13 ms·

Grubhub is using fake websites to drive up commission fees from real businesses

405 points by 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

wpasc 7y ago
Is it just me or are these restaurant adjacent businesses involved in some really bad practices. Between Yelp and Seamless, it seems to me that a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship will not form organically. (I'm referring to how Yelp can be predatorial to businesses to make them pay yelp or have Yelp negatively affect that business' yelp rating. There are plenty of articles showing this but data is hard to come by)
- djmips 7y ago
  It feels like they all want to ascend to that nirvana where they monopolize and get to charge a fee on everything like iTunes.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    Surprisingly enough. I use a lot of things in the App Store (which I assume you meant) without paying a dime to Apple - including Amazon digital purchases and prime video, Hulu, Netflix, Office 365, Udemy and DirecTVNow. Most of the money Apple makes from the App Store are for in app consumables from games. Admittedly there are still a lot of legacy subscriptions from both Netflix and Spotify before they pulled out of going through Apple for subscriptions.
    - jimmaswell 7y ago
      the devs had to pay big fees to apple to get the app posted
      - Cenk 7y ago
        $99 / year
      - saagarjha 7y ago
        $99 is almost nothing for a large company, who likely gives Apple a lot more money via the 30% cut.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        $99/year is a “big fee”? I pay slightly more than that for my Resharper license.
    - jacurtis 7y ago
      But the companies that operate those apps are paying Apple. So Apple still gets their cut. The same goes for Yelp or GrubHub. You can use Yelp for free, but Yelp is generally preying on local businesses to force the businesses to pay Yelp because of Yelp's distribution online. GrubHub often has free delivery, but they are charging huge commissions to the restaurant you order from. Someone always pays. It is the way the world works.
      - eridius 7y ago
        The $99 yearly developer program fee is hardly Apple getting "their cut".
      - scarface74 7y ago
        Paying Apple for what? What money is Apple getting when you subscribe for services outside of the App Store?
        Domenic_S 7y ago
        The app store offers subscriptions. If you subscribe to, say, netflix or hulu using an ios app, apple collects 15-30% of the subscription revenue. Netflix fairly publicly killed the app store subscription payment method in the beginning of the year because of this.
        scarface74 7y ago
        That was just the point. At no time did you have to go through the App Store to get s Netflix subscription. You could always go through the Netflix website. Netflix chose to use the App Store as a method for payment even though they didn’t have to. They decided it was worth the trade off. Plenty of subscription services decided it wasn’t from day one.
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
  Restaurants are probably the most common type of "offline" business and their owners tend not to be tech-savvy. Couple that with them working long hours and living in their own bubble and it's no surprise that this kind of thing just doesn't get dealt with. Perhaps the ambulance chasing lawyers should turn their attention to these aggrieved restaurant owners next. They'd have a field day.
MattyMc 7y ago
Crazy to think the people who wrote this shady script probably reads HackerNews. This is all kinds of immoral.
- svskeptic 7y ago
  Yet another shiny example of money vs. ethics in the Valley. Also, don't look towards the engineers, who may or may not have known. Look towards the money. Who are the VCs invested in them and how many of them knew and encouraged that in the name of growth? And, of course, the executives.
  - vanadium 7y ago
    GrubHub is based in Chicago, however.
    - svskeptic 7y ago
      Benchmark, DAG & Lightspeed... all Valley VCs.
    - notfromhere 7y ago
      the valley isn't just a place, its a state of mind.
      - HNLurker2 7y ago
        This is my new phone wallpaper image
- gruez 7y ago
  Not really. Elsewhere in this thread, people pointed out that there's a clause in the contract that allows this. So whoever was higher up probably told them (rightly), that it was a service that restaurant owners wanted. I mean, who doesn't a free website generated for their business? They'd need to dig deep to find how it was harming the business.
jpeg_hero 7y ago
I guess not illegal, but super shady. Pretty easy to see how incremental thinking leads to a shady result. We get paid $X per order from our restaurant clients, they like more orders so if we can get them more, they’ll be happier and pay us more -> improve SEO of Grubhub<dot>com -> works -> what else can we do -> use our seo skills -> register other websites do seo -> more orders. Bad result, but know how they got there.
- m-ee 7y ago
  Are there no trademark issues from using the restaurant's official logos? These restaurants may not have filed on everything they should have and probably don't have the resources to fight it regardless, but what if they did? A large company would definitely send a C&D immediately for actions like this.
