Baemin and Coupang Eats now control 88.3% of Korea’s food delivery market combined, an all-time high as of May 2026. That dominance is exactly why the fees feel the way they do, why your rider never has your real phone number (a system called anshim beonho, 안심번호), and why a 4-star review can read like an insult to the restaurant owner. I work in IT at a Korean financial company, and once I started tracing where a single delivery order’s money actually goes, I couldn’t stop.
A few weeks back I wrote about the steel container our fried chicken shows up in when we order near the Han River — the whole zero-plastic return-bin system my kid is now obsessed with. This time I wanted to follow the money instead of the packaging.
Just How Dominant Are Baemin and Coupang Eats?
“Duopoly” isn’t an exaggeration here. In the second week of May 2026, Baemin and Coupang Eats together held 88.3% of the market by weekly active users — the highest combined share either app has posted. Everyone else is losing ground, not just losing the race.
| App | Weekly Active Users (May 2026) | Direction |
|---|---|---|
| Baemin (배달의민족) | 15.24 million | Still growing, still #1 |
| Coupang Eats | 8.45 million | Closing the gap |
| Yogiyo (요기요) | 2.03 million | Shrinking |
| Ddangyeoyo (땡겨요) | 1.10 million | Shrinking |
Baemin (배달의민족, Baedal-ui Minjok, literally “the nation’s delivery”) is the one my building’s group chat defaults to, and honestly most of my coworkers only open Coupang Eats when a specific restaurant isn’t listed on Baemin. Yogiyo used to be a real third option a few years ago; now it’s under two million weekly users and the gap keeps widening. When two apps hold nearly nine out of ten orders, they don’t need to compete on price with each other so much as manage what restaurants and riders will tolerate — which is exactly where the fee structure comes in.
Where Does My ₩20,000 Chicken Order Actually Go?
Since February 26, 2025, Baemin has run something called sangsaeng yogeumje (상생요금제, sang-saeng yo-geum-je, literally “coexistence fee system”), which replaced a flat 9.8% commission with a tiered rate based on how much a restaurant sells.
| Restaurant revenue tier | Commission | Delivery fee charged to restaurant |
|---|---|---|
| Top 35% by revenue | 7.8% | ₩2,400–3,400 per order |
| Next 35–80% | 6.8% | ₩1,900–3,100 per order (₩2,100–3,100 for the 35–50% slice, ₩1,900–2,900 for 50–80%) |
| Bottom 20% | 2.0% | ₩1,900–2,900 per order |
Established chicken franchises almost always land in that top 35% bracket, so I ran the actual math on the ₩20,000 fried chicken my family ordered last month. At 7.8% commission, Baemin takes ₩1,560 off the top. Add the merchant-side delivery fee — I’ll use the midpoint of the published ₩2,400–3,400 range, about ₩2,900 — and the restaurant has already lost ₩4,460 before a single ingredient cost is counted. That’s 22.3% of what we paid for the food, gone before the store sees it.
Then there’s the part I paid separately: the line labeled 배달팁 (baedal-tip, “delivery tip”) on the checkout screen, which despite the name isn’t a tip at all — nobody hands the rider extra cash, and it’s baked into the total before you check out. Ours came to ₩3,000, well inside the ₩1,000–5,000 range these apps typically charge. Add that on top of the food price and I paid ₩23,000 for a ₩20,000 chicken. Of that ₩23,000, ₩7,460 — just over 32% — never reaches the restaurant in connection with the food itself.
That number lines up uncomfortably well with what 참여연대 (Chamyeoyeondae), a civic watchdog group, found when it audited three Baemin merchants in 2025: combined commission and delivery fees eating up 26 to 30 percent of the order price on lower-cost menu items, in one case a ₩15,000 order carrying ₩4,500 in total fees. My chicken order wasn’t an outlier — it’s roughly the system working as designed.
What none of that ₩7,460 pool tells you is how much actually lands in the rider’s pocket. Baemin doesn’t publish that split; it’s calculated per order based on distance and time through an algorithm nobody outside the company sees. What I do know is that whoever rode it to my door that night never once saw the real phone number I used to check on the order.
What Is 안심번호 (Anshim Beonho), and Why Doesn’t My Rider Have My Real Number?
