Swiggy and Zomato Commission: How Much It Really Costs, and How to Price For It

What Swiggy and Zomato actually take from every order once GST, payment fees and ads are added in, and how to price your menu differently on each channel without losing track of your margin.

Every restaurant that lists on Swiggy or Zomato knows the commission is not small. Fewer know the real, all-in number — or have a clean way to price their menu differently on each channel to protect their margin instead of quietly eating the commission on every single order.

What Swiggy and Zomato actually charge

Base commission for a single-outlet restaurant typically runs in the 18–30% range on both platforms, varying by city, cuisine, order volume and the specific agreement in place — there is no one published rate, and it is worth checking your own current rate card rather than assuming. On top of the base commission, GST is charged on the commission itself, and most restaurants also carry payment gateway charges, any restaurant-funded discounts or ad spend they've opted into, and packaging costs the platform does not cover. Once all of that is added up, the effective cost of an aggregator order commonly lands well above the headline commission number — restaurants report all-in costs anywhere from the high-20s to 40% of the order value once everything is accounted for. Always confirm your own numbers directly from your platform dashboard and your agreement — rates and terms change, and negotiated deals vary restaurant to restaurant.

Why your dine-in price doesn't work on Swiggy

If a dish is priced at ₹240 for dine-in and you list it at ₹240 on Zomato too, a 25% all-in commission means you keep ₹180 from that sale — the same labour, the same ingredients, for 25% less. Most restaurants already know this instinctively, which is why menu prices on aggregator apps are almost always higher than the price at the counter. The problem is usually not knowing this is necessary — it's doing it consistently, for every item, without it turning into a spreadsheet nobody keeps updated.

Pricing by channel, properly

The clean way to handle this is to treat "price on Swiggy" and "price on Zomato" as their own thing, separate from your dine-in price, rather than a mental surcharge someone has to remember to add at billing time. A restaurant-wide markup percentage per channel — say, 20% over dine-in for Zomato, 22% for Swiggy, whatever covers your actual commission on each — means every item is priced correctly the moment it's added to an order for that channel, with no one having to do the maths per dish. Any individual item can still be given its own fixed price on a channel where the standard markup doesn't fit — a dish where a round number reads better, or a loss-leader you deliberately don't mark up to stay competitive on delivery. A flat packaging fee per order, specific to delivery and aggregator orders, covers the box/bag cost that dine-in never has.

Own delivery vs. the aggregators

If you also run your own delivery — no Swiggy or Zomato commission, but you're carrying the packaging and possibly your own rider — the same channel-pricing idea applies with its own markup and packaging fee, usually smaller than an aggregator's since you're not paying 20%+ commission on it. This is also the channel where staying visible on price actually helps you: a guest choosing between your own ordering link and Swiggy will often go with whichever is cheaper, and your own channel can afford to be.

What to check before you commit to a number

• Pull your actual commission rate from each platform's dashboard, not the number you were quoted at sign-up — deals get renegotiated and can change without much notice.
• Add GST on the commission and your payment gateway fee before deciding your markup, not after.
• Decide whether packaging is a separate line or baked into the item price — either works, but pick one and apply it consistently.
• Revisit the markup when a platform changes its commission, not once a year on autopilot.

Where EasyBills fits

EasyBills lets you set a channel for each aggregator (and your own delivery), with its own markup percentage applied automatically to every item, a flat packaging fee per order on that channel, and the option to override the price on any single item where the standard markup doesn't fit — so a Swiggy order and a dine-in order for the same dish charge the right amount for that channel without anyone doing the arithmetic by hand. Swiggy and Zomato orders themselves arrive in the POS on their own and go straight to the kitchen, and the prices you set can be sent to both apps with your menu, photos and serving hours.