How food delivery aggregators can perform better?
The problem
Right now I live in Berlin. From time to time I become lazy and then I order food. Luckily nowadays there are bunch of options of delivery services.
Berlin is a big city with all benefits and downsides of it. One of them is advantage and disadvantage at the same time (at least for me) - amount of the different food options is HUUUUUGE. And this is the place where I am always get confused, cos I do not know what I want to order and from which place. There are too many restaurants, which propose quite similar food.
Yes, luckily there are things like ratings and feedback, which users leave about the places. That is supposed to help people like me to find what they need. But I realized that it doesn’t work like that any more… Why? Cos amount of restaurants and cafes with high rating is also big!
So in the end for me it is always the same story: I am stuck in food search among 20–40 places with 4–5 stars rating for 15+ minutes, reading feedbacks, comparing menus and etc.
And I should be thankful, cos mostly all of the food delivery aggregators are limiting the amount of the places where I can order food by some radius around my living address.
For ordering food I generally use Lieferando, and in general I am pretty satisfied with them. But they have the same problem which I have described above: almost endless list of places (~127 😂) where I can order food.
This is how the main app screen looks like after you enter your delivery address. Yes, obviously, there are categories. That is nice, but the problem still exists. To many options… 🤓
The idea
First of all let’s create imaginary food delivery service and name it MakeMeFull (MMF - the short version).
Why doing it? To avoid using existing brands (the example above with L-do was for the sake of the example itself) and not to create free advertising for them.
Second of all, let’s assume that MMF is a very popular service (at least in Berlin) and a lot of people use it every day, a lot of places work with MMF as a partner. For a specific time period MMF has a list of delivery addresses and ordered food items.
Then we need also to imagine the app, which looks ± the same way as the apps of other competitors on the market: you enter you address and then see the list of all places where you can order food. But in addition to all that MMF proposes one more screen, which should be easy to access from the main one: neighbors choice or trusted by neighbors .
When user opens that screen, he will see the list of places, where from his neighbors just ordered food recently (for example during last 30 minutes). Every item of the list will contain:
- the name of the restaurant/cafe,
- its rating,
- maybe the meal, which was ordered (not sure about this)
- count down timer, during which user can make an order, so that it will be delivered much faster (cos the restaurant already have a plan to deliver food for his neighbor).
It still should be anonymous. User should not know who exactly from his neighbors ordered or to which address. That’s it 😄
By neighbors I mean some people, who live really close to the user. Might be same building, same street, same block, in 2 km radius from him. This is the place for a/b testing.
Win-Win-Win situation
It might be not super obvious from the first glance, but this approach brings benefits for all players: final users, delivery company, partners (restaurants/cafes/etc).
Lets walk through each of them.
Win for the user:
- because of the trust factor it will be easier for some users to find out where they wanna order or even what they wanna order
- as a result they will spend less time for search
- they will get their food faster, cos they “join” the previous order instead of creating the new one
- under some circumstances the user might get even some tiny discount, if he orders right here right now
Win for the partner:
- potentially more orders, which should be delivered to the same place (savings on delivery: gas, workforce, time)
- once you get an order, a possibility of having a few more in a short time grows
Win for the food delivery service:
- time needed to convert user (who just opened the app) into a customer (who makes an order) is much-much smaller
- the pressure on the servers will be smaller, cos user will produce smaller amount of useless searches of places and menus
- as a result, decreasing costs for converting users
- couriers have better optimized routes and higher productivity, due to a simultaneous delivery of few orders to the “same” location
Now let’s assume that for every order MMF takes 1€ commission from the partner. For every next order to the neighborhood MMF takes a 20-50% bigger commission (for example 1.5€). Why? Cos it is an additional hot lead for the restaurant. It’s an opportunity for the restaurant to earn more right now right here and increase the efficiency.
What is needed to make this real?
To be able to show Trusted by neighbors screen, the MMF still needs to add to their existed database one parameter - a time frame, during which partner can handle another orders without dramatic slowdown in delivery. Time frame value might be different for different places. Or even it might depend on the distance — how far the restaurant is from the delivery place. Anyway, this is something that should be asked from the partners.
All other data (delivery address, the name of restaurant, the ordered items) is already known to the MMF. So it should not be super hard to develop this feature 🤓
For sure, there will be some challenges for MMF, some questions that should be answered. But this is the daily routine for them, that's their business.
Yes, I have zero experience in food delivery industry. Yes, I might be not aware of some details of their business operations. But sometimes good ideas just arrive from outside.
Why not to share them and see what happens?
So would you like to use the Trusted by neighbors feature?
Write your answer in comments 😜
At the time this article was written, no food delivery company had this functionality. So if one of them suddenly decides to implement it, I will be glad to receive some references in addition to the last MacBook Pro, iPhone or at least AirPods Pro 🙏🏻
