Build a Yemeksepeti-like food ordering site

If you take Yemeksepeti as a model, “Turkey’s largest” is not enough. How the platform grew, when it was sold and where orders come from today all feed directly into your first-release decisions.

The first decision is to separate the three businesses people lump together as a “food app.” Capital need, software scope and the path to customers are not the same.

Turkey already has established examples of all three models. Single-restaurant channels are the chains’ own apps. On the aggregator-marketplace side stands Yemeksepeti. Delivery in minutes from an owned warehouse is the setup people mean when they say Getir or build a Getir-style food site. The same software core can be used; they diverge on who owns the stock, the kitchen and the courier.

A single revenue line rarely keeps food delivery alive, because every order carries a concrete kitchen and courier cost. The six lines below are the ones used most often in practice.

At the start, keep the table simple with the commission + delivery fee pair. A five-line, hard-to-read invoice deters a restaurant that does not yet trust the platform. Add featured-listing and promotion revenue only after a regular order flow exists.

To see in more detail how these revenue lines come together in a marketplace model, review the examples on how a marketplace site makes money.

Write the order math on paper before you start recruiting restaurants. Food platforms usually close not because of the software, but because they notice too late that they lose money on every order. The table is a sample scenario; fill it with your own commission and courier numbers. The percentage here is not an official Yemeksepeti tariff.

The only difference between the two columns is density: the same courier makes 5 deliveries in an hour instead of 3. In food, density does not come from a marketing budget—it comes from a tight zone + short kitchen wait. Three orders in the same neighborhood outperform three orders spread across three districts by a wide margin. In a shopkeeper complaint that reached the Ombudsman Institution, commission plus carriage was claimed to hit 32% together, and 60% with extra fees; that is not an official tariff, but it shows how sensitive the restaurant side is. Whatever your rate, the restaurant seeing every line in the panel is, as of 2026, both a trust issue and a regulatory one.

• Take the minimum basket seriously. A single portion plus a distant address will not cover courier cost.
• Grow the basket. Drinks, extras and menu suggestions are the most natural basket-building tools in food.
• Manage peak hours. The 12:00–14:00 and 18:00–21:00 windows decide the entire courier plan.
• Measure cancel and “unavailable” rates. An item that appears on the menu but is not in the kitchen loses both the courier and the customer.

In classic e-commerce the address comes at checkout. In food ordering the address is the first step: which restaurants are listed, the minimum basket, the delivery fee and the promised time all depend on the address. On top of that, each kitchen adds its own prep time.

A zone and restaurant definition should carry at least these seven facts together:

• Zone boundary: An area drawn on the map or a list of neighborhoods. Orders outside the boundary must not be accepted.
• Restaurants that serve the zone: If more than one kitchen serves the same address, the ranking rule (distance, rating, prep time or paid featured listing).
• Open/closed and opening hours: Taking an order from a closed restaurant is the most common cause of cancellation.
• Promised prep time: How long the restaurant needs after accepting the order before it is ready for handover. That time is what triggers courier assignment.
• Minimum basket and delivery fee: A tiered tariff by zone and time of day.
• Estimated delivery time: Prep plus average travel. An inflated time promise is the most expensive mistake.
• Menu variation: Spicy, rare/well done, extra toppings, items to leave out. In food ordering these are not a “stock field”—they are the order itself.

When people say “build a Yemeksepeti-like app,” agencies often pitch a from-scratch Flutter or React Native build. Restaurant agreements, the commission table and courier rules take as long as the software. A ready food delivery app stack compresses the code into weeks and leaves you with the kitchen and zone work.

What matters is that the stack you choose actually covers food operations: restaurant application and approval, menu variations, order-status flow, commission and payouts, cancel/refund, audit logs. To see how the panels work in practice, watch our training videos.

The first release is not about covering every feature. It is about one order flowing cleanly from the restaurant to the customer. The six headings below form the core of a food delivery app.

Yemeksepeti runs both the restaurant’s own courier and the platform courier (Express) in the same ecosystem. A new platform has three reasonable options; you do not have to stand all of them up on day one.

Whichever model you choose, the software needs the same facts: whose courier has the order, what the status is, how long prep took, how long it stayed on the road. A delivery time you do not measure cannot be improved. Make sure those records work before you add a Yemeksepeti Express-style layer.

Yemeksepeti’s 2025 figures said 96% of orders came from the mobile app. In 2014, 64% of orders still came from the website; the ratio flipped over the last decade. Even the platform itself grew on the web first. Building a food ordering app is the right long-term move; it is not required as the first step.

The practical sequence is this: first open a mobile-responsive food ordering website, take real orders with neighborhood restaurants, and see how many customers come back in 30 days. Building a food ordering app comes after that data; otherwise store accounts and maintenance cost get tied to a model you have not tested yet.

The sequence below is written to start in a single neighborhood and reach a scalable food marketplace. The order of the steps matters: each one reduces the risk of the next.

Food delivery does not need complex reports. Watching these four metrics regularly in the early period will steer most of your decisions.

Track these four metrics in the same table every week. If order count is rising while contribution margin or accept speed is falling, it is time to pause growth and review the restaurant and zone setup.

We cover what must change in the stack as order volume grows on the high-volume marketplace software requirements page.

There is no single answer to “how much does it cost to build a Yemeksepeti-like site,” because the largest line is often operations, not software. The four factors below shape the budget directly.

Custom software from scratch often starts in the hundreds of thousands of lira, while ready online food ordering software lets you start a market test in the first zone in weeks, on a much smaller budget. Put most of the budget into winning restaurants and the first customer experience, not into the software.

For a line-by-line budget breakdown and timeline, see from-scratch software cost and planning.

For more questions, you can also visit the Frequently Asked Questions page.

There are two main paths for the model on this page. Compare the packages by the number of zones, the number of restaurants and the order volume you are targeting, and start with the right scope.

Building a food ordering site without writing code—using Softomi marketplace software—and running restaurant operations from the panel is possible. After you pick a package the process continues as setup, panel settings, delivery zones, onboarding restaurants and payment integration. Leave a demo request to talk through your project, or call us directly.