  - btown 7y ago
    The Grubhub terms of service almost certainly include a license to use the name and any trademarks for purposes including these shadow sites.
    - chrshawkes 7y ago
      And it will almost certainly land them in a huge class action lawsuit. The SEO damage done to small businesses makes them almost reliant upon GrubHub after making the mistake of doing business with them in the first place. Terms of Service can say whatever it wants it's not an official legal document, just something they turn to when their ethics violations get exposed.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bredren 7y ago
  It’s also now harder for the restaurants to leave? They may get lazy with advertising more generally and then would lose a lot if GH shut down the sites as a result?
arbuge 7y ago
If you read the article to the end they claim they're not cybersquatting. Sounds pretty disingenuous to me. One of the rationales given is that they'll transfer the domain to the restaurant if the latter requests it. Most of those restaurant owners probably won't know what's going on, or who to ask to have the domain transferred to them, or that they could even ask. Edit: The text of their response is quite curious. In part it reads: "Additionally, we have registered domains on their behalf, consistent with our restaurant contracts. We no longer provide that service..." If I were to guess, the fact that they'd be registering these domains was something slipped into the small print of their original contracts. Most restaurant owners probably wouldn't have noticed or understood the implications. The practice could have then been discontinued once it served its purposes of getting (or helping to get) Grubhub up to scale.
- bredren 7y ago
  Restaurants and their owners are notoriously bad at the internet. I have a friend in Seattle who became known as a reliable web developer for new restaurants. He took credit to eat rather than cash to do this relatively simple work for them. As a result, every time I’d visit we’d eat at some nice newer place on his credit line, responsible only for tips. It felt like minor celebrity. I suppose this is what newer website platforms are for but frankly I think even weebly is somehow too much for many.
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    > He took credit to eat rather than cash to do this relatively simple work for them. The good old tax dodge.
    - jtc331 7y ago
      Meh, it’s still taxable income that has to be reported :)
      - jacquesm 7y ago
        Shall we bet on whether it was reported or not?
eonw 7y ago
oh wow, tech companies doing shitty things to their "affiliates" and "partners"? nothing amazes me about these scummy companies anymore.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
I'm now getting 401s for a bunch of these Grubhub-created fake sites. Did they take them down already, or am I hitting a geoblock? (Not in the US.) http://www.pochana.net/ http://www.pochana.net/ http://bestpizzali.com/ http://bestpizzali.com/
- reustle 7y ago
  Works for me as soon as I turn on a VPN using a USA server. Also fun that they call the websites vanity websites: "utm_medium=whitelabel_vanitywebsite"
- lemoncucumber 7y ago
  Those URLs work for me, no 401.
  - nefitty 7y ago
    Same here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- lostsock 7y ago
  I get the following error when trying to view those sites from Australia: Sorry about that You do not have permission to view this site
  - oriettaxx 7y ago
    same same from Turkey
benatkin 7y ago
From their statement: "As a service to our restaurants, we have created microsites for them as another source of orders and to increase their online brand presence. Additionally, we have registered domains on their behalf, consistent with our restaurant contracts. We no longer provide that service and it has always been our practice to transfer the domain to the restaurant as soon as they request it." What service do they no longer provide? Registering domains on their behalf, or microsites, or both? Going forward are they going to have the company register their domain themselves and point it to GrubHub?
bpicolo 7y ago
Eat24 was doing this prior to the Grubhub purchase. Perhaps they picked it up from there? (It's also possible this started with grubhub and then bled to Eat24 I suppose). It's also for SEO, not just commissions.
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  Maybe we should create a comprehensive list of these bad companies / bad actors? Something like: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master...
JustSomeNobody 7y ago
Another day, another company doing something scummy. I'm getting to the point where I just don't want to check my feeds anymore.
- aitchnyu 7y ago
  No news is good news. Shit's been happening since time immemorial. Your awareness could be valuable. When the bad guy looks forward to his day, the good guy shouldn't put up a weak effort.
saravana85 7y ago
Its a big scam. Registering 23,00 fake domain names and getting commission from them is not at all acceptable. They need to be fined.
arcticfox 7y ago
