THIRD-PARTY APPS 6 Tips to Drive Sales

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Delivery was a true life saver for most restaurants during Covid, and third-party apps such as Grubhub and Uber Eats became essential tools for nearly everyone. But now things have changed. Is delivery still essential, and if it is for your restaurant, are the third-party apps the best way to go?

Publisher Ed Avis asked Meredith Sandland and Carl Orsbourn that question. Theses authors of Delivering The Digital Restaurant: Your Roadmap to the Future of Food and its sequel, Delivering the Digital Restaurant: The Path to Digital Maturity, offered six tips on maximizing revenue through delivery and the use of third-party apps.

Many Mexican restaurants have a love/hate relationship with third-party platforms. The margins are lower, the drivers are often not employees, and the customers usually are not regulars. But here’s the deal: Those customers might become regulars if they have a great experience, and if they have a bad experience, they might leave a bad review.

“Sometimes third-party orders get de-prioritized, they take longer, the drivers are waiting, things like that, which causes drivers to be less likely to want to come pick up, which causes the consumer to have a terrible experience. And that then affects their ratings, which means that they’ll get fewer orders,” Sandland explains.

Remember that correcting a mistake on a delivery order is harder than on an in-house order. And if that delivery order came from a third-party app, you might not even get the chance to correct the order — you’ll just get a hefty charge-back from the app.

A key way to avoid the prejudice against orders from third-party apps is to make them indistinguishable to your kitchen staff, Sandland says.

“In an ideal situation, the restaurant itself, the kitchen and employees, should not even know that it came in from a third party,” she explains. “It should flow seamlessly into the kitchen and it should be executed just like any other order. I think it’s natural that employees in the restaurant do not really want to do third party orders. For example, if the driver’s getting the tip instead of server, you could see how there would be naturally some feeling of, ‘I don’t like these orders as well as the others.’ It’s a completely natural human response, human feeling. And so in the best cases, that’s invisible to the kitchen and where possible, invisible to the front house staff as well.”

Customers don’t care whether they ordered through Grubhub or walked into your physical location: They make a determination based on quality.

“One of the things we talk about is the importance of looking at your customer as an omnichannel customer,” Orsbourn says. “So they might first discover you through a third-party marketplace for a convenient lunchtime occasion, but then they might bring their entire family into your restaurant for the weekend. Those first impressions count.”

The menu you make available through third-party apps doesn’t need to be same as the menu you use in-house. With that in mind, don’t put any item on the delivery menu that will take you more than 10 minutes to make.

“Typically, what happens is that marketplaces will add 20 minutes worth of logistics fulfillment time on top of the menu production time,” Orsbourn says. “Therefore if it takes more than 10 minutes [to prepare the order], it falls outside of a half-hour window. So then you’re not going to be seen as appealing, not just for that one item, but as a restaurant brand for that customer ongoing.”

Knowing exactly when to start an order is a related situation. If you start too soon, the food will be cold when the driver arrives. If you start too late, the driver might have to wait.

“If you are in an area where there are a lot of drivers and you have a relatively high ticket average, and drivers want to come to you because they’re likely to get a high tip, then I would suggest making the food [as soon as you get the order because] drivers will ap - pear very quickly,” Sandland says. “But if you are in a place where it’s hard to get drivers and you have a very quick make time, then I would suggest you wait until the driver gets there, and then make the food. The worst situation you could be in is if you have a low ticket average, you’re in an area where there’s not a lot of drivers, and your make time is long. And there I think you should ask yourself, ‘Should I be doing delivery at all? Should I lower my make times? How do I address that to get to a more productive place?’”

When someone orders through Grubhub, your restaurant doesn’t get much information beyond their name and address. Grubhub likes it that way, because they want the customer to order through them every time. But it’s better for you if you have some way to market directly to the customer and have them come into your restaurant, or order through your own website, and skip the app.

To get personal data, Orsbourn suggests attaching some kind of marketing to the delivery packaging. Don’t just drop it into the bag, because it probably will get thrown in the trash with the bag.

“Another way is to put something on the receipt itself, maybe a QR code,” he says. “Being able to form a relationship with the customer helps from a guest satisfaction standpoint, and that can be done through the receipt.”

Another way to make the personal connection, and hopefully gather data, is by having someone hand write a note to the customer. If you write a note that says something like, “Enjoy your meal… send us your email for 10% off your next order” and staple to the delivery packaging, you’ll probably get a decent response.

Once you collect the emails, you can do your own marketing that directs customers to your own site rather than a third-party site.

Having your own ordering platform, such as through Toast or Lunchbox, helps you keep the profit in your own cash register. But in order to get enough customers using your own platform, you need to make sure it works well. One way to do that is to count how many clicks it takes to place an order, Orsbourn explains.

“If you were a registered user on Amazon buying something off the front screen, it takes three clicks to purchase something, done. Three clicks, best in class,” he says. “If you are on DoorDash, it takes around five clicks to buy a standard item, no modifiers. So every additional click beyond those five is a reason for the customer to continue using third party.”

Where do extra clicks accumulate? It could happen if you require customers to register; it could happen in the ordering process, especially if you have a lot of options on menu items; it could happen on payment; and it could happen if you ask people to join your loyalty program.

“All of those things add a bit of friction, and that is one thing we really emphasize independents to look at,” Orsbourn says.

On busy days, do you sometimes turn off orders flowing from GrubHub or Uber Eats? That’s a natural thing to do if your kitchen is overwhelmed. But it isn’t the best decision, according to Orsbourn.

“If you had a line of people at your physical location, would you shut the doors and chase them away? Of course not. You would probably hand them a menu and offer them a seat at your bar until there was room,” he says.

Instead of shutting off the apps when you’re busy, take some time beforehand to strategize how you might handle the flow of orders better. Some ideas:

• Streamline your delivery menu and remove any time-consuming items.

• Consider your workspace and optimize it for to-go orders, especially during busy times.

• Look at your data and consider staffing up when you know more online orders typically come in.

• Consider increasing your online prices when you know traffic is highest. This may reduce your orders, but you’ll make more money on each order so ultimately it should balance out. Similarly, consider dropping prices during slow periods to keep your kitchen working efficiently.

“These orders are incremental volume and it’s all too easy to switch them off,” Orsbourn says. “And perhaps even more important, it’s easy to forget to turn it back on when things get quieter again.”

Sometimes changing your online pricing can help you manage the flow in your kitchen. You can use the same strategy to drive traffic to your own ordering platform, where your profit is higher. Just raise the prices on your third-party platforms and let customers know that they’ll pay less if they order from your own site.

“Just make sure you don’t make your prices so much higher than your competition on that same [third-party] platform,” Sandland says.

The biggest take-away is that independent restaurants can be tech leaders, according to Orsbourn and Sandland, who are optimistic about the ability of independent restaurants to maximize the opportunity of third-party delivery apps and other technology.

“We’re excited for independent restaurants because of the advent of all these new technologies,” Orsbourn concludes. “If they have the right mindset and the will to break the model that they used to build their business, the ability for them to transition to this new future is actually right at their fingertips.”