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I get that Grubhub, DoorDash, and other industry players have created value but the I wish there was a white-label software stack that is easily administered by

I get that Grubhub, DoorDash, and other industry players have created value but the I wish there was a white-label software stack that is easily administered by less technical people so the restaurants can take control back. I’m thinking something akin to a Wordpress 1-click install. Apps like grub hub are very slick but the other end of the spectrum are terrible HTML pages that look like they were designed 20 years ago. There’s a wide gap and a lot if opportunity for something in the middle. I don’t mind calling a restaurant direct. I would be happy with a simple menu and an easy to find phone number. I’m often weary of dark practices where GrubHub lists their own number, not the restaurants real number, and charges a commission or “finders fee.”

melomal 5y ago
The trouble is not with the ease of development but the centralization and ease of finding the restaurant. Marketplaces provide a one-stop location for customers, instead of searching Google then scrolling and clicking through each site to then get a 404 or poor website. If you created a simple website it would need a whole bunch of work to get it to rank, get it added to Maps, Yelp etc. A well known marketplace/s provides everything for a very low cost in the long run.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  This is not true and the opposite is actually true when it comes to ease of listing. There are many restaurants listed on Yelp and maps that are unclaimed. They are both incentived to get as many businesses on as possible. As soon as the owner cares a little bit there is a straight forward method for claiming the listing and then the owner can set their hours and own website. I personally don't waste my time helping massive companies for free by adding the listings but many people still do. I also don't put any worth into Yelp or Google reviews and hate generalized way menus are displayed and find the "poor" websites do a far better job at highlighting the restaurants offering. I always immediately click the website link on either to actually determine if I want to go. Maps and Yelp only are useful for a localized search of places directly around me.
wyattpeak 5y ago
I feel like the real challenge isn't the software but the provision of delivery drivers. Before UberEats, there was a service in Australia called Menulog, did much the same thing but required restaurants to supply their own drivers. It was dominated by the sorts of restaurants who already had drivers (pizza joints, chinese/indian places). There was very little uptake among places which didn't already have delivery organised.
- SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
  Menulog still exists here in Australia, however it has adopted a combination of the system you describe and the third party driver system of Uber Eats et al. You can filter by restaurants that use their own drivers - I sometimes do this for two reasons, firstly it supports a driver who is directly employed and paid an award wage instead of this "contractor" bullshit, and secondly because restaurant employees have an additional incentive to get the delivery right (if they fuck it up, their boss will have a word with them and they will redeliver, any similar process for Uber Eats is far less direct).
  - soneca 5y ago
    In a way you are supporting larger businesses in detriment of smaller ones that don’t have the demand or cash flow to hire a driver, aren’t you?
    - SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
      Yes, that's true, however larger is relative when we're talking about pizza places and the local Chinese restaurant. These aren't national chains I'm talking about.
epicureanideal 5y ago
I would also be happy to see some kind of Apache-like or EFF-like nonprofit organization create an aggregator for the white-labeled software so there would only be 1 app to install and search on. Taking a much much lower cut.
annexrichmond 5y ago
Yeah I personally prefer businesses I can just call directly for delivery/pickup. If they know my number they know my order and payment info.
ackbar03 5y ago
> I get that Grubhub, DoorDash, and other industry players have created value In my opinion at least I think the premises of this is a bit questionable. A multi-billion dollar company employing an army of delivery contractors, just to satisfy the whims of some guy who really wants a burrito but doesn't want to get off his couch, all whilst burning VC and now stock investor money. I think its fair to argue that while streamlining the delivery process is definitely a positive, we could do without the large number of software programmers and contractors and capital, all of which could be employed somewhere else in the economy, which might in fact lead to more value creation.
- Larrikin 5y ago
  Don't forget the point that most of the world was locked in their homes for a year (so disregarding the lazy man trope) and DoorDash had to rush to an IPO because even in this dream situation for a delivery company, they could barely make a profit and had to raise fees.
habosa 5y ago
I totally agree. For now I often advise restaurants to use something like Square: https://squareup.com/help/gb/en/article/6612-set-up-your-online-store-with-square-for-restaurants https://squareup.com/help/gb/en/article/6612-set-up-your-onl... GrubHub or Uber Eats are criminal when it comes to pickup orders. They'll take 25% or more of the money and steal your customer relationship. If you use something like Square you pay like 3% and keep the customer.
flibble 5y ago
You nailed it — the primary value of these marketplaces is the consumer facing ordering technology, not the fact that it’s a marketplace. This is an excerpt of a recent article that explains my thinking on it a bit better. There is little (or even negative) value for restaurants from marketplaces in this industry. In many industries marketplaces like this make sense. Typically, they make sense when discovery is very important, when there is little repeat usage of the discovered service or when there are multiple disparate services involved. Travel is a good example here: it makes good sense for a consumer to use a marketplace to discover a hotel and a car rental company when they book a trip to a city they’ve never been to and likely won’t go to again for a few years. And it makes sense for a hotel to list on a marketplace as it’s impractical for them to market directly to consumers from around the world in the off chance that they will visit the city the hotel is in. There are very different dynamics at play in hospitality. People tend to order from two or three takeaways in rotation as opposed to discovering a new one each time they order. They also tend to order from one located physically close to them, and they usually can be efficiently marketed to by this takeaway directly, both via offline methods such as walking past the store each day, getting flyers in the door, and online via search and brand marketing. It is also rare that a consumer needs to make multiple purchases from separate services to order their food (they don’t, for example, usually need to order a taxi to collect the food after ordering it). The value that restaurants get from joining a marketplace is the consumer-facing online ordering technology that they get access to, but not from the fact that they are getting it from a marketplace. There is a lot of negative value for a restaurant in joining a marketplace (i.e., it causes them harm) as they end up sending their existing customer base away to a 3rd party who is incentivised to move the consumers away from that restaurant and over to one who will pay the marketplace more for the orders. Disclaimer: I’m cofounder of flipdish.com that provides direct ordering tech to restaurants.
- chongli 5y ago
  You nailed it — the primary value of these marketplaces is the consumer facing ordering technology, not the fact that it’s a marketplace. You’re mistaken. The primary value is the logistics of dealing with drivers. A restaurant supplying its own drivers will always be at a disadvantage to Door Dash/Uber Eats etc because they can never utilize their drivers as efficiently as the big delivery companies. During peak hours, a restaurant may receive a surge of orders that they do not have the drivers to handle. During off-peak hours, on the other hand, they may not have any orders at all so any drivers they employ will be sitting idle, on call. The marketplace for restaurants that everyone talks about is not the hard one to build. The hard one is the marketplace for drivers. If I’m a restaurant then there’s very little value to me in an app that takes orders but does not provide drivers.
wraptile 5y ago
Google maps very often have menu photos for restaurant pages. We usually just pop the menu, find what we want and call the restaurant. It's often cheaper too and you know that all of your money is going to the restaurant.

