It's a more common situation than most owners expect: a restaurant discovers it has an active listing on a delivery marketplace, complete with a menu and prices, that nobody on staff set up. It's usually found by accident — a customer mentions ordering delivery from a restaurant that doesn't offer delivery, or a Google listing shows a "delivery" option the owner never enabled.
This happens because some marketplaces have historically built listings from publicly available menus and business information rather than waiting for a restaurant to sign up directly. The listing is live, taking real orders, before the owner has agreed to anything.
Beyond the obvious commission question, an unauthorized listing creates two concrete risks:
Every major marketplace has a merchant portal. Claiming the listing gives the restaurant control over pricing, hours, and menu accuracy immediately — even before deciding whether to keep it active at all.
Once claimed, the restaurant can choose to keep the listing (with accurate pricing and terms it actually agreed to), adjust the commission tier, or request removal. The point is that it becomes a decision instead of something that happened by default.
Whether or not the restaurant keeps the marketplace listing, having its own ordering site means regulars and repeat customers have a place to order directly — at full margin, with the restaurant controlling every price and every order detail.
If a restaurant is already dealing with this, the immediate fix is claiming the listing. The longer-term fix is making sure the next customer who wants to order direct has somewhere to do it.