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Ask HN: Why don't more people use GrubHub, Foodler, etc?

5 points by gusgordon ↗ HN
These services allow you to order food online for delivery, instead of calling. However, these services don't get much use, which doesn't make sense to me. This is counter to ordering Domino's pizza online, which seems to get more use.

Why are these services not so popular? Is it just that people feel more comfortable dealing directly with the restaurant?

17 comments

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rosenjon
Grubhub did raise $50M a couple years ago: http://techcrunch.com/2011/09/20/food-delivery-search-engine...

While not a direct indicator of success, I assume this means they are posting some encouraging numbers.

I think a lot of restaurants don't join these services, because it costs them money on each order, and they have to find a way to deliver the food, which is a distraction. For this reason, these services sometimes have the least common denominator in terms of the restaurants that are willing to deliver (i.e. restaurants that don't get enough real world traffic).

What evidence do you have that these services aren't popular, and how do you define popular?

gusgordon
I have never seen anyone use them or even heard of them. I mean, they are fairly popular, but it seemed to me that I and people around me should have at least heard of these things.
ibudiallo
That's interesting. You know when you don't know something it doesn't mean its not popular
xauronx
On grubhub I put in my address and get: "You have 1 restaurant you can order from."

And foodler... didn't look legit enough to give my address to.

I would love to use a site like this, I do order pizza online when I can. The problem is that awesome services like this generally take hold in the west coast and will make it to Ohio... probably never.

pdabbadabba
I think this is a good question. I can tell you that, here in NYC these services do get a fair bit of use (seamless.com, in particular, though I think GrubHub may also be popular). I attribute this to the combination of a large number of affluent people working long hours and the relative difficulty of getting around that big city life presents.

I think the reason why factors like this are important is that, all things being equal, people would rather dine in a restaurant if they're going to pay "eating out" prices. When you go to a restaurant, of course, you are paying for more than the food. You are also paying for (hopefully) a nice atmosphere and a feeling of relaxation and wealth. It's also nice to get out of the house/office.

Oddly enough, I draw an analogy to RSS readers. (Which has been on my mind recently for obvious reasons.) The thing that people overlook about RSS is that the value of a website is in more than just paragraphs of text. Websites are also designed to create a certain kind of experience. The premise that underlies this design work, of course, is that design adds value for the user beyond just the words on the page. But that added value is stripped away when content is consumed through an RSS feed. The question then becomes whether the added convenience (etc.) of aggregation into a feed outweighs the value lost.

Similarly, the question for GrubHub users is whether the loss of the secondary benefits of eating in a restaurant (and add to that, of course, the small additional monetary expense) are made up for by the added convenience. Evidently most people feel that it is not.

gusgordon
Ok, that's a good answer that makes sense for more expensive places. But say, when someone wants to order a couple pizzas, they still call the pizza place rather than use these services. The answer might go along with yours - maybe ordering online feels systematic, like they are just punching numbers into a machine to get a result? Maybe when ordering food, people fundamentally trust a person that they can talk to more than a machine? Maybe with Domino's online delivery, people realize it's a chain anyway so ordering from a computer doesn't make the process seem much more systematic?
ffumarola
I find a restaurant that I like and then find their number to call them directly so I can avoid the delivery fee they charge to Grub Hub / Seamless users (most likely to offset GH's fee to the restaurant).
serialpreneur
I use eat24hours.com almost every week. Recently I tried GrubHub for the first time too. I love using these services. I have dozens of restaurants nearby to choose from on eat24hours & grubhub in LA. I think this is one of those services which is very hard to scale outside big cities.
dreamdu5t
eat24hours was here before seamless or GrubHub, has FAR superior restaurant selection, excellent customer support, and doesn't spam my mailbox and bus ads with "BUY USING SEAMLESS RIGHT NOW HERE'S SOME MONEY!!!!"

Love, love, love Eat24.

Also, a personal anecdote... I reported a CSS bug to Eat24 and they gave me $100 in food credit. I'm not affiliated with them in any way besides being a customer.

codegeek
In NYC, seamless.com is very popular at least where I work. Reason being you can order online for delivery at your office doorsteps. So it depends on the use case.
anywherenotes
I order from restaurants online, if they have the service. And call others. Is there a benefit to using this service? If the benefit is finding restaurants, google can show restaurants near me.

I would imagine if you deal directly with restaurant, and they make a mistake, it's easier to solve it than if there's a third party in the middle.

kevinrpope
I've had great results when there are issues with a GrubHub order. Their customer service people call the restaurant and get it sorted out, and they usually tack on a credit to my account for the inconvenience.
6thSigma
Domino's online ordering service is amazing. Grubhub's service.. not so much.
27182818284
They don't look farther than the popular-kids-table cities. Look at Berkeley and they list 20 locations. I choose another university that has 66% the student population and they have 2 locations listed. I'd say they're missing the long tail, but it doesn't even feel right to call it that because we're not talking about rural Alabama, but major universities inside of cities :-/
timjahn
I assume you have data to back up this claim and you simply forgot to link to it?

I never buy $350 jeans from any brick-and-mortar or online stores that sell such jeans, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't mean these services are "not so popular" and "don't get much use".

dfeltey
I used to use GrubHub all the time when I lived in Chicago and always had a good experience with them. Since I've moved there aren't very many restaurants using these types of services where I live now, but I would definitely use a similar service if it had decent adoption locally.