What Amazon's Uber Eats deal actually means for a pizzeria, a bakery and a full-service restaurant

Amazon said Thursday that Prime members can order from Uber Eats inside Amazon with a $0 delivery fee on orders of $25 or more, and TechCrunch reported that the Grubhub arrangement ends the same day. We covered the announcement itself this morning. This piece is about the other side of the order: the restaurant.

The number behind the number: what a $25 order costs you

Neither company has said who funds the waived delivery fee or whether restaurants pay a different rate on orders that start in Amazon. We checked what Uber publishes. Its merchant pricing page lists a marketplace fee of 20% on the Lite plan, 25% on Plus and 30% on Premium, 15% if you use your own drivers, and a 7% fee on pickup. The same page says a commission-free webshop costs 2.5% plus $0.29 an order. Lite starts at 15% in some cities, including New York, Los Angeles and Seattle. We are assuming the percentage applies to a $25 food subtotal, which the page does not spell out.

On a $25 order	Fee	Restaurant keeps
Uber Eats, Lite (20%)	$5.00	$20.00
Uber Eats, Plus (25%)	$6.25	$18.75
Uber Eats, Premium (30%)	$7.50	$17.50
Own drivers on Uber Eats (15%)	$3.75	$21.25
Your own webshop (2.5% + $0.29)	$0.92	$24.08

Chronicle arithmetic from Uber's published list. Payment processing and any local fee rules may add to these figures.

One more reading: a free-delivery push can add orders without improving the margin on any of them. If an extra 100 Prime orders of $25 arrive in a month on the Plus plan, that is $2,500 of sales and $625 of fees.

Three businesses, three different answers

The pizzeria. Delivery is already half the business, and a $32 average ticket (our example) clears the $25 line easily. At 25% the fee is $8.00, so the shop keeps $24.00. If the shop prices the same pie the same on its own site, the webshop fee is $1.09 and it keeps $30.91. Each order that moves from the app to your own number or site is worth about $7 here. The Amazon deal does not change that; it just puts more customers inside someone else's app.

The neighborhood bakery or coffee shop. The $0 fee only applies at $25, and a typical coffee-and-pastry order is far below it (our example: $11). The customer would have to add $14 of food to qualify. That nudges people to order for the office, which can help a bakery that sells trays and dozens, and does little for a shop selling single drinks. This is our reading of the threshold, not something either company said.

The full-service restaurant. Take a $25 order on Premium at 30%: $7.50 in fees. If the food and packaging cost $9 (our example), $8.50 is left before labor, rent and the cost of a remake. On Lite at 20% it is $11. The bigger question is whether a Prime member orders from you because Amazon made it easy, or just moved an order you would have received anyway.

What to do

• Do not change plans on this news alone. Pull your last three Uber Eats statements and write down which plan you are on and what you actually paid.
• Ask your rep two things in writing: do orders placed through Amazon carry the same fee, and will they be labeled so you can count them?
• Count Grubhub orders for the next three weeks. If a meaningful share came from Prime members, you will see it fall. Amazon's own announcement and TechCrunch both say the Grubhub tie-up ends.
• Put your own ordering link on every bag. A card inside the bag costs a few cents. The gap in the table is the reason.

There are

605,380 independent restaurants are listed on CheckThisBiz, a directory of 7,704,724 independent US businesses, including 79,108 in CA, 54,058 in TX, 51,387 in NY. Chains and franchises are excluded from that count, so these are the owner-operated businesses that actually apply for funding.

Our restaurant playbook and coffee shop playbook cover the cost lines to track.

Sources: Amazon; TechCrunch; Uber Eats merchant pricing (read Nov. 5, 2026; fees vary by market and plan); Yahoo Finance; CheckThisBiz counts. Ticket sizes and food costs are examples, not data. This is information, not financial advice.