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UberEATS is Going After Food Delivery Market
First, Uber took over the taxi empire. Now, they want to dominate the food delivery scene.
Grubhub, Seamless and Eat24 have some new competition in town—UberEATS.
Technically, UberEATS has been around since April 2015, but in a very limited capacity. You could only order from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. from a small selection of restaurant options each day. But now, with the launch of a standalone UberEATS app (previously, this function was housed within the Uber app), anyone can order food seven days a week from more than 100 popular restaurant, from 8 a.m. to midnight. Uber is able to monetize the service on both ends. For restaurants, there is a 20 percent to 30 percent fee for each order. Couriers, who are paid per delivery on a per-mile basis, pay a 20 percent commission.But opening up their delivery services to Uber’s vast user base also means restaurants may be required to churn out more food more quickly to meet the growing demand.
With UberEATS, your food is delivered via a network of bicycle messengers, which means it should get to your home pretty fast (in as little as 30 minutes, according to Uber). And for a limited time, there’s no delivery fee—and no tipping required—so it costs nothing (other than the cost of the meal itself) to try it out. Eventually, the app will charge a small delivery fee, but unlike its Uber "taxi" counterpart, it won’t be subject to surge pricing.
“Most restaurants today that are on Seamless have pretty tight delivery radii; that’s because they’re using their own staff,” said Michael Conti, New York City’s general manager for UberEverything—the group that managers UberRush, UberEvents and really anything that’s not just hailing a simple ride from here to there. “So the further they send them out, the longer it’s going to take them to get back empty-handed. In other words, it’s expensive for any given restaurant to deliver even a few blocks farther because it could require more staff. Ostensibly, for Uber, if a robust network of messengers is constantly in circulation, one could pick up a new order nearby his or her last drop-off, eliminating that ‘empty-handed’ time.”
UberEATS is now available in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Houston and Toronto. On Tuesday, it launched in Atlanta, Dallas, Washington D.C., and Seattle. Later this week, it’ll arrive in Austin.
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