In related news, the FTC sued and won a $1.4 million settlement [0] from a concert ticket company in 2014. They basically place search engine ads that sound like the venue, and use a domain that look like it should be the official one for the venue. Remarkably, this company is still operating and still doing largely the same thing in violation of the consent decree. I found out about it when my mom tried to buy tickets from the Hult Center in Eugene OR, and lost $500 on 'hult.centereugene.com' thinking it was the official venue. [0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/07/ticketnetwork-marketing-partners-ryadd-secure-box-office-settle https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/07/ticke...
ajxs 7y ago
Surely this has 'class-action lawsuit' written all over it. I can't speak with any authority regarding US law, but surely there are grounds for legal action being taken against GrubHub.
- LorenPechtel 7y ago
  They are using content from the real sites. Copyright violation.
ycombonator 7y ago
How is this not cyber squatting ? Also isn’t impersonating a business that you don’t own a crime ?
chrischen 7y ago
This is not only not new, but has been done by countless other online ordering sites since as early as 5 years ago. I know this since I tried to make monthly-fee based ordering system for restaurants. This turned out to be a hard sell so most other systems took the other route: they bought a domain and did SEO for thousands of restaurants across the country. SEO and websites is not something the average small business owner is an expert on. To make it even worse, some of these online ordering systems even convincend Google maps that they were the official site, and a google maps search would also list their fake website as the official website. Of course to these businesses it just seemed like they were getting a lot of sales from these companies, in reality these people were just typing in the restaurant name into Google. The restaurants usually had to pay 10%-20% to Grubhub, beyondmenu.com, et. al. The most egregious company that does this is probably beyondmenu.com.
- snlnspc 7y ago
  Grubhub itself started purchasing these domains in 2011.
  - chrischen 7y ago
    I have no idea when beyondmenu would have started, but I bet they were the first.
throwaway5752 7y ago
The New Food Economy had an article on this that was a bit better (https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousands-shadow-sites/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...). It was posted two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306604
floatingatoll 7y ago
"it has always been our practice to transfer the domain to the restaurant as soon as they request it" This is a form of financial blackmail. Transferring a domain usually requires paying for one year's additional registration to a new registrar and, sometimes, a transfer fee on top of that and, most times, a hosting fee to redirect it. So, to summarize simply, in story form (to make very explicit how much of a scam this is for a business owner): <GrubHub> We've speculatively registered 50 domains at a cost of $500 to mislead people into using our order form, which at 20% commission* at $25 per order average (that we take out of what we would have paid to you) will pay itself back entirely in 100 orders placed. <Restaurant> What?! Stop it. <GrubHub> Hey, no sweat, we're happy to transfer those domains to you. All you need to do is initiate transfers for all of those domains, at the cost of at least $500 out of the revenue that we've been reducing by 20% for every order placed through these sites, and we'll be happy to transfer those domains to you. Also you'll have to find someone to host the redirects for you, and clean up the SEO damage we did. Best of luck with that! <Restaurant> I don't have $500 because you've been cutting my revenue by 20%! <GrubHub> Please rate your GrubHub Support experience by filling out a 5 minute survey. * "Marketing commission": https://ghlearnprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Grubhub_One-Pager_Pricing-Overview_Final.pdf https://ghlearnprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/...
- dehrmann 7y ago
  If it's really just a transfer, then I'd expect less than $100, and it's paid to the registrar, not Grubhub, so it's not quite blackmail. Now, what Grubhub is doing is unethical as fuck--best case. Worst case, it's criminal impersonation or business identity theft.
  - floatingatoll 7y ago
    I assume $10 per domain and GrubHub is shown to register tens of domains. Assuming a popular restaurant is worth 50 domains, they only need to capture 20% of average $25/order for qty.100 orders through 50 domains in 1 year to pay the annual registration cost of the scam. The scam is that restaurants can’t as easily pay $500/year to prevent GrubHub from squatting on and SEOing typos of their domain, and GrubHub can simply go make up another 50 domains when the owner takes over the first 50, because they only need the 20% “marketing” ripoff from 100 orders to break even again.
huckyaus 7y ago
Menulog and others have been doing this in Australia for at least 5 years.
JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
I wonder what the impact of the publication of stories like this have on GrubHub's talent acquisition teams. I'd love for them to call me up, and I'd love to ask them about this. When I graduated, the director of my department encouraged us to participate in the Order of the Engineer, specifically to think about the ethical dilemmas faced in situations like this. Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fake sites. When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses?
