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Online Takeout Delivery is Back
prostoalex writes "It's like watching e-Dreams and re-living the Kozmo.com experience, only this time it's for real, the New York Times says. SeamlessWeb is here (or rather, in New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and southern Connecticut) to take your take-out orders and deliver the food. All is done via their Web site so no need to look for that takeout menu: "SeamlessWeb charges restaurants a commission of 5 percent to 15 percent, while the business pays a 2.5 percent fee for each transaction. The process for consumers will work much the same, except they will be charged no service fee.""
I have ordered my groceries online for the past five years and would never consider going back to a store again. I wish food was the same way. You can usually order pizza from ten different places, but only one is online (Papa Johns). Well, sometimes Pizza Hutt, but I think that's only in Kansas or something.
Most cities in the country, outside of maybe the very heart of Seattle and then LA, New York and Chicago - you can't really even order food by phone - much less the internet.
I've never lived in any place (including Portland) where you could have anything other than pizza delivered. It would be cool if you could have chinese, mexican, italian and other stuff delivered. Even better would be if you could have real food - not just some fast food el-cheapo crap.
But I guess there's no money in it so you still have to drive all over town for everything in the world. I guess it's still 1985.
...God forbid the connection lags and you hit submit 4 times. They better have some good order verification :)
Then again, like the advent of consumer priced broadband crawling slowly past the cities, I wonder how long it will take before this is anything but simply another way to order a lunch meeting meal for metro area companies.
Perfecting Discordia
www.stevenvansickle.com
I think the point is that you can orderf rom anywhere on one site. For no extra fee!
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them.
SeamlessWeb is here (or rather, in New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and southern Connecticut) to take your take-out orders and deliver the food.
What about those of us in flyover country, you insensitive clod? (j/k)
In all seriousness, I think this is a great idea, but it's hardly original. It does need to catch on, tho. When I was living in San Diego, I was able to order pizzas from Dominos entirely online, pay for them with my card, and have them delivered faster than had I phoned in a cash order. I wish the take-outs luck with this.
It must be Windows. It needs half a gig of RAM and a hardware-accelerated graphics card just to run Solitaire.
I agree that it's a brilliant idea, but the relevant question is, why will it succeed this time if it failed last time?
The most obvious answer is that the dotcom era is over. If they're offering a reasonable offer at a reasonable price, plus the economies of scale (why should every restaurant in the area have a separate delivery system when you can even out the bursts with a large central service?), it could well work.
As opposed to the dotcom era, when readily-available investor money and a land-rush attitude made for stupid promotions. A friend of mine bought stuff through kozmo because it was cheaper, even delivered, than buying the object in a store. Clearly they were losing money like crazy and he knew he was taking advantage of stupid investors.
The insensitive clots ruling the world at my employer use seamlessweb so that all the worker bees would remain at their desks as long as possible.
The system generally works very well, although the 10:30am cutoff time for lunch orders can come and go very ruthlessly leaving you without the free lunch for the day.
The few problems we've had with the service have to do more with the vendors rather than seamlessweb. Some of them, especially the new restaurants in the system, have problems fullfilling the volume of orders sometimes.
They recently revamped their user interface. The old user interface made the service look a little like someone was running it from their garage. The new one is definitely an improvement and looks very professional.
In Soviet Russia, I ruled you
Sorry, but there are some things that I need to see in person. In many cases, there's absolutely no substitute for personal experience in choosing a product. It varies between people, but mine are: foods, powertools, movies, most books, and just about everythings else. I like to see things in person. Having ship things back because of poor quality is more trouble than just going to a local store and seeing it for myself. Plus, I'm giving my local retailer business as opposed to someone a 1,000 miles away. Sometimes, there's no way around it, you have to buy over the internet (electronics for one - Radio Shack is now a Best Buy competitor), now and again.
Right - just like these guys have been doing for years as well...
Actually 18 years - many of the early ones were via a mailing that contained all of the resturant menus, but I've been using their web order system for at least four years.
That that is is not that that is not. That that is not is not that that is.
O' for the opportunity to once again lament the loss of WebVan. I loved them. Mourn. Mourn.
But in all seriousness, just because the dot.com boom folded, doesn't mean that the idea was bad. WebVan died because it overextended itself massively, thinking it would have time to make a profit; and was caught rather unaware of the failing dot.com industry. Executive stupidity, sure, but a bad idea NO!! If they would have just kept to two primary markets during there fateful last year, they could have survived the crash, and be raking in the dough today. Many stores not offer delivery, because WebVan showed them that there was a market for it.
Also not to knock Seamless Web, but Waiter's On Wheel (Bay Area) and Waiter.com (Bay Area & Silicon Valley) both managed to survive the dot.com bust, and still deliver food from great restaurants without the super high mark-up. Up to 15% for the business charge just seems excessive; and already seems to be pushing some of their clientele into establishing their own services. The Japanese grill mentioned has a nice clean easy to use web site. Nice enough that if I knew I wanted food from them, I'd order directly from them to save both me and them money.
Of course, I admit sometimes, I used Waiter's On Wheels when I was uncertain what I wanted for dinner. Having access to a large array of menu's that aren't limited to pizza specials has its own value.
Delivery Butler (site here) is a Detroit based food takeout delivery service, and they've been around for some time and doing very well (since Nov 2001). I've used their online interface, and didn't have to do anything until the fella came by 45 minutes later, and dropped off my food, and drove away with my tip. I even paid my entire bill online. I'm sure there are others, too.. so not to be one of those boneheads, but this really isn't news.
Over here in Warsaw, I've been using a number of various services like this: Room Service, , etc. Thanks to these places, I have a total of 48 restaurants I can order from at the click of a button (or a phone call, if I feel like it.)
We even have 3 (mostly) high-end supermarkets that offer online ordering/delivery out of their brick-and-mortar locations. From what I understand, they've been making out like gangbusters.