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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.""
Dominos UK (http://www.dominos.co.uk) has had a web orders facility (and interactive digital TV) for the last four years. Is this really just catching on over the pond?
I guess the big question is, what point am I missing here?
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2. Order Domino's pizza online at their web site.
3. Drive home and wait for pizza.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've been using CampusFood.com to make my takeout (or pick-up) deliveries for quite some time. Great service. I don't think that online delivery services ever left the internet -- this story is just a shameless plug for some new startup.
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before the Food Network took over (bought?) the domain. Also, Waiters on Wheels. They fill a niche market.
My experience has been that ordering from a restaraunt that doesn't normally handle takeout will be a hit or miss affair as to whether or not you will be satisfied with what gets delivered.
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I've been using http://www.takeouttaxi.com/ for quite a while now.
pooptruck
Is this different than Restaurants on the Go here in Toronto? I can order online (or via the phone) from a rather large list of restaurants and have it delivered to my door. Sure, there's a delivery fee, but one might expect that.
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I think the point is that you can orderf rom anywhere on one site. For no extra fee!
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There's a CAD comic for every story...
= 2005-02-21
http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/?t=archives&date
Another blatent advertisement gets posted as a story. Yawn.
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.
Kozmo offered video rentals online, with free delivery - as well as things like snack foods, CDs, convenience items, video games, etc. It was impulse-buying to the max. I was so sad to see Kozmo die. This is nothing like Kozmo, it's like all the other online ordering systems for restaraunts out there.
Meh. Call me when Kozmo REALLY comes back.
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It took them long enough, but they finally realized that if you hide the cost of the second business (delivery) in the prices from the first business (food) people can be fooled into thinking they are getting free delivery.
Or, another way of looking at this is that urban prices are so inflated that one can piggyback entire businesses inside the margins. I suppose when a sandwich costs $15, you've got a lot of room to play with your delivery model.
In my area (Arlington, VA), we have DrDelivery.com. You can get all sorts of food and other errands run for you. Its fairly popular.
As long as a company stays small and dosn't expect 90% of the population to go for internet-delivered everything this type of thing can be a success. After pets.com people said no one could make money selling petfood online, but actualy lots of people do. They just don't have multi-million dollar ad-campains.
There will always be a few people rich and lazy enough (or in my case, rich and holding a suspended drivers license) to make something like this work.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
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.
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I double checked, and found that I accidentally typed dominatrix.com instead of dominos.com. I was wondering why I never got any pizzas, but this weird lady kept knocking at my door.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
SeamlessWeb is here (or rather, in New York, Chicago, Washington, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and southern Connecticut)
I just went to their site and it says New York only. Other cities "coming soon."
Uhhhh... great article.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
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.
I've been using Quikorder for my dominos pizza (yes i have a thing for pre-made cheap pizza delivered fast =) for about 5 years now. Even has ICQ message alert, online order history, and good coupon deals.
Did you mean Maine? I live in Portland (Oregon) and besides being able to order stuff besides pizza in the good old days of Kozmo, you can still order food from places like http://delivereddish.com/ in Portland. They've got some great restaurants on their list.
Papa johns has been doing this for years. Create an account, put in your different locations (home, office, friends) pick the order you want, delivered in the same amount of time as called in deliveries. Most of the time its even cheaper, they allways have internet specials.
I would guess that a company that delivers different resturants food to your house would naturally take much longer then if you just picked it up your self, but for the chain companies that are handeling it them selves, papa johns has been doing it right for a whilel.
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Often times I find myself too buzzed to drive but fresh out of 40's... and no matter what I offer the Pizza Hut guy, he just won't go pick me up a couple more. How about an online beer delivery service? I think the government would even subsidize the business to keep the drunks (me) off the street... just a thought.
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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.
So we go from a phone system to an internet system and the costs increase by 10% and we call that progress? Every restaurant I've seen already has a computer in the back office that is more than capable of handling the few orders an hour that will come in.
Anyway, I'm not even suggesting the website would have to be at the restaurant. My only problem is with the idea that a company full of people is required for this. At the very most, this should be a $500 software package that the restaurant buys and installs that has a very simple interface and maybe even groks the menu database from their point of sale computer system. This whole thing should be doable for a negligable marginal cost.
If you needed a mechanic to successfuly start your car for you most days or "upgrade" it with new gas, we'd be disgusted with the automotive engineers for their lack of competence, and might even suggest that their shitty engineering were a self-serving nod to the dealers. But nobody seems to mind that computer science research seems to mostly produce jobs for IT people, and not elegant solutions. It may seem like an unfair analogy, but consider the fact that companies need to hire an IT staff to deal with their computers on a daily basis, but don't need to hire a mechanical staff to run the company cars.
Besides, if you're interested in volume, which way would you rather go - your own site with perhaps couple of users a day, or heavily advertised "restaurant aggregator", like this outfit seems to be, where you might get a larger volume just by being listed with them.
I'd rather not have my ordering facility and marketing coupled. I'd wish I could handle my own menu and ordering system cheaply and then spend my advertising money where it's most efficient. These guys are charging a lot for the service of providing an ordering sytem, and they're going to get away with it because no small restaurant can figure out how to do this themselves. And that's a huge shame, and a cost to our economy, and it occurs all over our economy.
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.