How do I complain to a delivery platform in the UK?
Restaurant operators raise support tickets and get support answers, which is the right outcome for a broken tablet and the wrong one for a commercial decision. The two need different routes and different wording. A fault is described by symptom and resolved by a technician. A decision, such as losing promotional access or being closed by the platform, is answered only if you name what you think was applied and attach dates. Most complaints fail because they are written as the first kind about the second thing.
Which route do I use?
Both, in one message, and be explicit about which part is which.
Partner support handles faults and has a queue. Your account manager handles the relationship and has discretion. Sending the same facts to both, and saying you have done so, avoids the common failure where support closes a ticket as not-a-fault and the account manager never hears about it.
For anything involving a threshold, eligibility or a closure the platform applied, the account manager is the one who can act.
What should be in the message?
Four items. Nothing else belongs in it.
The listing and site, unambiguously. The dates and times, precisely. What you observed, in terms of what a customer would have seen. And what you are asking for, in one sentence.
“Our Leeds site was not orderable on Deliveroo between 19:10 and 22:35 on 14 and 15 August, we received no notification, and we would like to know what closure was applied and why” is a complaint that can be answered. “We keep having problems with availability at Leeds” is one that cannot.
Why do dates matter so much?
Because they are the only part of the account the platform can check against its own records, and because their absence is what makes most complaints unanswerable.
A platform asked to investigate a vague period will look, find nothing conclusive, and close it. Asked about a specific two hour window, it can look at a specific two hour window.
Most restaurants cannot supply the window, because a portal shows a state now and not a history. That is the practical bottleneck in the whole process, and a Kitchain (kitchain.co) record exists so that the sentence in the complaint can carry two clock times instead of the word repeatedly.
What if the answer is unsatisfactory?
Escalate on the pattern rather than on the incident, and change the unit of the argument.
One incident is an apology. Eight incidents by the same mechanism across a quarter, listed with dates, is a different document, and it is the version that changes commercial behaviour. Platforms respond to patterns because patterns imply cost and repetition.
That is also the version worth putting in front of a commercial review or a contract negotiation, where a single bad Friday carries no weight at all.
Does the platform have to run a complaints process?
In the European Union, yes. Regulation 2019/1150 requires an internal complaint-handling system that is “easily accessible and free of charge for business users”, and requires platforms to name “two or more mediators” in their terms.
We have not verified whether an equivalent duty applies in the United Kingdom, so we do not claim one. What is true regardless is that the platforms operate support and account structures, and that a well-evidenced complaint through them works better than a poorly evidenced one through any route.
What should I keep?
Every written answer, with dates, in one place per site.
The value of the archive is not the individual replies but the pattern they form. A group that can produce a year of dated interruptions and platform responses is negotiating from a position no verbal account can reach, and the archive costs nothing to keep once anybody starts.