The food industry is due for a good old opensource disruption, where each restaurant can setup their private menu hub (like you would an instagram account), add their payment processing details, and start delivering their own orders. It's a win-win for the restaurant and their recurring customers.
Worked years ago at a restaurant that had its own website and app ordering...
Ubereats and the like still dominated the orders even with the 15% upcharge and even after notifying repeat customers that they can save money ordering direct
The convenience of having one centralized app with one account that can summon any food from any restaurant in a 10 mile area is just way too strong.
Plus the fact that you only have to give your credit card details to one large company that (hopefully) has some security professionals working for it, rather than dozens of smaller ones and hoping that none of them lose it/get compromised.
Consider supporting lower friction payment types like apple pay/google pay or any other which the customer is likely to be already using and don't need to enter their billing details to yet another random website. Maybe you already do.
The target audience for consolidated food delivery apps isn’t the person who wants to manage the fine details of ordering from 10-20 different local restaurants.
The majority of people using these apps just want to scroll some restaurants and order something quickly. Saving 10% by going through extra steps, installing extra apps, going to a company’s website, and doing custom orders isn’t what most of their repeat customers want to do.
I'm the one who don't bother ordering directly to get better value, but I started noticing less and less restaurants (that I order from) having this option anymore.
They probably saw too little people using it and stopped accepting, sadly.
Having dedicated delivery drivers stops making sense after a while
One benefit of these apps is companies which would never have had a driver now can be ordered, but the cost is all the businesses who did no longer do.
And it’s going to be a hard sell for a small business owner to pay for not employees that are in low demand by the consumer vs the zero fixed cost apps that manage that for you.
Stuff like this already exists (AFAIK not open source but cheap enough that restaurants would prefer to use it if they could). The problem is modifying user behaviour: people used to go directly to the restaurant to order food but are now very used to opening the food delivery app, browsing it, and ordering.
You could have the slickest ordering experience in the world and it won’t help you if no one sees it.s
These certainly exist. My local favourite Thai restaurant has its own ordering website and has its own staff deliver the order, with no markup over the in-restaurant menu prices.
The company that operates their ordering platform is mobihq.com (I have no affiliation with them)
There are middle man services for certain types of food in certain areas.
For example Slice is a popular one for pizza. I know a business owner who uses it.
They have an app and optionally an online menu on your custom domain to take online orders and physical hardware for taking orders in your store. Think POS system, register, terminal, printers, etc..
For a business owner that covers you for accepting online and offline orders, and you can deliver direct to your customers.
95% of his online delivery orders go through this system because DoorDash charges him (the business owner) 30% for each order so he raised his prices there to partially offset that. Slice on the other hand is 5% cheaper than his baseline price for online orders for customers so it's a no brainer most use that. With that said, way more people call in or come in person than using the app. Probably a 90% / 10% split.
It's crazy to think, but I think we're quickly reaching an inflection point where the generation of on demand multi-sided marketplaces that gained steam in the 2010s is ready to be disrupted itself.
Similar to how JustEats works. Or at least used to. The restaurants have their own driver, and create their own menu. Though I think the cut from JustEats is still quite high.