melomal 5y ago

The trouble is not with the ease of development but the centralization and ease of finding the restaurant. Marketplaces provide a one-stop location for customers, instead of searching Google then scrolling and clicking through each site to then get a 404 or poor website. If you created a simple website it would need a whole bunch of work to get it to rank, get it added to Maps, Yelp etc. A well known marketplace/s provides everything for a very low cost in the long run.

Larrikin 5y ago
This is not true and the opposite is actually true when it comes to ease of listing. There are many restaurants listed on Yelp and maps that are unclaimed. They are both incentived to get as many businesses on as possible. As soon as the owner cares a little bit there is a straight forward method for claiming the listing and then the owner can set their hours and own website. I personally don't waste my time helping massive companies for free by adding the listings but many people still do. I also don't put any worth into Yelp or Google reviews and hate generalized way menus are displayed and find the "poor" websites do a far better job at highlighting the restaurants offering. I always immediately click the website link on either to actually determine if I want to go. Maps and Yelp only are useful for a localized search of places directly around me.

wyattpeak 5y ago

I feel like the real challenge isn't the software but the provision of delivery drivers. Before UberEats, there was a service in Australia called Menulog, did much the same thing but required restaurants to supply their own drivers. It was dominated by the sorts of restaurants who already had drivers (pizza joints, chinese/indian places). There was very little uptake among places which didn't already have delivery organised.

SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
Menulog still exists here in Australia, however it has adopted a combination of the system you describe and the third party driver system of Uber Eats et al. You can filter by restaurants that use their own drivers - I sometimes do this for two reasons, firstly it supports a driver who is directly employed and paid an award wage instead of this "contractor" bullshit, and secondly because restaurant employees have an additional incentive to get the delivery right (if they fuck it up, their boss will have a word with them and they will redeliver, any similar process for Uber Eats is far less direct).
- soneca 5y ago
  In a way you are supporting larger businesses in detriment of smaller ones that don’t have the demand or cash flow to hire a driver, aren’t you?
  - SturgeonsLaw 5y ago
    Yes, that's true, however larger is relative when we're talking about pizza places and the local Chinese restaurant. These aren't national chains I'm talking about.

epicureanideal 5y ago

I would also be happy to see some kind of Apache-like or EFF-like nonprofit organization create an aggregator for the white-labeled software so there would only be 1 app to install and search on. Taking a much much lower cut.

annexrichmond 5y ago

Yeah I personally prefer businesses I can just call directly for delivery/pickup. If they know my number they know my order and payment info.

ackbar03 5y ago

> I get that Grubhub, DoorDash, and other industry players have created value In my opinion at least I think the premises of this is a bit questionable. A multi-billion dollar company employing an army of delivery contractors, just to satisfy the whims of some guy who really wants a burrito but doesn't want to get off his couch, all whilst burning VC and now stock investor money. I think its fair to argue that while streamlining the delivery process is definitely a positive, we could do without the large number of software programmers and contractors and capital, all of which could be employed somewhere else in the economy, which might in fact lead to more value creation.

Larrikin 5y ago
Don't forget the point that most of the world was locked in their homes for a year (so disregarding the lazy man trope) and DoorDash had to rush to an IPO because even in this dream situation for a delivery company, they could barely make a profit and had to raise fees.

habosa 5y ago

I totally agree. For now I often advise restaurants to use something like Square: https://squareup.com/help/gb/en/article/6612-set-up-your-online-store-with-square-for-restaurants https://squareup.com/help/gb/en/article/6612-set-up-your-onl... GrubHub or Uber Eats are criminal when it comes to pickup orders. They'll take 25% or more of the money and steal your customer relationship. If you use something like Square you pay like 3% and keep the customer.

flibble 5y ago

You nailed it — the primary value of these marketplaces is the consumer facing ordering technology, not the fact that it’s a marketplace. This is an excerpt of a recent article that explains my thinking on it a bit better. There is little (or even negative) value for restaurants from marketplaces in this industry. In many industries marketplaces like this make sense. Typically, they make sense when discovery is very important, when there is little repeat usage of the discovered service or when there are multiple disparate services involved. Travel is a good example here: it makes good sense for a consumer to use a marketplace to discover a hotel and a car rental company when they book a trip to a city they’ve never been to and likely won’t go to again for a few years. And it makes sense for a hotel to list on a marketplace as it’s impractical for them to market directly to consumers from around the world in the off chance that they will visit the city the hotel is in. There are very different dynamics at play in hospitality. People tend to order from two or three takeaways in rotation as opposed to discovering a new one each time they order. They also tend to order from one located physically close to them, and they usually can be efficiently marketed to by this takeaway directly, both via offline methods such as walking past the store each day, getting flyers in the door, and online via search and brand marketing. It is also rare that a consumer needs to make multiple purchases from separate services to order their food (they don’t, for example, usually need to order a taxi to collect the food after ordering it). The value that restaurants get from joining a marketplace is the consumer-facing online ordering technology that they get access to, but not from the fact that they are getting it from a marketplace. There is a lot of negative value for a restaurant in joining a marketplace (i.e., it causes them harm) as they end up sending their existing customer base away to a 3rd party who is incentivised to move the consumers away from that restaurant and over to one who will pay the marketplace more for the orders. Disclaimer: I’m cofounder of flipdish.com that provides direct ordering tech to restaurants.

chongli 5y ago
You nailed it — the primary value of these marketplaces is the consumer facing ordering technology, not the fact that it’s a marketplace. You’re mistaken. The primary value is the logistics of dealing with drivers. A restaurant supplying its own drivers will always be at a disadvantage to Door Dash/Uber Eats etc because they can never utilize their drivers as efficiently as the big delivery companies. During peak hours, a restaurant may receive a surge of orders that they do not have the drivers to handle. During off-peak hours, on the other hand, they may not have any orders at all so any drivers they employ will be sitting idle, on call. The marketplace for restaurants that everyone talks about is not the hard one to build. The hard one is the marketplace for drivers. If I’m a restaurant then there’s very little value to me in an app that takes orders but does not provide drivers.

wraptile 5y ago

Google maps very often have menu photos for restaurant pages. We usually just pop the menu, find what we want and call the restaurant. It's often cheaper too and you know that all of your money is going to the restaurant.