> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees.
Well isn't that plain fraud? (And no adding some * somewhere with a disclaimer doesn't make it not fraud. The point is that it intentionally misguides/tricks/manipulates the user with the intention of harming the given brand (by on-the-fly replacing it)).
EDIT(clarification): It's like going into a shop and asking for a specific samsung tv and the salesman goes and comes back with a philipps tv saying here is your tv, the price is .... Sure if you look clearly at it it's not the PC you asked for but if you are in a hurry or social insecure you might still end up buying it even through you didn't want to.
(The potential hitch here is that most restaurants are small businesses, and small businesses aren't great about doing things like registering their trademarks. But you can still build a claim even around an unregistered trademark under certain circumstances: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-good-unregister...)
If doordash didn't sell Saddleback food, i'd agree, but given that doordash distributes Saddleback products, seems reasonable to me they are allowed to advertise "buy Saddleback bbq here"
What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting Saddleback BBQ.
It would be like mentioning a popular brand on your website in order to get the search engine traffic for that brand, even though you don't sell it.
You can't lawfully squat a brands trademarks, neither in SERPs, domain names, nor in real world signposts.
You can use trademarks for comparison but having a signpost - virtual or actual - that has another brand on it is tortuous infringement. Bait and switch is rightly unlawful.
Interestingly googling around the principle usage -- to mean pertaining to a tort -- of this spelling is in UK Terms of Use. It's quite hard to search though as often people will talk about tortuous caselaw [1], meaning 'twisting and turning'. Both usages can be in the same document, so Google Search - in particular - is no good here.
Spelling "tortuous": I find supporting documents from the UK Home Office [3], the UK IPO (including in court proceedings for trademark), and in private practice references to UK tort law, eg [2] dated 2019.
I don't consider my usage to be wrong per se but will consider using tortious in international forums (I so wanted to write "fora", lol); thanks for the query, terse as it was.
It's possible we're all using it "incorrectly" of course. I work in the IP sector, we might all be drinking from the same fountain (eg perhaps reading past UK caselaw keeps us archaic).
[1] https://www.worldtrademarkreview.com/brand-management/signif..., example of talking about an intricate case that twists and turns.
[2] https://thelawreviews.co.uk/edition/the-intellectual-propert... talking about an infringement of a tort, as tortuous.
[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/references-to-the... , note I'm assuming the Home Office is the origin, it's Gov, but I don't really see mention of the department that owns that data.
While we're on the topic—that's probably ‘principal’.
That is exactly what is happening. Say Saddleback isn't open on Tuesdays. Boom, that visitor now sees a long list of BBQ joints to order from that can still be delivered. Since they are in the mood for BBQ clearly, they are going to order from Uncle Bucks BBQ instead.
This should be open & shut huge fines for DoorDash, damages paid to this restaurant (and many others), and enforcement to prevent it from happening again.
People working for these companies and facilitating this should be ashamed of their employer and either quit or vocally demand changes internally.
It would depend on the terms of service. If it clearly outlines their self-serving goals when spending "your" advertising dollars, then it seems it falls back to the owners for signing into such an agreement.
It must be really difficult out there for so many minimal margin businesses to make such Faustian bargains. Then again, I never really understood how Groupon was able to do it either. Is the "restaurant owner" marketplace really that unsophisticated, or is it so bespoke that it's incredibly difficult for any one owner to fully do their diligence?
This is the true effect. It gives you something similar, but degrades your brand name and sidesteps the law.
DoorDash isn't telling you that Applebees is Saddleback BBQ, they are just not making it as easy as they could to help you find what you are looking for.
Fraud is hard to prove because you have to prove intent, but this at best incompetence, almost assuredly false advertising, and pretty clearly fraud although good luck proving it in court.
How is this any different than a newspaper ad saying "You can get Coke at Krogers" and then Krogers having a Pepsi display in the soda aisle.
1. https://lh6.googleusercontent.com/6KsGyAeFFfeliOLsLJzPQf5o1o...
I'm not sure if you were the one who downvoted me here but it hardly seems fair to downvote someone for having a different point of view.
Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind.
The DoorDash approach seems very backward. If I saw that landing page I'd be inclined to think "wow, these people don't actually have Saddleback, let me check somewhere else." I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant.
That's if you're trying to sell them the thing they showed interest in.
Door Dash et al aren't trying to sell you Saddleback Barbecue, they're trying to get you onto their platform so they can sell you to advertisers. What you're interested in is just a way for them to manipulate you onto their platform.