Anshim beonho (안심번호, an-sim beon-ho, literally “safe number” or “reassurance number”) is a temporary, randomly generated virtual phone number assigned to a single order. Riders, restaurants, and customers all contact each other through it instead of exchanging real numbers, and once the order is marked delivered, that number simply switches off. Baemin was the first delivery app in Korea to build this in, and every major competitor has since copied the pattern.
At work, my team handles something structurally similar for call verification on scam-prevention flows, so recognizing the pattern here didn’t surprise me — masked, single-use numbers are a standard fraud-mitigation trick in Korean fintech, not something Baemin invented from scratch. What did surprise me was realizing how much friction it quietly removes: no rider building a call history of customer numbers, no customer worrying a delivery complaint turns into a random text message three weeks later. It’s a small piece of infrastructure, but it’s the reason a stranger on a scooter can call me about a missing side of pickled radish without either of us learning anything about the other.
Why Does a 4-Star Rating Feel Like a Complaint in Korea?
I left four stars on an order a few months back — the food was fine, just slower than usual — and got a message from the restaurant within the hour asking what had gone wrong. That reaction isn’t paranoia on the owner’s part; it’s backed by data. A 2022 survey by a lawmaker-affiliated policy institute found that 74.3% of small business owners say delivery app ratings and reviews directly affect their sales, and 63.3% say they’ve personally experienced what’s called 별점 테러 (byeoljeom teleo, byeol-jeom te-reo, literally “star-point terrorism”) — a coordinated or spiteful string of low ratings, sometimes from a single unhappy customer, sometimes from a competitor.
With numbers like that hanging over every order, five stars has quietly become the neutral, default rating and anything below it reads as a genuine problem rather than “pretty good, minor issue.” It’s the inverse of how I rate things back on, say, a hotel app, where four stars out of five is a compliment. Here, four stars is a restaurant owner refreshing their dashboard wondering what they did wrong — and given how thin the margins already are after the commission and delivery-fee cut, a bad rating streak can matter as much as the fee structure itself.
Will Uber Buying Delivery Hero’s Stake in Baemin Change My Bill?
In July 2026, Uber offered to buy Delivery Hero’s operations across 50 countries — including its majority stake in Baemin — for roughly €13 billion (about $14.8 billion) in cash. If regulators approve it, the deal isn’t expected to close until the second half of 2027.
Delivery Hero has been Baemin’s controlling shareholder since a deal struck in 2019 and finalized in 2021 (Korean regulators made it sell off its other local app, Yogiyo, to approve it), so this wouldn’t even be Baemin’s first foreign owner — it would be its second. What changes with Uber specifically is less clear. Uber runs Uber Eats in dozens of markets and has its own commission playbook; whether that gets imported into Baemin’s already-controversial fee structure, or whether Korean regulators use the ownership change as leverage to push rates down further, is genuinely open. Nothing in the deal terms locks in a fee change either direction, and eighteen months is a long runway for a lot to shift before it closes.
For now, I’m not switching to Coupang Eats just because Baemin’s fee structure looks worse on paper — delivery speed and restaurant selection near our apartment still tip it back to Baemin most nights. But I’ve started actually reading the fee line on the receipt before ordering from a small place I want to stay in business, which I never bothered doing before I ran these numbers.
FAQ: What Foreigners Ask Me About Korean Delivery Apps
Is Baemin or Coupang Eats bigger in Korea?
Baemin remains larger, with about 15.24 million weekly active users versus Coupang Eats’ 8.45 million as of May 2026. Together, though, they control 88.3% of the market — an all-time high — while smaller apps like Yogiyo and Ddangyeoyo keep shrinking.
Do I need to tip my delivery rider in Korea?
No. Korea has no US-style tipping culture for food delivery. The “delivery tip” (배달팁, baedal-tip) shown at checkout, usually ₩1,000 to ₩5,000, is a fixed charge built into your order total, not a gratuity you add on top for the rider.
What is 안심번호 (anshim beonho) and why do I see it instead of a real number?
Anshim beonho is a temporary, randomly generated virtual phone number that Baemin pioneered so riders, restaurants, and customers never exchange real numbers. It’s tied to one specific order and deactivates automatically once the delivery is marked complete.
Will delivery get more expensive if Uber buys Delivery Hero’s stake in Baemin?
It’s not guaranteed. The roughly €13 billion deal announced in July 2026 still needs regulatory approval and isn’t expected to close until the second half of 2027, so any effect on commissions or fees is speculation until that process plays out.