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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Clever, but how long until Takeaway.com and others add a clause in their contract against putting such business cards in their order? These companies have power over restaurants, because they can ruin a restaurant's reputation until it yields and accepts the new contract.

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That's about as anticompetitive as it gets, using your market power to prohibit your partners from mentioning a lower cost alternative. The damage to consumers would be easy to illustrate.

Reminds me of a certain fruit company whose new M1 processor has been making the rounds on the news lately.

> Takeaway.com and others add a clause in their contract against putting such business cards in their order?

Possibly, buried in the fine print somewhere, but enforced by whom? Aside from the restaurants, only the drivers will see the food. Will they be ratting out the restaurants to their corporate overlords? I doubt it.

They can hire delivery-driver-equivalents of mystery shoppers - better paid workers whose primary job is spot-checking ToS compliance. Or they'll just pay someone to order random stuff from random restaurants and report what they get, under guise of quality assurance.

It's how trust-based arrangements are handled in other industries.

How long until some actor emerges who provides a network of ordering sites hosted on the cloud that charge $30-50 a month for each restaurant and nothing more? As margins get thinner and thinner this is inevitable. And no marketing needed, if the service is good word of mouth would do it.

A long time, I don’t think it’s a viable model at scale. The restaurant owners are only slightly more tech savvy than my mom and they really struggle with this stuff. Also Uber acts as a mini Facebook style walled garden and locks out more and more customers from using your restaurant. At some point 10-20% the walled garden is enough to drive your profit to 0 and bankrupt a restaurant.

If I’m understanding you correctly, that already exists as Square Online, although I think they’re a bit more expensive than that. A lot of restaurants near me use it.

ChowNow is exactly this: https://get.chownow.com/

And for what it's worth, I actually love using ChowNow. I can order directly from the restaurant, but I don't have to use a 2009 website built in PHP 0.2 by the owner's niece.

Takeaway needs the restaurants otherwise their service is useless.

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