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My father runs a restaurant, so I guess I could give perspectives from both sides. For a customer, it's inconvenient and sometimes daunting to call a restauran

My father runs a restaurant, so I guess I could give perspectives from both sides. For a customer, it's inconvenient and sometimes daunting to call a restaurant and ask for the menu, then choose the items, then recheck the order with the call desk, then order the food and pay it in cash. With an app, you just need to do a few taps and then order directly from the restaurant, and even pay for it with your card. For restaurants, you get the marketing reach through being on a platform while also getting delivery costs that are on par with what would have been if you hired your own drivers (if you're a low end restaurant). It's obviously much less beneficial for a high end restaurant that relies on dine-ins for higher priced menu items. I've been trying to coax him into moving to Whatsapp based ordering systems (since Whatsapp is big in the old world), but it's hard to do that without Whatsapp chatbots and access to the Whatsapp businesses API.

agustif 6y ago
You could leverage Twilio for it's Whatsapp Business API. Also add SMS to the mix if feeling adventurous. If you were to make this, you could also both open source it or run it as a SaaS and give some options to those restaurants that don't want to pay a 30%
- fakedang 6y ago
  Thanks. This is actually a really good suggestion I can try out. Edit:- btw, SMS isn't effective anymore. Nobody uses SMS now anywhere I've traveled. It's either Whatsapp or Telegram (in the UK mostly).
sammorrowdrums 6y ago
Open source taxi hailing and food ordering services, accommodation services that are genuinely open platforms are such a pipe dream of mine - on the one hand there is no reason why existing restaurants, delivery drivers and existing taxi services etc. can't broker their services. Hosting costs, moderation, payment processing and centralisation are major difficulties though. Legality and safety of providers are also significant. So while one side of my brain says - these services could offer and respond to requests in a federated system (akin to activity pub) where you can post menu feeds for example, and respond to requests for your food / taxi / accommodation in a requested location if it is available. The other half of me says - too expensive to host and build, time consuming to build, difficult to get providers to use your protocols, and then difficult to stay non-commercial - and difficult to work out how payments should be done, dispute resolution, reviews issues and the fact that probably the service would end up used to sell sex and scam people somehow because it almost always does... And I shrug and think: this is why we probably can't have nice things.
- fakedang 6y ago
  The thing is that every delivery service, or rather every service that has a human component in the supply chain, will have a significant cost to it that cannot be mitigated by going open source. Indeed the big cost for Uber and ilk isn't the technology cost per se, but the cost of human power (an issue which was incidentally raised to me by the COO of one such platform). And then as you mentioned, the costs of policing said platform so that it isn't used for illicit activities or sex.

agustif 6y ago

You could leverage Twilio for it's Whatsapp Business API. Also add SMS to the mix if feeling adventurous. If you were to make this, you could also both open source it or run it as a SaaS and give some options to those restaurants that don't want to pay a 30%

fakedang 6y ago
Thanks. This is actually a really good suggestion I can try out. Edit:- btw, SMS isn't effective anymore. Nobody uses SMS now anywhere I've traveled. It's either Whatsapp or Telegram (in the UK mostly).

sammorrowdrums 6y ago

Open source taxi hailing and food ordering services, accommodation services that are genuinely open platforms are such a pipe dream of mine - on the one hand there is no reason why existing restaurants, delivery drivers and existing taxi services etc. can't broker their services. Hosting costs, moderation, payment processing and centralisation are major difficulties though. Legality and safety of providers are also significant. So while one side of my brain says - these services could offer and respond to requests in a federated system (akin to activity pub) where you can post menu feeds for example, and respond to requests for your food / taxi / accommodation in a requested location if it is available. The other half of me says - too expensive to host and build, time consuming to build, difficult to get providers to use your protocols, and then difficult to stay non-commercial - and difficult to work out how payments should be done, dispute resolution, reviews issues and the fact that probably the service would end up used to sell sex and scam people somehow because it almost always does... And I shrug and think: this is why we probably can't have nice things.

fakedang 6y ago
The thing is that every delivery service, or rather every service that has a human component in the supply chain, will have a significant cost to it that cannot be mitigated by going open source. Indeed the big cost for Uber and ilk isn't the technology cost per se, but the cost of human power (an issue which was incidentally raised to me by the COO of one such platform). And then as you mentioned, the costs of policing said platform so that it isn't used for illicit activities or sex.