America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies still struggle to profit

Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by mountainofdeath on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @02:02PM (#23169730)

Exactly. There is a small dev outfit in my second-tier US city that caters to precisely this market and is doing quite well considering many restaurants added this to their website or replaced their website outright. They assume their customer is the average mom-and-pop restaurant and set up their business accordingly.

I am curious why Shopify doesn't lateral into this market. They already have the majority of the infrastructure for retail.

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by trynewideas on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:29PM (#23170772)

Square's been doing what Shopify hasn't, to be honest. I've seen a half-dozen restaurants who didn't do pickup/delivery before the pandemic who are doing their own delivery now — all have stood up square.site fronts. (Probably helps that a lot of them probably used Square for POS anyway.)

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by blahbhthrow3748 on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:33PM (#23170830)

Shopify will wait until a partner builds it on their platform, see if they're successful, then acquire them. They've done it a couple times, they have tons of cash and don't need to take huge risks.

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by bobthepanda on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @02:50PM (#23170286)

A gig platform for delivery drivers is a whole different thing to manage than a common web shopping workflow.

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Re:America is stuck at home, but food-delivery companies sti... by goodmachine on Wednesday May 13, 2020 @03:01PM (#23170442)

I agree.

But please, let us never use 'lateral' as a verb ever again.

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