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Comment by obibring | Hacker News Reader

This is the right move - local restaurants are hurting and, sadly, the internet is a place where big corps with large budgets have leverage over passionate little guys working their butts off.

For those who want to help, I built a chrome extension similar to Honey that shows a local restaurant's direct ordering website as you're about to order from that restaurant thru a third party service. If direct ordering isn't available, it will also show you if that same order is cheaper elsewhere. If you have a favorite local restaurant that accepts direct orders, please help us add them to our system by filling in this form: https://platerapp.app.link/JACVBOFUY7

For those interested in checking out the extension, it can be downloaded here: https://platerapp.app.link/tDSD3mUTY7 (it doesn't collect browsing history or sell personal info or anything of the sort)

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(Preface: I'm sure your app filters for stuff like this)

I got kinda burned when I tried to order direct from a restaurant. The last time we ate there they included a little "order online" card with a link to their website. So the next time, in the spirit of supporting businesses directly, I went to their site and ordered. They did use a third-party handler (ChowNow I think?), but I figured it was a kind of order management third-party. In fact, after placing the order, I got an additional email from that third-party handler congratulating me on ordering directly from restaurants, and that they explicitly don't charge restaurants a fee. Neat, right? Well, Lo and behold, behind the scenes they just used DoorDash to handle delivery...

That sucked because A) it was more hassle for me to sign up for Yet Another Account, and B) I have DashPass (free delivery and discounted service charge) but didn't get to use it, so it ended up costing me more even with the coupon the restaurant threw in.

Hell, there are even pizza places around me that use DoorDash for delivery. Pizza places, for goodness sake!

It's a weird world I suppose.

Wow, that's really wild. Would you mind sharing the name of the restaurant? I'd love to reach out to them to understand what happened there. And thanks for posting this, that's definitely something I'll take into consideration.

I have actually seen quite a few restaurants do this, where they use a third-party ordering system but then delegate to DoorDash/GrubHub for delivery. Is it maybe because the delivery service gets a smaller cut in this case? I wonder if the total fees add up to a smaller number with the two middlemen than with only DoorDash/GrubHub. Presumably, the latter can charge more if they also handle the transaction as well as bring traffic, as opposed to only handling delivery.

> Is it maybe because the delivery service gets a smaller cut in this case? Yes, this is correct. If you order from DoorDash directly, the restaurant will pay anywhere from 15-40% of the total transaction.

Restaurants that have partnered with DoorDash for delivery logistics only will pay usually around $7 per order (this varies depending on geography and overall partner terms).

However, the key difference is that this delivery fee is almost always passed on to the customer. So from a restaurant's perspective, they are getting a great deal: Delivery logistics for customers who want delivery, but if they're using a low/no commission direct ordering service, they keep (most of) the full order margin.

> Restaurants that have partnered with DoorDash for delivery logistics only will pay usually around $7 per order

Did you mean 7 percent of the order perhaps?

That happened to me as well here in AZ. There is a popular local cookie place that we wanted to support. Ordered a dozen cookies from their website thinking it would put more money in their pocket vs ordering from DoorDash. However, the entire delivery process was DoorDash done all via SMS. It was odd.

I got kinda burned when I tried to order direct from a restaurant.

If it's a "mom and pop joint" with 1 or maybe at most a handful of locations located in the area, skip the app and just call it in. Nothing to download or sign up for, no chance for an unseen middle-man. These non-chain restaurants are literally the "service industry", I've found I always get a higher level of service when talking to a human on the phone, at a couple of our regular places the servers that pickup ask how I'm doing, have an idea of how we like things, politely inquire about the kids, etc... A couple of them offer online ordering, but I always just pickup the phone and hand over my credit card when they bring the food out, IMO it's a better experience for all parties involved.

Edit: Caveat, I'm old enough that to-go/delivery over the phone was the only option at one point, not app first; and even before the pandemic found DoorDash and their ilk to be parasites that I wouldn't use.

Off topic, but your comment made me think of the way my view toward restaurants has changed.

If the pandemic has taught me anything, it’s that restaurants as a concept are just kind of terrible and unnecessary, at least for the bulk of the world’s unremarkable places.

If a perfect vaccine was distributed to every person on the planet right now I wouldn’t be back to visit 95% of restaurants out there.

During “lockdown” I learned to make all kinds of food and way more interesting, higher quality cocktails than 95% of bars and restaurants have, for a fraction of the price.

I learned that my restaurant visits were there to satisfy an emotional desire, and they didn’t even do a great job of that.

I learned that the desire for a “quick meal” is a farce, that homemade food isn’t really a time sink for someone deep into the habit.

My future restaurant visits will be way more sparse and deliberate. I’m going to be holding restaurants to the standard of making something that I literally can’t make at home without going to culinary school and apprenticing under a master chef.

It isn’t a noble act to support your local business if the business isn’t meeting your needs, and at this point I’m not sure how my local dive is going to be able to adapt to my modified needs.

