The Food Delivery Industry
There are many dominant players in the food delivery industry today – with many new ones frequently entering. Many people, especially millennials, use food delivery apps extremely often. The ease and convenience of these apps cannot be beat. However, for some restaurants, they may feel that the benefits of using some online delivery companies are turned into drawbacks.
Certain big players in the home-delivery market have grown to dominate the third-party industry, filling millions of orders a month across the country. Using them have drastically changed the way restaurants operate and may not be a good fit. This is because guests become the delivery company’s customers, not the actual restaurants themselves. Losing connection with a large part of their customer base is detrimental. These big players use the restaurants’ customers information to market themselves and their collaboration with new restaurants, not their existing ones.
Another reason why restaurants are finding why these services unprofitable is because they have to pay high commission fees from each order. As these companies grow bigger and bigger, they request a higher percentage of each order – somewhere between 25 to 30 percent. For smaller restaurants, this is hugely debilitating.
On top of the percentage that big companies take, there are also other fees involved with using their services. Restaurants often get locked into contracts, ensuring that they cannot cancel easily. Additionally, they also have cancellation fees that they charge if you wish to terminate the partnership. Late fees are also not uncommon: if a restaurant does not prepare an order in the certain amount of time the company deems acceptable, they are charged a fee for every minute a driver has to wait. This may be a drawback for serving customers that are actually dining in the restaurant as their orders are not prioritized. Also, the restaurant may have their reputation on the line if the delivery company’s staff has any problems, including being late or having a problem delivering the food.
There are smaller companies who operate on a month by month basis that do not charge any cancellation fees or lock you into a contract. dispatchNINJA is one of these companies, ensuring that every restaurant gets their chance to shine. We work hand in hand with our restaurants to promote themselves with their own branding. We also provide marketing services and printed flyers to advertise them in their respective cities. dispatchNINJA has carefully vetted every dispatch partner in each town and we only choose to work with the best ones that will deliver every order seamlessly. We will be launching our own aggregator very soon – keep on the lookout!