If you have nobody using your delivery service, you can't maintain deliver-ers. You're running a three sided marketplace in which you need to have both minimum

If you have nobody using your delivery service, you can't maintain deliver-ers. You're running a three sided marketplace in which you need to have both minimum wages and work for your delivery folks, enough orders for the restaurant to bother, and enough restaurants and ok enough prices for the consumer. That's why it's expensive. That's why you need marketing who doesn't just take out a facebook ad but literally visits and calls restaurants, IT teams to literally teach the basics to restaurants, and an ops team who can assist your delivery folks when a restaurant runs out of onion rings or accidentally slips an allergen into an order. All of that adds up real fast because you need all of those services running at all the times the business is running. Nobody is going to order from a delivery service that only gives you two options. Nobody is going to deliver for a service that only gives you two or three delivery runs a night. > economies of scale if you're effectively sharing a driver pool and software development cost with all of your competitors. The software is so cheap as to be fungible here. It's the drivers who have geographical restrictions, dynamic shifts (gig economy) and also the freedom to not take orders. If you're a runner and you know Chik-fil-a has horrendous lines all the time, you may just never want to run those orders - and in the gig economy, that's a viable choice for you. The delivery service still has to handle those cases (pay more on them, offer incentives, argue with the restaurant for a way to get orders to drivers more easily, etc). > I don't know why the delivery services aren't forced to undercut each other's prices to get the businesses. Delivery services don't generally struggle to get customers, they struggle to get and keep drivers.