- repomies691 7y ago
  > Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fronts. Not really hard core technical skills.... > When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses? The tasks might be divided in various ways so that not one guy did it. For example the task of generating the front is delegated to an engineer who does this feature so that restaurant can easily generate a website for themselves if they want. What they leave out is telling that actually GrubHub sales employee registers the domains for GrubHub and generates the webistes with this one-click tool.
  - JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
    You can try and suggest there aren't ethical dilemmas here, but there are. Whether carried out by one or more than one individual, the intent would be clear what you are contributing, whether it's the domain purchases (I could only ponder why we're purchasing johnnyspizzanyc.com, for example, if we're GrubHub) or if you're the one in charge of putting up the phony site at the domain (which makes your role more obvious in the whole scheme).
    - rusticpenn 7y ago
      In most cases the engineers might never know if the customers are the actual customers or their management...
davemel37 7y ago
This is obviously messed up, but its nothing new. Thousands of startups growth strategy is ranking organically for brand search of their prospects. Google sells that ad space on branded search, yelp and other directories rank for them. The great big Internet Scam no one wants to admit is that digital advertising is one big protections racket! Hijacking customers and selling it back to businesses. Just look at super shady companies like rehabs.com that ranks for thousands of rehabs and pushes their phone number on all the listings. If google and the internet went away tomorrow, small local businesses would likely be better off. Instead of having to pay money just to keep competitors from bidding on their brand or worrying about all the ways tech startups prey on small local businesses!
oriettaxx 7y ago
may domains I just checked from the list cited in the article are now not working https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m9vszEQ9A13tN4AFRXWXVKZamRpQFIltP452wSqAvFM/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m9vszEQ9A13tN4AFRXWX... weird
tareqak 7y ago
A different article with the same story: https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousands-shadow-sites/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand... .
jacquesm 7y ago
Here is 'Casey Winters', former growth hacker at GrubHub explaining their strategy: https://firstround.com/review/pinterest-and-grubhubs-former-growth-lead-on-building-content-loops/ https://firstround.com/review/pinterest-and-grubhubs-former-... I absolutely can't stand the whole 'growth hacking' phenomenon, usually it boils down to doing something at someone else's expense in order to improve ones own position in the market. It's the mafia mentality brought to start-up land, suddenly you find you have a 'partner' that you did not choose who skims off a good portion of your profits.
- t34543 7y ago
  That mentality has been at the core of every place I’ve worked. You dial it back when you have more to lose and then pretend like you never did anything wrong.
- godzillabrennus 7y ago
  You just basically described capitalism... In every other system the “Mafia” takes the whole thing.
- sireat 7y ago
  If Casey Winters did the "growth hacking" at Pinterest he is responsible for polluting search results with useless, paywalled Pinterest spam. Pinterest is like ExpertSexChange dark pattern strategy taken to the max.
  - 27182818284 7y ago
    Yeah for years I've found myself having to "-pinterest" out of searches. I wish that it was just removed period.
    - russh 7y ago
      And this is how I know google does not give a shite about the people who actually use their search engine as a search engine.
  - 7y ago
exabrial 7y ago
FTC needs to get involved...
akeck 7y ago
"Everything is securities fraud." ~ Matt Levine
shay_ker 7y ago
GrubHub also runs Google Ads to push GrubHub results to the top of search results. SEO is a core part of their strategy, in the name of driving business to restaurants. I'm sure many businesses don't care and don't mind, as long as they're making money. There's always the cost that GrubHub, or the restaurants' own solutions, could be cannibalizing each other. It's a similar problem that any company has across marketing channels. GrubHub could be more transparent about their microsites, but there's always the possibility of some restaurant owners just not understanding what they're getting after signing a contract no matter how hard GrubHub tries. Although, phone orders are definitely tough. Restaurants have historically hated phone orders because of how GrubHub makes money off of them.
simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Maybe we should create a comprehensive list of these bad companies / bad actors? Something like: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master...

