A café owner who runs a dual-pricing system effectively keeps two menus: one at the counter, and one inside a delivery app. An Americano that sells for 4,500 won in the store often shows up at 5,500 to 6,000 won on the app. According to a 2024 survey by the Korea Consumer Agency, nearly half of the restaurants listed on delivery apps charged different prices for delivery than in-store — and among cafés, that share runs above the overall average. At checkout, the customer sees the delivery fee line read zero. What doesn't show — unless you put the two screens side by side and compare — is that the food price was raised first to make that zero possible.
Dual pricing didn't appear overnight. It accumulated as delivery platforms entrenched themselves in the market and café owners, one by one, made the same choice to offset platform commissions and advertising costs. When per-order fees on a delivery channel run 10 to 15 percent, selling at in-store prices leaves nothing. Owners faced two options: keep prices uniform and lose money on every delivery order, or raise delivery prices to absorb the commission. Most chose the latter, and the accumulation of those individual decisions produced the dual-pricing landscape we see today.
In May 2026, the National Cafe Owners' Cooperative of Korea issued a public statement. It came just after reports that Coupang Eats was considering extending free delivery — until then a perk reserved for Wow membership subscribers — to ordinary, non-paying users. For anyone running a café or preparing to open one, this dispute is not just another platform-policy headline. It is a reason to recalculate how much of your revenue depends on which channel.
Where the Bill for Free Delivery Actually Goes
The mechanics of the free-delivery model are simple. The platform stops charging consumers a delivery fee, and recoups that cost through other routes: merchant commission rates, advertising bid prices, exposure algorithms. The zero the consumer sees on the delivery-fee line and what the café owner finds in the month-end settlement statement are two entirely different stories.
In its statement, the cooperative argued that delivery platforms have lured consumers with free delivery, discount coupons, and subscription services — while the actual cost has landed on small business owners. As delivery orders grow, so does the total commission a café owner pays. Raise delivery prices to offset those commissions and you get dual pricing. Don't, and each delivery order yields almost no margin, or an outright loss. The spread of dual pricing itself, the cooperative argued, is a product of this structure.
What the cooperative singled out in this statement was the timing. The reports about expanding free delivery surfaced while Korea's Fair Trade Commission is investigating Coupang over allegations of tying products to its Wow membership. The cooperative argued the timing could look like an attempt to dilute the regulator's case. It also claimed that Coupang had shown little engagement during months of negotiation over support measures for small merchants. "Platforms and small business owners should be in a symbiotic relationship, not a predatory one," said Ko Jang-soo, chairman of the cooperative. "Free delivery built on the sacrifice of small business owners is not sustainable."
The cooperative demanded that Coupang Eats halt the planned expansion of free delivery to general users. It urged the government and the Fair Trade Commission to investigate possible tying and abuse of market dominance, and called on delivery platforms broadly to put forward substantive measures to protect small, independent merchants.
The Platforms' Logic Isn't Entirely Wrong
The platforms' counterargument, however, can't simply be dismissed. Their central claim is that free delivery lowers the barrier to ordering, increases total delivery transaction volume, and thereby lifts merchants' overall monthly revenue. There really are café owners whose monthly sales grew after joining a delivery platform. By connecting them with customers who would otherwise sit outside their physical trade area, the argument goes, platforms expand the market itself.
Even among scholars who study the delivery-platform economy, interpretations diverge. Short-term gains in consumer welfare are measurable, and there are real cases where higher transaction volume benefits small merchants too. Romanticize how good café economics were before delivery platforms, and the current critique weakens. Ignore the owners who say delivery revenue carried them through a near-closure, and the debate drifts away from reality.
But the market-expansion effect of the early years is a different thing from the bargaining dynamics that set in once a platform's dominance hardens. After a platform has secured enough consumers and merchants have grown dependent, it is the platform that decides how to change commission structures and exposure algorithms. Nothing guarantees today's terms will hold tomorrow. A café earning more than 60 percent of its revenue through a single platform has little leverage to push back when conditions change — and leaving means giving up a large share of revenue on the spot, which makes it impractical.
Design Your Revenue Structure Before the Platform Does It for You
For anyone running or planning a café, this controversy raises one practical question: what share of your total revenue comes through delivery platforms, and exactly how much would your profit change if the commission terms or platform policies shifted?
A café drawing more than 70 percent of revenue from delivery will see its entire profit structure shaken by a 3-to-5-percentage-point commission increase. A café where delivery is under 20 percent of revenue — with the rest spread across walk-in customers, advance orders through a KakaoTalk channel (Korea's dominant messaging app), subscription packages, and regulars who order directly — is relatively insulated from platform policy changes. Which model is better depends on the café's location, size, and product mix. Knowing which one you are comes first.
Some cafés are already deliberately engineering their channel structure. They build mechanisms — loyalty points, stamp cards, subscription passes — to convert first-time delivery customers into in-store regulars, or establish a pickup pre-ordering routine through a KakaoTalk channel or their own reservation app. In the short term, revenue may grow more slowly than it would through platform exposure. But an order through a direct channel, free of platform commissions, nets more than the same-priced order routed through a platform. At similar revenue levels, what ends up in the owner's pocket depends on which path the orders take.
Menu composition and pricing deserve a look too. Dual pricing is a pragmatic answer to commission losses, but the wider the gap between in-store and delivery prices, the less reason customers have to visit in person. Rather than mirroring the full in-store menu on delivery, owners can narrow the delivery lineup to items that travel well, or create delivery-only sets that raise the average order value. Factoring in packaging costs and the risk of orders degrading over distance, offering everything on delivery is not necessarily the winning move. Whichever direction you choose, the starting point is the same: get the per-channel profit numbers down on paper before reacting to platform policy changes.
Café owners who have survived for the long haul tend to say the same thing. Even if you lean heavily on platform exposure in the first months, after a year or two the path to stable profitability runs through building your own customer database and managing the business around repeat visits. Keeping both — new customers acquired through platforms, regulars retained through direct channels — while consciously adjusting the ratio between them is deeply tied to a café's medium-term profitability.
This free-delivery controversy is an occasion for café owners to re-examine their own channel structure. The ones who check their per-channel profit numbers and gradually grow their direct channels before the platform changes its terms are the ones who end up with options. Fighting the expansion of free delivery is the cooperative's job; designing your own revenue structure is the owner's.
