The restaurant industry is hurting. With COVID, almost nobody is going out to enjoy a meal. However, many people are still ordering in, often through food delivery apps where all you have to do is hit a couple of buttons, and your food is delivered right to your door.
You don’t have to think about it. You don’t have to get off your couch. You don’t even need to exchange money. It seems so easy. Almost too easy – and in a way, it is.
An Unsustainable Business Model
Before the pandemic, you could get away without using any of these third-party delivery apps. But since many do not want to risk exposing themselves to the virus – and in many cities, it’s actually mandated that you can’t socialize with anybody outside of your household – these third-party apps have become more of a necessity.
Restaurants are now caught between a rock and a hard place, so to speak. It is unfortunate these apps are designed to favour more chain restaurants or those with a big enough customer base and a sizeable income – not your local family-run eatery down the street.
The sad truth is that many of these food delivery apps do not seem to care about your favourite local restaurant. They just need to satisfy their Silicon Valley shareholders.
In fact, many of these third-party delivery apps are killing the restaurant industry because they are taking a huge portion of restaurants’ already slim margins – sometimes more than 30% in addition to the delivery fees they charge the restaurants customer. Business Insider reports that as much as 85% of restaurants could remain closed after the pandemic, many as a result of these third-party delivery apps.
How You Can Support Your Local Restaurant Industry
When you order from a restaurant using a third-party app, you might feel as if you are helping these restaurants, but in many cases, you are in fact hurting them. It is not your fault; these big third-party apps use their advertising dollars to make you believe that everybody is a winner when you use their service. Wrong!
The restaurant must either take the 30% hit as part of doing business or they must pass it on to their consumers. Neither are great options! But it is not just the restaurant owners who are suffering. There is a trickle-down effect to the servers and kitchen staff as well.
The best way to Support your local restaurant is to place an order directly from their website and go to pick it up and tip the restaurant. This is a Restaurants Home Run as they pay no fees to anyone for this and the tips go to the staff.
If you really need delivery, the best way is to try to order through an app like DeliveryBizConnect which operates on a Driver Matching Service model saving restaurants 80% or more of the fees the major 3rd party apps charge.
How These Third-Party Apps Are Getting Tipping Wrong
When you tip using a third-party delivery app, you assume part of the tip money is going to the people who ACTUALLY made your food. Nope!
It is all going to the delivery drivers – many who become drivers as supplemental income to a regular full-time job. Many are frustrated at how low the job ends up paying the meaning often they really could care less about their service or the food quality.
Let’s face it. You don’t tip because a driver has the miraculous ability to get your food from point A to point B. You tip because you enjoyed the food and want to support your local restaurant.
Most servers, prep cooks, dishwashers, sous chefs, friers, busboys (and girls) do not make a lot of money to begin with: they make their money through tips. Money they are no longer earning through third-party delivery apps!
When the driver is the ONLY one getting tips it hugely demotivates the restaurant staff. What does this mean for the average consumer? Apart from bad service, it also means many great cooks and servers will leave their job for greener pastures resulting in a lowering of restaurant standards across the field and diminishes the overall dining experience.
DeliveryBizConnect has a unique feature called Split Tipping, where a customer can choose to split the tip between the restaurant and the driver keeping all parties motivated.
The Answer to Restaurant Delivery
Thankfully there is an answer to third-party apps and that is DeliveryBizConnect. We offer a fair platform that skips the 30% commission fees. In fact, our fee is only 3.33% Deliveries which leaves more money in the pockets of the restaurants and drivers get paid more.
How are we fairer, you ask? For example, we give you ultimate control over tipping. You can split the tip however you want. You think the restaurant and its staff deserve an extra bonus for excellent food? We have that option. You think the driver was cute and gave you a huge smile at the door? Well… you can make sure he or she remembers you!
And the good news for the restaurant industry is when the patron is allowed to choose where to allocate the tip, the tip is usually higher!
The Power of DeliveryBizConnect
In addition to 3.33% Deliveries for the Restaurant, and Split tipping to get staff re-motivated DeliveryBizConnect has a few other super features developed while spending 7 months embedded in our customers locations.
We allow for order stacking. This is when a driver can take multiple orders at one time. It’s a win-win for everybody involved.
We’ll give you an example: you pay the driver $4.99 on the first order then $2.49 on any stacked orders (plus tips of course.) Most restaurants can stack as many as three orders at once while businesses that do not need to keep their food hot such as a convenience store can do a lot more.
With other third-party delivery apps on a $30 order, you could pay $7.50 per order for a combined $22.50. WithDeliveryBizConnect you pay $4.99 plus $2.49 times two which means you pay $9.97.
However, remember that the customer still pays the $4.99 per order or a total of ($14.97) each which means you earn $1.67 per order. The other apps KEEP the $4.99 for themselves as well as charge you the 30%! No other delivery app has this type of system!
DeliveryBizConnect also recognized a big issue with other apps while embedded in our customers’ restaurants which was the wrong bags were being picked up by drivers, or they were leaving a multi-order bag behind. Our system gets the bag count and prints tickets for each bag which the driver needs to successfully scan all of them for the order in order to get routed to the delivery destination.
Finally, we solved the Pick-Up order tag game restaurant owners play. Pick-up orders are GOLD to owners but can be a bit tricky as people run off for a coffee, or stay parked a block away if they arrive a bit early. We created a simple automated Call customer button in our system on the complete order page of the restaurant interface. When pressed it sends a TXT/SMS to the customer telling them to come to the counter to collect their order. Our clients LOVE this feature!
There are other ways you can make some money with DeliveryBizConnect. You can also help us find drivers to help with better pay and other restaurants who need to save on delivery and earn a Thank You referral commission ongoing on their delivery volumes. Get your customers onto our Free Mobile app which is branded to you, and you can earn a 4% first order referral bonus from participating restaurants when YOUR customers order for the first time from anybody else in our app.
Have more questions about Delivery Biz Connect? You can visit our website at DeliveryBizConnect.com or give us a call at 604-900-2384 ad we’ll be happy to answer your questions.