Food delivery services (DoorDash, Grubhub, Postmates, UberEats, etc.)

The juggernaut food delivery service in Turkey “Yemeksepeti”, has had a data breach. Uncertain how many users’ data was compromised, but the database includes “Name and surname, date of birth, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, delivery address information, login passwords (masked with SHA-256)”

" Yemeksepeti (literally, ‘food basket’) is an online food delivery company. Yemeksepeti currently operates in 70 cities in Turkey and in Cyprus, with more than 35,000 member restaurants, 18 million users, and 520,000 daily orders."
– as of 2019

Every service will get hacked sooner or later. This is why I use fake info whenever possible and different emails and passwords for every site. My account on food delivery services has my correct first name and a bogus lastname, so my doormen aren’t too confused. Obviously the address has to be correct or the food won’t make it to my gullet.

The best Chinese Restaurant in my area is a family run business. They don’t do delivery, only pickup, since I assume it’s too difficult to manage delivery drivers and don’t want to deal with the fees / issues with the big services. Until recently, they were purely a “paper menu + phone” place, and didn’t have any sort of web presence.

At some point in the last month or so, they suddenly added online ordering if you search for them on google. Looking at the fine print, it looks like they’re provided by this service:

It seems like it’s an online restaurant ordering service specifically targeting Chinese restaurants. I assume mostly because they have bilingual Chinese / English customer support.

I’ve seen other places nearby that use vrindi/restaurantwave hosting, and a seafood place near me has “online ordering” by honorpos, which, as far as I can tell, is literally just a web front-end to the POS system they use for taking orders at the waiter stations. Another by me uses an “orderstart.com” url, which seems to be the frontend for menudrive.com.

It’s interesting to me that there does seem to be a proliferation of offerings for online ordering that explicitly are not seamless / grubhub. There’s really no reason not to allow people to order directly via an online portal rather than over the phone these days.

I’ve noticed a few places around here that use Chinese Menu Online. It’s probably a lot easier on the backend when the restaurants by and large have the same or very similar menus. I’ve been happy with my experience every time I’ve used it and the fee is minimal.

Hopefully there’s a market for this sort of middleman to thrive. Give me a way to order online and pay ahead of time and give the restaurant an easy to set up, no frills ordering system that gets them off the phones.

So I’ve never used DoorDash before until last week since my work was doing a remote event and let everyone expense it.

I cannot believe how much of a rip off this is?? How do people actually use these services regularly?

How is “delivery fee” and “Service fee” two separate things??

Delivery fee is free if you’re a DoorDash+ member so they need a secondary way to charge people. Typically it’s either $1 or 5%, whichever is higher.

♫ Fee for food
and food for fee!
Fee for you
and fee for me! ♫

Yeah, Doordash isn’t worth it if you’re a one-and-done customer.

If you’re ordering with them once or twice per week or more, the $9.99 monthly fee to be DoorDash+ makes it eminently worth it for folks who live in areas where DD is very viable option. A lot of times when I use it, the only markup over if I’d gone myself is the tip I pay to the delivery driver. And I usually get my food faster than if I’d picked it up myself, too.

Yeah, if restaurants can license the tech – but provide their own delivery drivers and personnel – that’s a pretty great trend.

I think maybe ChowNow allows that, plus their fee structure is way better. It’s the only service I see the fancy places around here using, although it seems like they typically only do pickup.

Heh, menu prices are 30% higher, roughly, than in restaurant prices AND the local places just keep increasing their prices.

They are at some restaurants.

They decidedly not at some other restaurants though. I’ve seen markups as high as 50%, and as low as 5-10%. I’ve also seen flat markups.

As with everything with these services, it varies greatly place to place, restaurant to restaurant I think.

I can vouch for this statement from my own experience (which is extensive, we order from Door Dash 3 - 4 times per week lately). Some places the mark ups are appalling, others they’re virtually non-existent.

The only money the restaurant gets is what you put down on the food, and Doordash (or whoever) takes a cut of that end too. So if they’re pushing up the prices, I can’t really blame them.

While that was my first time using DoorDash for actual delivery, some of the restaurants by me use it or other services to coordinate pickup orders too.

Many restaurants do jack up their prices by quite a bit for how they list on those services, I’m sure to cover the fees the services charge the restaurants. So I normally just call the restaurant instead. Such a scam.

Oh yes I can.

There is a service fee, a delivery fee, a regulatory free and when I first ordered from a restaurant something that cost say 21 dollars is now 29. They’re out of their mind if they don’t think I won’t blame the restaurant for raising their prices. As far as I am concerned, DD and the restaurant industry is to be blamed for this.

It will be interesting to see who survives as things get back to normal over the next year or so. I think delivery will stay popular, but not as popular as it is now, and these services are losing money hand over fist even at these crazy prices.

Can Doordash keep going when their order volume falls by 50%?

They lose money on each order in most locales so yes, dropping volume will help them a lot.

They don’t make money now, when everyone uses them, when they have everyone’s attention and the selling point is basically get screwed by us and your local restaurant and prop the industry up so you still have somewhere to go to after the global pandemic is over… and they still can’t make money.

These companies are leaking water, and the only reason you can’t see it readily is there is so much water being dumped into them by the virtue of locals trying to save local eateries.

But that’s them compensating for Doordash charging them I’ve seen as high as 55% of the order on the restaurant end. So I’m still 100% blaming Doordash, myself. I understand that not everyone will feel the same way, but I think that’s misplaced.