405 points by 9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

Is it just me or are these restaurant adjacent businesses involved in some really bad practices. Between Yelp and Seamless, it seems to me that a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship will not form organically. (I'm referring to how Yelp can be predatorial to businesses to make them pay yelp or have Yelp negatively affect that business' yelp rating. There are plenty of articles showing this but data is hard to come by)

djmips 7y ago
It feels like they all want to ascend to that nirvana where they monopolize and get to charge a fee on everything like iTunes.
- scarface74 7y ago
  Surprisingly enough. I use a lot of things in the App Store (which I assume you meant) without paying a dime to Apple - including Amazon digital purchases and prime video, Hulu, Netflix, Office 365, Udemy and DirecTVNow. Most of the money Apple makes from the App Store are for in app consumables from games. Admittedly there are still a lot of legacy subscriptions from both Netflix and Spotify before they pulled out of going through Apple for subscriptions.
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    the devs had to pay big fees to apple to get the app posted
    - Cenk 7y ago
      $99 / year
    - saagarjha 7y ago
      $99 is almost nothing for a large company, who likely gives Apple a lot more money via the 30% cut.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      $99/year is a “big fee”? I pay slightly more than that for my Resharper license.
  - jacurtis 7y ago
    But the companies that operate those apps are paying Apple. So Apple still gets their cut. The same goes for Yelp or GrubHub. You can use Yelp for free, but Yelp is generally preying on local businesses to force the businesses to pay Yelp because of Yelp's distribution online. GrubHub often has free delivery, but they are charging huge commissions to the restaurant you order from. Someone always pays. It is the way the world works.
    - eridius 7y ago
      The $99 yearly developer program fee is hardly Apple getting "their cut".
    - scarface74 7y ago
      Paying Apple for what? What money is Apple getting when you subscribe for services outside of the App Store?
      - Domenic_S 7y ago
        The app store offers subscriptions. If you subscribe to, say, netflix or hulu using an ios app, apple collects 15-30% of the subscription revenue. Netflix fairly publicly killed the app store subscription payment method in the beginning of the year because of this.
        scarface74 7y ago
        That was just the point. At no time did you have to go through the App Store to get s Netflix subscription. You could always go through the Netflix website. Netflix chose to use the App Store as a method for payment even though they didn’t have to. They decided it was worth the trade off. Plenty of subscription services decided it wasn’t from day one.
SmellyGeekBoy 7y ago
Restaurants are probably the most common type of "offline" business and their owners tend not to be tech-savvy. Couple that with them working long hours and living in their own bubble and it's no surprise that this kind of thing just doesn't get dealt with. Perhaps the ambulance chasing lawyers should turn their attention to these aggrieved restaurant owners next. They'd have a field day.

MattyMc 7y ago

Crazy to think the people who wrote this shady script probably reads HackerNews. This is all kinds of immoral.

svskeptic 7y ago
Yet another shiny example of money vs. ethics in the Valley. Also, don't look towards the engineers, who may or may not have known. Look towards the money. Who are the VCs invested in them and how many of them knew and encouraged that in the name of growth? And, of course, the executives.
- vanadium 7y ago
  GrubHub is based in Chicago, however.
  - svskeptic 7y ago
    Benchmark, DAG & Lightspeed... all Valley VCs.
  - notfromhere 7y ago
    the valley isn't just a place, its a state of mind.
    - HNLurker2 7y ago
      This is my new phone wallpaper image
gruez 7y ago
Not really. Elsewhere in this thread, people pointed out that there's a clause in the contract that allows this. So whoever was higher up probably told them (rightly), that it was a service that restaurant owners wanted. I mean, who doesn't a free website generated for their business? They'd need to dig deep to find how it was harming the business.

jpeg_hero 7y ago

I guess not illegal, but super shady. Pretty easy to see how incremental thinking leads to a shady result. We get paid $X per order from our restaurant clients, they like more orders so if we can get them more, they’ll be happier and pay us more -> improve SEO of Grubhub<dot>com -> works -> what else can we do -> use our seo skills -> register other websites do seo -> more orders. Bad result, but know how they got there.

