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Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

themargins.substack.com

51–60 of 534 posts

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#51
This reminds me of a post I submitted a few weeks ago on HN.

A friend of mine works for a restaurant group in NYC and they like many they have had to respond by offering delivery to folks in order to keep some revenue flowing. He and I were chatting and he mentioned that lately, a large majority of high value ($500+) orders were fraudulent with the fraudster ordering things that can be resold such as high-value wine, liquor, etc that isn't necessarily perishable. He says that the scams work like this:

1. The order comes in via Caviar usually with a ridiculous amount of booze. It is usually a courier delivery but he says looking back, some have been picked up by 'customers'.

2. There are some instances where the order gets canceled either by the scammer within the 2 min grace period post ordering of from the actual customer who had their account phished/received some sort of alert/and stopped the transaction.

I am intrigued by this because there is obviously someone on the receiving end that's ending up with a boatload of high-end booze and then offloading it somehow while Caviar eats the dispute later on and still pays the restaurant out.

Literally, thousands of dollars a week of fraudulent booze orders are being fulfilled to people fraudsters using phished accounts with valid cc's. The consumer eventually realizes the charge, disputes it, and gets their money back leaving Caviar with the bill.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#52
I said this in another post about Grubhub but similarly to this article I really don't get it. Those apps are all 25%+ expensive than ordering take out directly with the restaurant, they screw the restaurants and all those delivery companies lose millions.

Did everyone really become THAT lazy that driving 10 minutes to get your meal is that much trouble?

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#53

What if you strip out the entire 'aggregation' and customer facing side of DoorDash/GrubHub/UberEats and rebuild them as complete back-end logistics services to the restaurants? You charge lower percentage of orders or just a monthly fee to help procure and pay the labor and route deliveries. Seems like that's the actual challenge for restaurants

DoorDash already serves as the back end for a number of other services.

But being a courier company is not near as good of a business model. The aggregation element means that they own the end customer and payment flow, which among other things increases spend since you discover new restaurants via the platform and can transact seamlessly with any restaurant on DoorDash vs giving your card info to each new place

More importantly, as a two-sided marketplace DoorDash enjoys network effects which are the source of its defensibility. If they were just a courier company, restaurants could just switch over when they found the next company that could deliver marginally faster or undercut them with VC funding. As a two-sided marketplace, the restaurants can't turn them off without losing all the demand coming through the platform, demand which is captured by DoorDash is because they have tons of restaurants on the platform, creating a feedback loop.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#54

Reading the title, I anticipated this was going to be something along the lines of getting Domino's delivered for less than their delivery fee. (Side note, does anyone actually order franchise pizza on an app? They all already deliver for far less) But this was far more interesting. The fact that Doordash scrapes prices, and apparently doesn't verify... how does this happen? I'm not familiar with the reimbursement mo…

Yes, it has been exploited exactly like you described. An example that I remember - Foodpanda in India. I guess fraud costs are massive for all the food delivery startups.

source: http://www.livemint.com/Companies/rYKC6HjnShogjE62jO5lpK/The...

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#55

This quote summarizes it all for me: "Amazon just bailed on restaurant delivery in the U.S." If amazon, a "real" business with a reputation built on ruthlessly cutting margin can't get it to work why would anyone else?

I mean, they canceled their phone program too, you don't see Apple packing it up.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#56
post #49

Just some back-of-the-napkin math if you wanted to do this "right". Let's say you hire drivers as employees and pay them $15/hr plus tips and reimburse them for mileage. You charge a $4.99 delivery fee. Drivers work set shifts and are paid hourly whether they are making deliveries or not. That means each driver needs to be making at least 4 deliveries an hour or you're losing money. That's not even really counting fo…

> Domino's and lots of other places do it, but they probably aren't paying $15/hour and they also have one central location and more predictable demand.

One thing to note about Dominos is that people pay at the door, so they would need to look the delivery guy in the face as they stiff him on the tip. Not required for the delivery apps and fewer people tip there.Because people tip, you can pay lower wages.

I had a relative who worked as a Chinese food delivery guy for a while and he did it exclusively for tips. The restaurant did not pay him at all.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#57
post #20

The restaurants need to work through their own trade organization where they band together and push out the delivery businesses that are costing them money, and then allow delivery companies to bid for their business.

In the end the customer needs some single easy interface where to order food from. It is kind of difficult to see how this could work in a way where restaurants would dictate how customers prefer to order.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#58
post #20

The restaurants need to work through their own trade organization where they band together and push out the delivery businesses that are costing them money, and then allow delivery companies to bid for their business.

The restaurants (that aren’t mega chains like McDonalds) are usually utterly incompetent in spheres of logistics and IT. I don’t see how this can end up well.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#59

I said this in another post about Grubhub but similarly to this article I really don't get it. Those apps are all 25%+ expensive than ordering take out directly with the restaurant, they screw the restaurants and all those delivery companies lose millions. Did everyone really become THAT lazy that driving 10 minutes to get your meal is that much trouble?

Not everyone has a car.

Re: Doordash and Pizza Arbitrage

#60
post #20

The restaurants need to work through their own trade organization where they band together and push out the delivery businesses that are costing them money, and then allow delivery companies to bid for their business.

In the end the customer needs some single easy interface where to order food from. It is kind of difficult to see how this could work in a way where restaurants would dictate how customers prefer to order.

Why doesn't Google build this as an extension of Google Maps?

Charge restaurants no fee for the platform, if they provide their own drivers. Charge restaurants money through Google Ads to promote their restaurants for higher results.

In a few years, get Waymo's driverless cars on the game.

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