Why your Swiggy and Zomato payout is so much lower than your sales
· 6 min read
The gap between what customers paid and what reached your bank is rarely one thing. It is a stack of deductions, several of them outside the headline commission, and together they decide whether delivery is profitable for an outlet.
From what customers paid to what you received
| Step | What comes off |
|---|---|
| Customers paid | The starting point: food, packaging and GST. |
| GST on the food | Passed to the platform, which pays it to the government. |
| Discounts you funded | Coupons and offers that come out of your share. |
| Commission | The headline rate, on the item value. |
| Other platform fees | Payment collection, long distance, membership programme fees. |
| GST on those fees | 18% on commission and fees — usually a cost to a restaurant. |
| Complaints and cancellations | Refunds for complaints, your share of cancelled orders. |
| Ads and other period charges | Advertising and charges applied to the week or month. |
| Taxes withheld | TDS and, where it applies, TCS — claimable, but not in your bank yet. |
The number that matters: the all-in cost
Add commission, fees, discounts you funded, advertising and the GST on fees, and divide by what customers paid. That is the platform's real take — often well above the headline commission. It is the figure to compare across outlets and platforms, and the one to bring to a commission negotiation.
Why the same rate costs outlets differently
- Order size: fixed fees weigh more on small baskets.
- Distance: long distance charges hit outlets serving wide areas.
- Discounting: heavy offers raise the cost per order.
- Ads: spend concentrated on one outlet lifts its cost, whatever its sales.
What to do with it
Work the all-in cost out per outlet, per platform, each month. Where it climbs, you can see why — and whether the answer is a commission conversation, fewer discounts, a different ad budget, or a claim for money that should never have been deducted.
MenuMetrics does this for every order in every file you upload: it rebuilds each payout from the platform's own columns, checks it against what settled, and lists what does not tie — with the arithmetic — ready to raise as a claim.
Reconcile every payout, not a sample
MenuMetricsreads the Swiggy and Zomato reports you already download and checks every order against what settled. Start with last month’s file.