What does marketplace commission actually cost on a typical order?
Work it out rather than take a figure on trust. At a 30% full-service rate (an assumption, not a measured fact about any named company), a £24 order gives the marketplace £7.20 and leaves you £16.80. Across twenty deliveries on one Friday that is £144, and it recurs every trading day.
The arithmetic
Twenty deliveries at £24 is £480 of orders. At 30%, commission is £144. Over a six-day trading week that is £864, and across a year of similar Fridays alone it runs into five figures.
Substitute your own numbers. The rate on your own contract is the one that matters, and it is the only figure here you can check against a document you already hold.
Rates vary by market and by what the contract bundles. Lower rates usually mean you handle delivery yourself, higher ones mean the marketplace does. Compare like for like: a 15% rate where you deliver is not obviously cheaper than 30% where they do.
The part that is not on the invoice
Commission is visible. The customer relationship is not. When a marketplace holds the customer record, a regular who orders weekly is charged for every time, and you cannot contact them directly to bring them to your own channel.
That is the real recurring cost, and it compounds in the opposite direction to the commission line: the better the customer, the more it costs you to keep renting them.
Scorto charges a subscription plus a per-delivery fee only when you use its freelance network. Deliveries by your own couriers carry no per-delivery fee. On the twenty-delivery example, with twelve on your own drivers, the comparison is £144 against roughly £26. Rates are set per territory, so treat that as arithmetic to check rather than a quotation.