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Comment by sizzle | Hacker News Reader

who won this space? Uber eats?

In which country? There are dozens of food delivery companies all over the world. It's not a winner take all market.

Many brands are part of a holding. Like "Just Eat Takeaway.com" Which also owns Grubhub and SkipTheDishes in North America. Mostly active in Europe though.

Depending on how bullish you are on the market it's either DoorDash or no one. Because DD is the frontrunner by a pretty solid margin but time will tell if the business ends up being sustainable med-term.

DoorDash operates only in the United States, Canada, Australia and Japan. [1]

Uber Eats is almost everywhere (45 countries). [2]

Also there are some very big players outside of the US, e.g. Rappi in LATAM (Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, etc). [3]

[1] https://help.doordash.com/dashers/s/article/Where-is-DoorDas...

[2] https://help.uber.com/ubereats/article/when-and-where-is-ube...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rappi

Yeah, it’s very region-specific. Uber basically doesn’t exist in Southeast Asia. Here, Grab is king. A while back, Uber sold their SEA operations to Grab for a stake in Grab, and then I think they were trying to sell their stake to Alibaba.

DoorDash acquired Wolt late last year. [1]

With this they now also have quite a large presence in Europe.

[1] https://blog.wolt.com/hq/2021/11/09/wolt-joins-forces-with-d...

> but time will tell if the business ends up being sustainable med-term

Narrator: "it won't. As the whole American startup scene nowadays is based on the idea of losing unlimited investor money for years and decades with literally zero plans to change that"

Uber eats has a fraud problem, Doordash is the superior service. That doesn't answer your question however.

Could you say more about the fraud problem? I've used Ubereats a few times a week for a couple of years and I don't think I've had a problem, though only ever in a tier 1 city.

Cities have tiers? Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)

Not a fraud issue but in Miami over the break I ordered food from Uber eats, I got 5 different drivers who all got assigned then dropped the order.

On doordash none of this bs ever happens.

Cities definitely have tiers in China. I guess people use a similar system elsewhere?

See eg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city for some tier rankings. They usually start with London and New York.

Yes, it's a pretty widely-used term. Eg https://www.thebalance.com/real-estate-market-tiers-5207240

> Anyway, in San Francisco I order food and the driver doesn't move for an hour and a half. I call in to customer support, get another driver and he drives to the other side of the city before coming back and picking up my order (I paid for priority)

Oh wow, that sucks. Not sure how I never experienced that, though when I was in SF I used it a bit less often than I do now (NY). If anything, I would've thought it would be way worse in NY: systems/platforms seem creakier here in general.

Seems to work just like their car service then. Driver accepts the ride, sits there for 10 minutes, and then texts you asking you to cancel (they think I don't know it hurts their stats if they're the one to cancel).

Perhaps it won't hurt their statistics if you cancel their trip, since the driver has been waiting for you for ten minutes and he can do it with confidence. I already had a bad experience with a taxi when I was still ordering transportation services on https://www.bostonexecutivelimoservice.com/new-york-city-to-... . Then I was fifteen minutes late and notified the driver in advance, but my trip was canceled due to the fact that the workload of orders was oveloaded and every car was on the bill. Apparently they had the right to do this and simply canceled my trip, since the fault was on my part and the situation was not changed by the fact that I warned the driver that I would be late. Most likely you have a similar situation and there is nothing to worry about, just order another taxi.

anecdotally i saw a huge dip in consistency across both ubereats and doordash in the back half of 2021. like orders taking 1+ hours greater than expected delivery. that being said, i've never had the problems you're citing with either on food delivery.

as for tiering, i think it's a rough estimate of the population density. getting delivery/drivers in suburbs is plain harder given their physical sparseness

Please elaborate on the fraud problem. What moat do DD have?

At least for me a driver came all the way to our house with the food and then left without dropping the food off.

Yes we got our money back, but what a pain.

I had a problem once but it turned out to be the restaurant's fault (they accepted my pick-up order, marked it as picked up and closed for the day before I got my food - all of this in the span of ~10 mins). I submitted a complaint via the app and Uber refunded me no questions asked. </shrug>

I have to wonder where the opening tag for that shrug was. Were you shrugging for the entire comment? :)

I read </shrug> as a self closing tag <shrug /> as human language is not necessarily valid XML. It is amazing how we "autocorrect" things as we read that we have to consciously stop and think what we did.

One doesn’t have to have a moat to have superior service.

Fraud from Uber or fraud from the deliveries? I uninstalled Uber eats and rather drive to pick or use any other service than touch Uber. Uber eats was one of the nastiest apps with the absolute worst UX I have tried. Germany had a website pizza.de a decade earlier and they would send faxes in the backend and even that was better.

Even plain Uber keeps trial to sell me on their subscription every single ride.

In this specific context, yes. Uber now owns Postmates and have rolled it into their Uber Eats offering.

Kind of a toss up. Doordash has more market share in US but UberEats has wider international presence and is a leader in some markets. But yes, Uber acquired Postmates at one point and is now rolling out a subscription program called UberOne that encompasses rides, eats and its nascent grocery/pharmacy offering from the cornershop acquisition.

Also depends on the metro. I think NYC is actually primarily GrubHub, Seattle and central TX are primarily UEats, but for the most part DD is a safe bet. North TX is definitely DD territory.

GrubHub hands down

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