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Most restaurant owners would very much prefer it if you called in your order. If you’d really rather order online, see if you can do it via the restaurant’s website.
This kind of explains everything. As bad as Seamless might be, it's a far better experience for the customer than using the average restaurant website.
The whole restaurant marketing/value-added service industry is terrible, sometimes feeling even a bit sleazy. Of course its known that a restaurant's yelp rating is dependent on how much they pay, but all the way down the food chain to the local startup restaurant-services, they seem equally sketchy. Every 3-6 months I see the stickers for some new delivery service, discount club, or rewards program start to show up on the doors of almost every restaurant in town. And then like clockwork within 6 months they are gone because the service either went bust or was dropped by every restaurant (and then went bust) because the restaurant owners finally did the math and saw how much money it was bleeding.
While none of them exist in my neck of the woods, it seems that all the "successful" 3rd party food delivery companies are only successful because they're running on VC cash, exploiting contracted delivery personnel, and/or making the restaurant give them a big enough discount such that they only break even.
In Australia there’s an online ordering platform called MenuLog who also charge a commission. I’m not sure if Grubhub or Seamless do this, but MenuLog will also purchase a domain and set up a cookie cutter site for all restaurants that sign up. They will also push this site high up in Google search results with SEO, which sounds great, but all loyal customers who are searching for the restaurant end up on this site, which links to their online ordering platform. So restaurants end up paying a commission for orders from loyal customers who would have gone straight to the restaurant. We’ve also seen phone numbers purposely omitted in these cookie cutter sites as they can’t earn a commission from phone orders.
I see an opportunity for a "Shopify for restaurants". Essentially an end to end SaaS solution that let's you do your own order management and lead-gen (and plugs into your own POS). though that latter part (lead gen) would still be a huge challenge for restaurants. Seamless charges those fees because they have the audience and can.
Note this is from 2016.
I read a great book a while ago called "The Middleman Economy" which talks about all the ways that middlemen provide value. Sounds like Seamless isn't providing much value (at least at the time of writing), and those take rates are pretty high for repeat orders.
At the same time, as a restaurant, why wouldn't you pay 20% if you were going to be out of business if you didn't (as one of the quotes in the article mentioned).
The corporate accounts thing is actually pretty interesting - a cost that was previously absorbed by large companies (doing the accounting for expensed food orders) is shifted to the restaurants by a third-party entrant in the space (Seamless) which captures a profit in the process.
Of course this is money that the large companies could have been extracting in the first place, but they didn't bother because it's not worth it for them on an individual basis - they don't care about the money, they are giving their business to Seamless just for the convenience. I wonder what other similar opportunities might exist?
A super innovative, restaurant-centric startup in this space: https://www.tocktix.com. Tock turns around the weird power imbalance by booking tables as tickets like you might in a theater. Instantly the no-show problem vanishes, and the customers you get are the kinds of customers you want. Clever.
The other day, I was at a restaurant that uses EatStreet (a smaller competitor) but no other similar services. (I was waiting for an order I placed in person.)
A GrubHub driver came in and asked whether the GrubHub order had gone through yet; it seemed like he had been waiting. The person at the counter, confused, said that the establishment didn't work with GrubHub and never had. The employee repeated that he had an order, and tried to confirm the details of the order - but there was no such order. Apparently GrubHub had called the restaurant, and when someone at the restaurant tried to explain that it didn't work with GrubHub, the system had ignored them, and placed the order anyway.
Now somewhere there is a customer presumably mad at the restaurant for losing their order, while GrubHub will, for all I know, continue to do this to said restaurant forever. What's an owner supposed to do?