If you're a UK takeaway owner reading this on a Tuesday afternoon between lunch and dinner service, you already know Just Eat's order volume isn't what it was two years ago. The platform is still huge — but every restaurant on it is fighting for a smaller slice while paying a bigger commission to do it.
That doesn't mean you can't grow on Just Eat. It means the easy days are over and the things that actually move orders are now boringly specific: the photo on your top menu item, the radius you've set, your acceptance rate this week, whether your shop is showing a 35-minute or 55-minute prep time at peak.
Below is what we actually see working for the takeaways we audit, plus the harder question almost no agency will answer for you: how much of your business should sit on Just Eat at all.
How Just Eat actually ranks restaurants
Just Eat doesn't publish its full algorithm, but their own restaurant resources and consistent observation across hundreds of merchants point to a small set of factors that genuinely move position in the customer's list:[1]
- Distance from the customer (and your delivery radius setting)
- Acceptance rate — % of orders you accept vs reject
- Average prep time vs the time you've quoted
- Customer rating and recent review volume
- Order completion rate (orders that arrive without complaint)
- Photo quality on top items (this affects clicks, which feeds the algo)
- Menu engagement — how often customers tap through your items
- Promotional spend on the platform (paid placement)
- Active hours — being open during peak Friday/Saturday windows
Five of those nine you control directly without giving Just Eat a penny extra. Start there.
1. Photos: the highest-leverage thing you're probably ignoring
Open the Just Eat app right now and search your own postcode. Scroll. The restaurants that catch your eye almost certainly have proper food photography on their top three items. The ones that don't, you scroll past in 0.3 seconds.
Just Eat's own merchant insights consistently show that menus with high-quality photos on top items outperform photo-less menus by a meaningful margin on click-through and order conversion. We've seen takeaways double weekly orders within a fortnight of replacing phone snaps with proper styled shots — no other change.
The mistake most takeaways make is photographing all 80 items and posting whatever they get. Don't. Photograph your top 10 sellers properly — overhead, on a clean surface, with consistent lighting — and leave the rest blank. Blank is better than badly-lit. The mind treats badly-lit food photos as a warning signal.
If you don't have a budget for a photographer: your iPhone in window light at 11am, with the food on a plain white plate, beats every restaurant in your postcode that uploaded a flash-lit chicken biryani at 11pm.
2. Prep time honesty
Just Eat penalises restaurants that consistently quote 25 minutes and take 55. The customer rating drops, the algo sees the complaint, your future ranking drops with it.
The counter-intuitive fix: set your prep time longer than you think you need. A 45-minute quote that you deliver in 35 looks like a hero to the customer. A 25-minute quote you deliver in 50 looks like a liar.
This is especially true at Friday/Saturday peak. If you're routinely overrun between 7pm and 9pm, increase your prep time during those hours from the dashboard. You'll lose the few customers who can't wait, but you'll keep your rating with the rest.
3. Acceptance rate: stop rejecting orders
Every order you reject hurts your visibility, even temporarily. If your kitchen is overwhelmed, the right move isn't to reject — it's to temporarily mark yourself busy or close the menu for 30 minutes. Just Eat treats those very differently.
A pattern of rejections is one of the fastest ways to slide down the listings. We've audited restaurants with 4.9 ratings who couldn't understand why their orders were dropping — and the answer was a 12% rejection rate from a stressed Saturday three months ago that the algo hadn't forgiven yet.
4. Reviews — and the right way to ask
Reviews on Just Eat work the same way reviews on Google work: count, average, and recency.[4]
The mistake takeaways make is asking for reviews in the bag with a printed leaflet. The customer is full, distracted, and the leaflet ends up in the bin.
A better system: send a polite text 2 hours after delivery (when the meal is over and they're settled), thanking them, and including a single one-tap link to leave a Just Eat review. The conversion rate is consistently in the 5–12% range. If you do 200 deliveries a week, that's 10–24 new reviews monthly without spending anything except a £15/month SMS account.
5. Menu engineering for the platform
Just Eat customers behave differently from in-shop customers. Three patterns we see consistently:
- Bundles outperform single items. A "Family meal for 4" listed at the top of your menu drives higher average order value than the same items priced individually.
- Top three items get 60–80% of the orders in most takeaway menus. Make sure those three are your highest-margin, fastest-to-prep dishes — not whatever was at the top of your old paper menu.
- Add a £1.99 dessert. Every Just Eat order you can push from £18 to £20 with a £2 add-on improves your effective commission rate. Customers who wouldn't order a dessert separately routinely add one when it appears at checkout.
6. The radius question
Just Eat lets you set your delivery radius. Most takeaways set it as wide as possible to maximise visibility. This is usually wrong.
The further your driver has to go, the worse your customer rating drifts (cold food, late deliveries), and the more order completion issues you collect. We've audited takeaways who shrank their radius from 5 miles to 2.5 miles and gained orders within 6 weeks because their rating recovered and they appeared higher in the listings of customers actually within range.
Test it for two weeks. If your average customer rating stays the same or improves, the smaller radius is the right call.
7. Promotions: the trap and the trick
Just Eat will repeatedly suggest you run promotions — 25% off, free delivery, "first order free." These promotions are listed prominently and do increase order volume. They also:
- Cost you 25% on top of your existing commission
- Train customers to wait for the next discount
- Bring in price-sensitive customers who don't reorder
The honest answer: a small, well-timed promotion (e.g. 15% off Tuesday-Wednesday for two weeks while you're trying to beat a quiet patch) can work. Permanent discounts shrink your margin until the platform is no longer profitable for you.
The trick most successful takeaways use: run the promotion just long enough to lift your rating and review count to a tier above your competitors, then turn it off. The visibility boost from being a 4.7-rated, busy-looking restaurant outlasts the promotion.
8. The bigger question: how much of your business should be on Just Eat?
Honest answer from a marketing studio that doesn't make any money from Just Eat one way or the other: probably less than it is now.
The Competition and Markets Authority has flagged for years that aggregator platforms can extract significant margin from small food businesses,[3] and the mathematics is unforgiving:
- Just Eat takes ~14–15% commission (and rising)
- Card processing on top adds 1–2%
- Promo discounts add 5–25% when active
- The customer is theirs, not yours — when they delete the app, they're gone
A direct ordering page on your own website pays 0.0% commission to anyone except your card processor. The hard part is getting customers to use it. The good news: most of your existing Just Eat customers live within walking distance of your shop and will use a direct site once they know it exists — especially if you give them a small loyalty incentive.
We typically advise the takeaways we work with to aim for a 50/50 split: half the orders coming through Just Eat (for new customers, discoverability and overflow), half coming through their own site (for repeat customers, direct relationship, full margin). Getting there takes 6–12 months and a real plan — not a "fancier menu PDF."
What to do this week
If you read all this and feel overwhelmed, do these four things:
- Replace the photos on your top 5 items with proper shots (one afternoon)
- Increase your prep time by 10 minutes during Friday/Saturday peak
- Set up an automated text 2 hours post-delivery asking for a review
- Cap your delivery radius at 2.5 miles for two weeks and see what happens
If you do all four for 60 days, you'll almost certainly see weekly orders go up — without paying Just Eat a penny more in promotions.
After that, the bigger conversation worth having is whether Just Eat should be 80% of your delivery revenue or 50% of it. That conversation is worth a free 20-minute call. If your kitchen does the hard part, the platform strategy shouldn't be the thing limiting you.
Sources & further reading
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