Fantastic idea! If a restaurant offers delivery themselves, it's a no brainer to order directly from them. Usually it's cheaper and faster than ordering through an app. Hope this gains traction.

I dont agree on the "faster" part. Uber or Doordash manage their own delivery people and they're vastly more efficient than the restaurants' own. If you look at Yelp or Seamlesss negative reviews, you'll notice that most of them complaint about delivery service. If there's one thing that the restaurants can benefit from when using Uber or Doordash is having their reviews on those platforms based solely on the quality of food itself.

When I order delivery from a restaurant, an employee (maybe the owner’s kid) comes and delivers the food directly to my house when it’s done. It‘s generally faster than the app model where you need to wait for the driver to go to the restaurant to pick up the food, then come to your house while possibly stopping at other restaurants and/or houses on the way.

I could see how the restaurant delivery would be worse if that particular restaurant is bad at delivering. Also, the app model does seem like it should be cheaper at scale by using the deliverer’s labor more efficiently.

Restaurant deliver can be worse when the driver is overloaded and your food sits at the restaurant waiting for them to pick it up, or when the driver picks up multiple orders at once (likely) and yours is delayed or is last to be dropped off.

I've definitely had this happen on occasion. There might be interesting ways to solve this problem, like showing the level of "delivery risk" associated with an order given the user's distance from the restaurant and time of day.

> the app model where you need to wait for the driver to go to the restaurant to pick up the food, then come to your house while possibly stopping at other restaurants and/or houses on the way

This is a weird set of complaints.

1. Usually, there would be some lag time between when you order the food, and when the restaurant finishes making it. This would overlap with the time required for the driver to go to the restaurant and pick up the food; the app model isn't actually introducing a delay there.

2. Restaurants that do delivery themselves also use the same driver to deliver multiple orders at once. You're definitely better off with a dedicated driver, but the restaurant is much worse off. Again, this would not appear to be related to the app model. We order pizza and pick it up ourselves, because if the pizza place delivers it, it arrives stale and we pay extra for delivery.

> It‘s generally faster than the app model where you need to wait for the driver to go to the restaurant to pick up the food

That's not how it works. I order a lot and the driver is always there to pick it up as soon as it's ready. The driver obviously gets notified about the delivery as soon as the restaurant confirms the order.

The restaurant also has a more direct incentive to actually deliver.

One Friday night here in Sydney, it was raining like crazy - so we ordered in some food from one of the online groups. 2 hours later and multiple talks with support and they were still telling us stories about how it's nearly there.

We eventually called the restaurant directly and the food had been sitting ready for 90 minutes on the counter. The service just had all their gig-economy-staff decide this isn't the gig for them in bad weather, so no one was available to pick it up and deliver it. They said we could pick it up ourselves but we didn't really feel like old food at that point so we cancelled and drove out somewhere else. Being lied to was the most annoying part.

I was picking up sandwiches from a local shop and watched 3 doordash/Uber Eats drivers come right after the other to pick up the same order, but they all cancelled it because the restaurant didn't have multiple deliveries for them to pick up at the same time- ie- they were dropping off multiple houses each run. It made me realize why the food was cold last time we ordered from them! From now on I just go and pick up myself.

The best part about the app is able to see where the driver is on the map. I hate being in the unknown and not knowing what's going on with my delivery.

I think sometimes those maps are faked. We've seen drivers from apps pick up multiple orders for delivery, but the map doesn't show them stopping at multiple houses, it just slows down the icon of the car.

I'm using Foodora in Sweden and sometimes I see the courier go to other places and they've even told me they had to do other drops (when I said "I saw you took the wrong way on the map"), so yes but I don't think they fake it here.

The app is a cool idea, however, I’m curious how you guys plan on managing the standardization across menu items. Replicating a single restaurant menu is an incredibly complicated problem given the amount of customization, but you also need to account for the variability of the same menu across multiple services.

This is a really good insight and a part of the delivery experience I think could be greatly improved. Different services offer surprisingly different versions of the same menu, and customers are unaware there might be better selection on a different website.

This is absolutely not the right move.

This is you self promoting your app.

Restaurants will pay more to market themselves, hire delivery drivers, and manage the logistics.

Local restaurants are hurting because of COVID. They are blaming the delivery services, whose proprietary tech, marketing spend, logistics services are the only reason 90% could maintain any revenue stream.

> This is you self promoting your app.

Okay, but it seems like a reasonable time to promote a relevant app that is apparently free with no ads. It's not like your post is completely free of agenda.

> Restaurants will pay more to market themselves, hire delivery drivers, and manage the logistics.

This is simply not true. Adding middle men does not make this more efficient, and I'm really not sure why you think it does.

One basic reason it's not true, is that business owners won't necessarily pay for these things at all, they may just do them themselves. Sometimes it's easier to produce effort than it is to produce cash to buy effort.

This is a pretty cynical way to see things. I’m a restaurant lover who wants my local restaurants to survive the pandemic. Why is building a product to help them “not the right move?”

Is there a Firefox version coming soon?

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