Fees: delivery fees and order fees

Fees cover the real cost of getting food to the door, without baking it into every meal price. Your site adds them at checkout for you, shows each one by name, and waives them when you say so.

Find them under Orders & Payments > Fees. The page needs the Admin Edit Fees feature, listed on the Features page.

The fees you can add

Delivery fee. Added to home delivery and shipped orders. Not added to pickup orders.
Order fee. Added to every order, pickup or delivery. Use it for a packaging, service or small-order fee.
Tip. Optional amounts the customer can choose to add. See "Collecting tips" below.

Every fee is money you collect from your customers. It is not a charge from us to you. More on that in "Where the money goes" below.

Creating a fee

Click New Fee and fill in:

Fee Type: delivery, order or tip.
Public Fee Name: what the customer sees at checkout, for example "Delivery" or "Eco packaging".
Internal Description: a note for your team.
Amount and Amount Type: a flat amount, or a percent of the order subtotal.
Applies to All Users, or pick Applicable Users for a fee that applies only to certain customers.
Delivery Region Code (optional): the fee applies only to addresses in that region. See Delivery regions: where you deliver and what it costs.
Waive for orders with $0 subtotal: skip the fee when a discount, such as a Free Order, brings the meals to zero. Credits and a gift card pay for the order and do not lower the subtotal, so this box does not apply to them.

Flat amount or percentage?

A flat fee is the same on every order: $5 delivery is $5 whether the order is $40 or $400. Customers find it easy to understand, and it covers costs that do not grow with the order, such as a driver's time.
A percent fee is a share of the order subtotal: a 3% service fee is $1.20 on a $40 order and $12 on a $400 order. It grows with the order, which suits costs that grow with it, such as packaging or card fees on large orders.

A common mix: a flat delivery fee, plus a small percent service fee. Keep an eye on large orders with percent fees; a big catering order can carry a big fee.

The fee type and amount type are set when you create the fee. To change them, make a new fee and turn the old one off.

Which fee a customer pays

Every active order fee that fits the customer is added.
For delivery, the customer pays one delivery fee: the lowest one that fits their region. A fee set for that customer is never replaced by a cheaper fee meant for everyone.
Fees with the same type and name are never charged twice.

This makes tiered delivery easy: a cheap fee for your core zip codes, a higher fee for the outer ring, and no fee for your best customers.

Waiving fees

On a location: Delivery Fee Waived (for all customers), or Delivery Fee Waived (for customers on active Meal Plans). See How to add a new pickup location.
On a meal plan: Deliveries Included.
On a discount: Waive Delivery Fees or Waive Order Fees. A Free Order discount starts with both ticked. No discount waives a tip. "Free delivery this week" is one discount code. See How to create discounts.

Where the money goes

Owners sometimes read "Fees" and think it is what Eat Fresh charges them. It is the opposite. Fees are your charges to your customers:

A fee is added to the customer's order total at checkout, with its name, so the customer sees what they pay for.
The customer pays it with the rest of the order, through your payment processor.
It lands in your processor account with the order, like the meal prices do.

Your Monthly Sales & Tax report shows it too. Site Fees is the fees your customers paid. Credits and Gift Cards are what customers paid with their credits and gift cards. Gross Sales is subtotal plus fees plus tax, less credits and gift cards: what the customer paid through your processor. The processor's fee and the Eat Fresh usage fee are shown separately, as Processing Fees and App Fees, and Net Paid is what reaches you. See Your reports: a tour of the Reports page. What Eat Fresh charges you lives on a different page: Your Eat Fresh billing page: plan, invoices, SMS credits and payments.

Collecting tips

Tips are fees too, with the fee type tip. Each active tip fee is one button the customer can pick at checkout, in the "Confirm and submit your order" step. The customer taps the call to action, picks an amount, and clicks Add tip. They can change or remove it before they submit.

Turn it on with the Order Tips toggle on the Features page. Your site starts with four tip buttons: $1, $3, $5 and $10. Change them, turn some off, or add your own under Orders & Payments > Fees.

The words around the tip are yours to edit: the tip's name, the call to action ("Want to add a tip?"), and who it goes to ("How much do you want to tip the team?"). They are site copy under Content > Other Content; search for "tips". See Site content: your pages, words and pictures.

Ideas that work:

Tip the driver. Name the recipient "driver". If you use built-in routing, the Driver Tips sheet shows tips by driver and by stop, ready to pay out. See Delivery routing: the best route for every driver.
Tip the kitchen. Name the recipient "kitchen team" and share the total at the end of each week.
Percent tips for bigger orders: 10%, 15% and 20% buttons feel natural on a catering order.
Give back. Name it "Donation" and the recipient "food bank", and pass it on each month. Say so on your FAQ page.

Tips arrive in your processor account with the order, like other fees. Paying them out to your team is up to you.

Fees on a pending order

Staff can add or remove a fee on a single pending order, and tick Skip Auto-Assigned Fees so the site does not add its own on a manual finalize. See Pending orders: what they are and how finalizing works.

Finding your fees

The Show Global and Show Inactive switches and the fee type and region filters narrow the list. Export to CSV downloads it. Owner and Manager create and edit fees. To remove a fee, untick Active and click Update.

Keywords: delivery charge, surcharge, gratuity, convenience fee

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