m-ee 7y ago
Are there no trademark issues from using the restaurant's official logos? These restaurants may not have filed on everything they should have and probably don't have the resources to fight it regardless, but what if they did? A large company would definitely send a C&D immediately for actions like this.
- btown 7y ago
  The Grubhub terms of service almost certainly include a license to use the name and any trademarks for purposes including these shadow sites.
  - chrshawkes 7y ago
    And it will almost certainly land them in a huge class action lawsuit. The SEO damage done to small businesses makes them almost reliant upon GrubHub after making the mistake of doing business with them in the first place. Terms of Service can say whatever it wants it's not an official legal document, just something they turn to when their ethics violations get exposed.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
bredren 7y ago
It’s also now harder for the restaurants to leave? They may get lazy with advertising more generally and then would lose a lot if GH shut down the sites as a result?

arbuge 7y ago

If you read the article to the end they claim they're not cybersquatting. Sounds pretty disingenuous to me. One of the rationales given is that they'll transfer the domain to the restaurant if the latter requests it. Most of those restaurant owners probably won't know what's going on, or who to ask to have the domain transferred to them, or that they could even ask. Edit: The text of their response is quite curious. In part it reads: "Additionally, we have registered domains on their behalf, consistent with our restaurant contracts. We no longer provide that service..." If I were to guess, the fact that they'd be registering these domains was something slipped into the small print of their original contracts. Most restaurant owners probably wouldn't have noticed or understood the implications. The practice could have then been discontinued once it served its purposes of getting (or helping to get) Grubhub up to scale.

bredren 7y ago
Restaurants and their owners are notoriously bad at the internet. I have a friend in Seattle who became known as a reliable web developer for new restaurants. He took credit to eat rather than cash to do this relatively simple work for them. As a result, every time I’d visit we’d eat at some nice newer place on his credit line, responsible only for tips. It felt like minor celebrity. I suppose this is what newer website platforms are for but frankly I think even weebly is somehow too much for many.
- jacquesm 7y ago
  > He took credit to eat rather than cash to do this relatively simple work for them. The good old tax dodge.
  - jtc331 7y ago
    Meh, it’s still taxable income that has to be reported :)
    - jacquesm 7y ago
      Shall we bet on whether it was reported or not?

eonw 7y ago

oh wow, tech companies doing shitty things to their "affiliates" and "partners"? nothing amazes me about these scummy companies anymore.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

I'm now getting 401s for a bunch of these Grubhub-created fake sites. Did they take them down already, or am I hitting a geoblock? (Not in the US.) http://www.pochana.net/ http://www.pochana.net/ http://bestpizzali.com/ http://bestpizzali.com/

reustle 7y ago
Works for me as soon as I turn on a VPN using a USA server. Also fun that they call the websites vanity websites: "utm_medium=whitelabel_vanitywebsite"
lemoncucumber 7y ago
Those URLs work for me, no 401.
- nefitty 7y ago
  Same here.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lostsock 7y ago
I get the following error when trying to view those sites from Australia: Sorry about that You do not have permission to view this site
- oriettaxx 7y ago
  same same from Turkey

benatkin 7y ago

From their statement: "As a service to our restaurants, we have created microsites for them as another source of orders and to increase their online brand presence. Additionally, we have registered domains on their behalf, consistent with our restaurant contracts. We no longer provide that service and it has always been our practice to transfer the domain to the restaurant as soon as they request it." What service do they no longer provide? Registering domains on their behalf, or microsites, or both? Going forward are they going to have the company register their domain themselves and point it to GrubHub?

bpicolo 7y ago

Eat24 was doing this prior to the Grubhub purchase. Perhaps they picked it up from there? (It's also possible this started with grubhub and then bled to Eat24 I suppose). It's also for SEO, not just commissions.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
Maybe we should create a comprehensive list of these bad companies / bad actors? Something like: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master...

JustSomeNobody 7y ago

Another day, another company doing something scummy. I'm getting to the point where I just don't want to check my feeds anymore.

aitchnyu 7y ago
No news is good news. Shit's been happening since time immemorial. Your awareness could be valuable. When the bad guy looks forward to his day, the good guy shouldn't put up a weak effort.

saravana85 7y ago

Its a big scam. Registering 23,00 fake domain names and getting commission from them is not at all acceptable. They need to be fined.

arcticfox 7y ago

In related news, the FTC sued and won a $1.4 million settlement [0] from a concert ticket company in 2014. They basically place search engine ads that sound like the venue, and use a domain that look like it should be the official one for the venue. Remarkably, this company is still operating and still doing largely the same thing in violation of the consent decree. I found out about it when my mom tried to buy tickets from the Hult Center in Eugene OR, and lost $500 on 'hult.centereugene.com' thinking it was the official venue. [0] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/07/ticketnetwork-marketing-partners-ryadd-secure-box-office-settle https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2014/07/ticke...

ajxs 7y ago

Surely this has 'class-action lawsuit' written all over it. I can't speak with any authority regarding US law, but surely there are grounds for legal action being taken against GrubHub.

