeted SMS campaigns when business is slow.

  • Multi-brand from one kitchen

    Run three virtual brands? Pay-E links can carry the brand name in the SMS — "Korean BBQ" or "Sicilian pizza" — even though the same kitchen prep is happening behind the scenes.

A story like yours

What real shops do with Pay-E.

Composite stories grounded in operator interviews. Names and figures are illustrative.

Couldn't take payment remotely3 virtual brands, delivery-only · Brunswick VIC

Brunswick Cloud Kitchens

Aggregator platforms take ~30%. Phone-order regulars wanted to skip the aggregator but the kitchen has no storefront and no POS terminal.

Brunswick Cloud Kitchens runs three virtual brands — Korean BBQ, Sicilian pizza, and a poke bowl concept — out of one industrial kitchen in inner-north Melbourne. There is no front-of-house. There is no POS terminal. Every order historically came through Uber Eats or Menulog at a 28–32% commission.

Regulars who learned the kitchen's number wanted to bypass the aggregators. Pay-E gave the team a way to take phone orders without a POS: SMS paylink, customer pays through Stripe Checkout, kitchen ticket prints when paid.

Now 22% of orders are direct, no aggregator fee. The savings are paying for an extra kitchen hand on Friday nights.

“We don't run a storefront, but we still wanted real customers — not just app accounts. Pay-E gave us that without a $1,800 POS install.”

— Operations lead — Brunswick Cloud Kitchens

See more stories on the Customer stories page.

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