Restaurant Delivery Zones That Protect Your Margins: How to Draw Them Right

A single delivery fee across one big circle looks fair on the surface. Everyone pays €2.50, everyone waits. But that one number is an average, and the average hides the problem: the order two streets away and the order 6 km across town both pay the same €2.50 — while one costs you eight minutes of a driver and the other costs you forty. Every far order is quietly subsidised by the near ones, and the far ones are exactly where your margin goes to die.

Self-delivery is one of the few ways to keep your own margin, your own customer, and your own data instead of handing a slice to a marketplace. But it only works if the geography is priced honestly. This guide shows how to carve your delivery map into zones, set a fee and a minimum order for each one, use drive time instead of a straight line, and cap the radius before it caps your kitchen. All with plain euro examples you can copy today.

Why One Flat Fee and One Big Radius Lose Money

The cost of a delivery is almost entirely time, not distance in a straight line. A driver locked in the car for a 25-minute round trip is a driver who is not taking the next three orders. During a Friday rush, that one long run can back up your whole queue, cold-hold two other bags, and turn a €14 order at the far edge into a net loss once you count fuel, the driver, and the orders you could not fulfil.

A single wide radius makes this worse in two directions at once. Draw it too small and you turn away perfectly good orders from the next neighbourhood. Draw it too big to "capture more area" and you invite the exact orders that bleed you — small baskets, long drives, cold food, one-star reviews. The fix is not a bigger or smaller circle. It is replacing the circle with a set of zones, each with its own price and its own rules.

Six Rules for Drawing Delivery Zones

Zones are not decoration on a map. Each boundary is a business decision about what you will accept and at what price. Follow these six rules and the map does the gatekeeping for you:

• •Price by drive time, not by the crow-flies distance — a river, a one-way system, or a rail crossing can turn 1.5 km into a 15-minute crawl. Two addresses the same distance out can belong in different zones.
• •Raise the minimum order as the zone gets farther — a near zone might accept a €12 basket, but a €12 order should never justify a 25-minute round trip. Make the far zone earn its drive.
• •Raise the fee with distance too, but keep it honest — the customer should feel the far fee is fair, not punitive. A modest step per zone (say €2, then €3.50, then €5) reads as reasonable; a €9 surprise reads as a rip-off.
• •Show an estimated delivery time per zone — near zone 20–30 min, mid zone 30–45, outer zone 45–60. Setting the expectation up front prevents the "where is my food" call and the review that follows it.
• •Cut zones along real barriers, not neat circles — follow the ring road, the river, the district line. A boundary that matches how your drivers actually move is one they can hit on time.
• •Cap the outer edge where the math stops working — past a certain drive time, no fee or minimum makes the trip worth it. That is not lost business; it is a loss you chose not to take.

Rule of thumb: a delivery is only worth doing when the order value clears your food cost plus the true cost of the trip (driver time, fuel, and the orders that driver could not take meanwhile). If a zone cannot be priced to clear that bar, it should not be a zone — it should be outside your map.

How to Set Up Zones That Actually Hold

Draw the zones on a map, not in a spreadsheet

Start from your kitchen and draw outward in bands. A simple three-band setup works for most venues: an inner core (the streets around you, fastest and cheapest), a middle band (still comfortable, slightly higher fee and minimum), and an outer band (the edge of what you will serve, highest fee, highest minimum). Draw each band as a real shape on the map that hugs the roads and stops at natural barriers, not a mechanical circle. On Ordering.Tools you draw these directly on the map and attach a fee, a minimum order, and an estimated time to each — see the Delivery Management feature page for how the zone editor works.

Set a fee and a minimum order for every zone

Give each band its own two numbers. A worked example for a mid-sized city venue: inner core — €2 fee, €12 minimum, 20–30 min; middle band — €3.50 fee, €18 minimum, 30–45 min; outer band — €5 fee, €25 minimum, 45–60 min. The rising minimum is doing the heavy lifting. A €25 floor on the outer band means a long drive always carries enough basket to pay for itself, so you never send a driver 6 km for a single wrap. Tune the exact numbers to your own food cost and driver pay — the shape is what matters: fee up, minimum up, time up, band by band.

Use drive time, then test with real orders

A straight-line radius lies. Two kitchens 2 km from an address can be 8 minutes and 22 minutes away depending on bridges, one-ways, and traffic. Price the zones by how long the trip actually takes, then validate against reality. For the first two weeks, watch your real deliveries: which zone is consistently late, which one keeps producing sub-minimum complaints, which edge orders arrive cold. Pull the outer boundary in where the times run long, and nudge a fee up where a band is clearly losing money. If you run your own riders, the Own Delivery feature page covers driver assignment and live status so you can see exactly which zone eats your time — and Real-Time Tracking keeps the customer informed while you tune the map.

Get the Zones Right and Delivery Pays for Itself

Well-drawn zones do something a flat fee never can: they let you keep the profitable near orders flowing while refusing the unprofitable far ones by design — no awkward phone call, no manual judgement, just a map that says yes to the right orders and no to the wrong ones. That is the whole point of running your own delivery instead of paying a marketplace a 15–30% cut on every basket: you own the customer, the margin, and the data, and the zone map is what keeps that ownership worth having.

Start with three honest bands, price each by drive time, set a minimum that rises with distance, and cap the edge where the numbers stop working. Then let two weeks of real orders tell you where to redraw. To build it, see the Delivery Management feature page for the zone editor and the Own Delivery feature page if you dispatch your own riders. And if far-order margin is still leaking, our guide on why customers abandon orders digs into the checkout side of the same problem.