When UberEATS approached Oscar Boyne to sign up his North Perth bar and kitchen to the online food delivery service he crunched the numbers, but just could not make it add up.

The 30 per cent commission his Old Laundry restaurant would have been charged on each meal sold through the app was just too much.

"The thought of extracting 30 per cent from my bottom line … my abacus just didn't stand up," Mr Boyne said.

He recognised the huge reach of UberEATS, but was not prepared to lose money on each dish for the sake of advertising or change the food he produced to make it work.

"UberEATS, I think probably the only way you could look at it, if you wanted to is as a marketing exercise, at best," Mr Boyne said.

UberEATS has taken the restaurant home delivery market by storm. ( Reuters: Neil Hall )

He is not the only one concerned.

The Australian Hotels Association (AHA) has warned high commissions charged by online food delivery services can artificially push up prices for customers and make the new technology unviable.

The restaurant sector disrupted

But more than 800 restaurants and other food outlets across Perth, and thousands more around the country, think differently and have signed on with UberEATS.

It is one of several similar businesses transforming the food sector.

Menulog, which claimed to be the market leader, has 10,000 restaurants on board and three million customers nationwide. Deliveroo said it was growing by 20 per cent month-on-month.

"There's clear evidence that home delivery has introduced particular restaurants and bars and pubs that are great with food to new customers through the home delivery method," AHA WA chief executive Bradley Woods said.

"It's a great way of networking and marketing through getting the food into the customer's mouth at home, and it may entice them to go to the venue to dine in as well."

Alfredo Chiella manages Bistro Bella Vista in East Perth and signed up with UberEATS as soon as it started in Perth a year ago.

Alfredo Chiella said UberEATS opened up a new market for restaurants. ( ABC News: Nicolas Perpitch )

"I found that it is working pretty well with us," Mr Chiella said.

"We definitely opened [to] a new market, we reach people that we wouldn't reach before because they wouldn't come here and get a takeaway."

His 30 per cent commission to UberEATS, which includes delivery of the food, has forced him to push up the price of some premium dishes.

But he has also been able to take down slightly the cost of popular plates, like pasta.

Overall, revenue is up and some online customers have even come into the restaurant later for the full dine-in service.

Prices artificially inflated

Despite the success stories, Mr Woods was concerned prices were being increased.

"Sometimes, 30 per cent commission just makes it unviable. So the delivery companies have got to get real, because it's pushing up prices artificially for consumers and sometimes making it unviable for the venues," he said.

"They're doing it more as a marketing or a consumer engagement process.

"But at some point, either the commissions have got to get better or venues are going to stop delivering."

Uber said its app allowed restaurants "to reach thousands of new customers and grow their business without the hassle of managing a complex delivery network".

Uber also offered restaurants 24/7 customer support, and it recently launched new features in its app to help restaurants better understand consumer demand.

It pointed to restaurants which had opened a separate takeaway online shopfront to cater for the surge in online demand.

Other service providers stressed it was in their best interest to help their restaurant partners grow.

"We simply would never want to be building a business that wasn't growing their bottom line," said Alistair Venn, Managing Director of Menulog, which as an ordering service charges a 14 per cent commission to restaurants, which then deliver the food themselves.

"And we have numerous case studies of how that does work. The other very important thing is we don't dictate to our restaurant partners how to do delivery. So, we offer a huge amount of flexibility, whether it's through pricing of delivery fees, minimum orders, what days of the week in which to operate, what times of day.

"So we really work with them and continue to tweak that to make sure that it is profitable for them."

Extra revenue attractive

Deliveroo country manager Levi Aron said his company added a new revenue stream for restaurants.

"At Deliveroo we carefully select the restaurants we have on board our platform," Mr Aron said.

"Predominantly, our restaurants don't do delivery. By that very nature, they're high-end or gourmet restaurants, so essentially what we're doing with our restaurants, we're adding a new category to their business.

A common complaint by customers was food sometimes took too long to arrive and the quality was not consistently as good as it should be. It was something delivery services were acutely aware of.

"We understand the differences between the different cuisines, how they travel, what they need to do," Mr Aron said.

"The way we build our business, the technology that we have enables [the journey] from restaurant to customer to take approximately seven minutes. On top of that we add prep time, the time the rider takes to get to the restaurant."