LorenPechtel 7y ago
They are using content from the real sites. Copyright violation.

ycombonator 7y ago

How is this not cyber squatting ? Also isn’t impersonating a business that you don’t own a crime ?

chrischen 7y ago

This is not only not new, but has been done by countless other online ordering sites since as early as 5 years ago. I know this since I tried to make monthly-fee based ordering system for restaurants. This turned out to be a hard sell so most other systems took the other route: they bought a domain and did SEO for thousands of restaurants across the country. SEO and websites is not something the average small business owner is an expert on. To make it even worse, some of these online ordering systems even convincend Google maps that they were the official site, and a google maps search would also list their fake website as the official website. Of course to these businesses it just seemed like they were getting a lot of sales from these companies, in reality these people were just typing in the restaurant name into Google. The restaurants usually had to pay 10%-20% to Grubhub, beyondmenu.com, et. al. The most egregious company that does this is probably beyondmenu.com.

snlnspc 7y ago
Grubhub itself started purchasing these domains in 2011.
- chrischen 7y ago
  I have no idea when beyondmenu would have started, but I bet they were the first.

throwaway5752 7y ago

The New Food Economy had an article on this that was a bit better (https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousands-shadow-sites/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand...). It was posted two days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306604 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20306604

floatingatoll 7y ago

"it has always been our practice to transfer the domain to the restaurant as soon as they request it" This is a form of financial blackmail. Transferring a domain usually requires paying for one year's additional registration to a new registrar and, sometimes, a transfer fee on top of that and, most times, a hosting fee to redirect it. So, to summarize simply, in story form (to make very explicit how much of a scam this is for a business owner): <GrubHub> We've speculatively registered 50 domains at a cost of $500 to mislead people into using our order form, which at 20% commission* at $25 per order average (that we take out of what we would have paid to you) will pay itself back entirely in 100 orders placed. <Restaurant> What?! Stop it. <GrubHub> Hey, no sweat, we're happy to transfer those domains to you. All you need to do is initiate transfers for all of those domains, at the cost of at least $500 out of the revenue that we've been reducing by 20% for every order placed through these sites, and we'll be happy to transfer those domains to you. Also you'll have to find someone to host the redirects for you, and clean up the SEO damage we did. Best of luck with that! <Restaurant> I don't have $500 because you've been cutting my revenue by 20%! <GrubHub> Please rate your GrubHub Support experience by filling out a 5 minute survey. * "Marketing commission": https://ghlearnprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Grubhub_One-Pager_Pricing-Overview_Final.pdf https://ghlearnprod.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/...

dehrmann 7y ago
If it's really just a transfer, then I'd expect less than $100, and it's paid to the registrar, not Grubhub, so it's not quite blackmail. Now, what Grubhub is doing is unethical as fuck--best case. Worst case, it's criminal impersonation or business identity theft.
- floatingatoll 7y ago
  I assume $10 per domain and GrubHub is shown to register tens of domains. Assuming a popular restaurant is worth 50 domains, they only need to capture 20% of average $25/order for qty.100 orders through 50 domains in 1 year to pay the annual registration cost of the scam. The scam is that restaurants can’t as easily pay $500/year to prevent GrubHub from squatting on and SEOing typos of their domain, and GrubHub can simply go make up another 50 domains when the owner takes over the first 50, because they only need the 20% “marketing” ripoff from 100 orders to break even again.

huckyaus 7y ago

Menulog and others have been doing this in Australia for at least 5 years.

JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago

I wonder what the impact of the publication of stories like this have on GrubHub's talent acquisition teams. I'd love for them to call me up, and I'd love to ask them about this. When I graduated, the director of my department encouraged us to participate in the Order of the Engineer, specifically to think about the ethical dilemmas faced in situations like this. Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fake sites. When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses?

repomies691 7y ago
> Somebody with technical skills performed the purchasing of these 1,000s of domains and setting up these fronts. Not really hard core technical skills.... > When that person continues on in their career, will they proudly exclaim to prospective employers, how they helped their company perform these tasks to leech off small businesses? The tasks might be divided in various ways so that not one guy did it. For example the task of generating the front is delegated to an engineer who does this feature so that restaurant can easily generate a website for themselves if they want. What they leave out is telling that actually GrubHub sales employee registers the domains for GrubHub and generates the webistes with this one-click tool.
- JMTQp8lwXL 7y ago
  You can try and suggest there aren't ethical dilemmas here, but there are. Whether carried out by one or more than one individual, the intent would be clear what you are contributing, whether it's the domain purchases (I could only ponder why we're purchasing johnnyspizzanyc.com, for example, if we're GrubHub) or if you're the one in charge of putting up the phony site at the domain (which makes your role more obvious in the whole scheme).
  - rusticpenn 7y ago
    In most cases the engineers might never know if the customers are the actual customers or their management...

davemel37 7y ago

This is obviously messed up, but its nothing new. Thousands of startups growth strategy is ranking organically for brand search of their prospects. Google sells that ad space on branded search, yelp and other directories rank for them. The great big Internet Scam no one wants to admit is that digital advertising is one big protections racket! Hijacking customers and selling it back to businesses. Just look at super shady companies like rehabs.com that ranks for thousands of rehabs and pushes their phone number on all the listings. If google and the internet went away tomorrow, small local businesses would likely be better off. Instead of having to pay money just to keep competitors from bidding on their brand or worrying about all the ways tech startups prey on small local businesses!

oriettaxx 7y ago

may domains I just checked from the list cited in the article are now not working https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m9vszEQ9A13tN4AFRXWXVKZamRpQFIltP452wSqAvFM/htmlview https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m9vszEQ9A13tN4AFRXWX... weird

tareqak 7y ago

A different article with the same story: https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousands-shadow-sites/ https://newfoodeconomy.org/grubhub-domain-purchases-thousand... .

jacquesm 7y ago

Here is 'Casey Winters', former growth hacker at GrubHub explaining their strategy: https://firstround.com/review/pinterest-and-grubhubs-former-growth-lead-on-building-content-loops/ https://firstround.com/review/pinterest-and-grubhubs-former-... I absolutely can't stand the whole 'growth hacking' phenomenon, usually it boils down to doing something at someone else's expense in order to improve ones own position in the market. It's the mafia mentality brought to start-up land, suddenly you find you have a 'partner' that you did not choose who skims off a good portion of your profits.

t34543 7y ago
That mentality has been at the core of every place I’ve worked. You dial it back when you have more to lose and then pretend like you never did anything wrong.
godzillabrennus 7y ago
You just basically described capitalism... In every other system the “Mafia” takes the whole thing.
sireat 7y ago
If Casey Winters did the "growth hacking" at Pinterest he is responsible for polluting search results with useless, paywalled Pinterest spam. Pinterest is like ExpertSexChange dark pattern strategy taken to the max.
- 27182818284 7y ago
  Yeah for years I've found myself having to "-pinterest" out of searches. I wish that it was just removed period.
  - russh 7y ago
    And this is how I know google does not give a shite about the people who actually use their search engine as a search engine.
- 7y ago

exabrial 7y ago

FTC needs to get involved...

akeck 7y ago

"Everything is securities fraud." ~ Matt Levine

shay_ker 7y ago

GrubHub also runs Google Ads to push GrubHub results to the top of search results. SEO is a core part of their strategy, in the name of driving business to restaurants. I'm sure many businesses don't care and don't mind, as long as they're making money. There's always the cost that GrubHub, or the restaurants' own solutions, could be cannibalizing each other. It's a similar problem that any company has across marketing channels. GrubHub could be more transparent about their microsites, but there's always the possibility of some restaurant owners just not understanding what they're getting after signing a contract no matter how hard GrubHub tries. Although, phone orders are definitely tough. Restaurants have historically hated phone orders because of how GrubHub makes money off of them.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago

Maybe we should create a comprehensive list of these bad companies / bad actors? Something like: https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master/README.md https://gitlab.com/simonebrunozzi/dark-companies/blob/master...