I guarantee you that a custom landing page for these campaigns would work out better for them.
If Applebees is paying for some sort of marketing/relevance service, then all bets are off, and it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their opposing customers get screwed.
I do have issues with the misuse of the restaurant brands -- seems unethical to send me to Pizza Hut when I click on Dominoes.
You're polishing a turd. Call it whatever you want, but if I'd prefer not to be a customer of a company who prioritizes competing interests over me.
Amazon is a terrible example of prioritizing customers--what part of selling counterfeits, putting sponsored products higher in search results, or retroactively deleting books off your Kindle serves users?
Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience.
One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. Google's blue button test doesn't matter to any product except that exact one. None of us can say, without seeing the results; our previous experience is not relevant.
EG, maybe a 10% conversion to order dropoff is OK if we can direct X% of users to an expensive restaurant. The 10% drop cost is offset by a 50% increase in order cost.
First, a custom landing page can both provide you with the restaurant and an option to search for more restaurants.
Secondly, if the goal was an optimized experience, why wouldn't they want that on their restaurant pages, even the ones that don't come in from search? There's a reason.
> One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable.
YMMV of course, but this one stretches credibility.
I've worked with brilliant conversion optimizers, in a single vertical niche where we had > 30 websites, each doing between 200K-2M visits/month. We would have loved to test + copy, but every time we ran this experiment, we found huge differences.
One subtle nuance is that "generalizable" needs to be more specific than "this change increased conversions". The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.
The Conversion industry tends to similar language as the complementary/alternative medicine space. "I did this thing, it had this outcome. I believe this happened because XYZ. It worked for me, it will work for you!" (People telling stories which may or may not be true.)
That is also why clinical trials for interventions is so important.
FWIW, that's the goal of global optimization, a particual type of optimization, and one that rarely anybody on the market cares about wrt. business. Local optimization, "B beats A", is more frequently used, as usually all the business cares/can afford to care about is to find a C that beats B, if their competitors found the B that beats A.
If it was such a brilliant idea, DoorDash & GrubHub should change their sites so that links from their search results only take you back to their search page.
That's extremely different than the thing described here: "take you to a category page with something else entirely pinned at the top."
Maybe tech-savvy folks, or people otherwise paying close attention, but I don't think this describes the vast majority of people by any stretch.
DoorDash and Grubhub make the overwhelming bulk of their revenue from simple fees on the deliveries made. They surely sell ads (and para-ads like list placement), but the eyeball value of my one visit is vanishingly small relative to the $70 I just spent on takeout. The scales are just totally different.
If they're not showing you the restaurant you followed a link for, it's not because of advertising. It's likely because they don't have a contract with that restaurant and still want to sell you a meal.
Now, that's not ethical. But it's not because of "advertising".
Advertising, or trying to redirect to other restaurants paying higher commissions are the only possible explanation (aside from incompetence of course, but if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you).
They're trying to maximize revenue by double-dipping. They want the $70 food order and another $X because you viewed some ads.
- You search for a specific BBQ restaurant on Google.
- You see an advertisement for that restaurant! But it's actually DoorDash.
- You click on that ad, and DoorDash initiates a location-based search for BBQ restaurants, putting their preferred partners at the top of the result list.
DoorDash is happy if you order from any restaurant through them, but they're even happier if you order from a restaurant that they get more money from.
Is that that what they prioritize over having a functional app for customers, merchants and drivers alike, and proper development deployment that doesn't incur large blackout periods?
Doesn’t Google let anyone bid on any word, including brands? [1]
Doesn’t it stand to reason that it’s at least plausible that other search services might do the same?
1. https://www.google.com.au/search?q=google+lets+anyone+bid+on...
Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.
That's what's being claimed in the original comment here.
That's what feels like incompetence (or, more likely, a "targeted landing pages" project that just hasn't been very prioritized).
I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant
I NEVER use Hotels.com for this reason, it is meant to extract as much as possible and take away the pricing power from the hotel.
It is not only allowed, but common, to bid on the name of a competitor. What you can not do is use their name in their ads. If I had to guess what's going on here is that at the scale DoorDash is at they're almost certainly utilizing dynamic keyword insertion where it grabs your search query and inserts it into your ad text. This is probably just an oversight honestly. I highly doubt there's some advertisers menacingly rubbing their hands together and cackling as they type in "saddleback bbq" into the ad copy. This is probably just an oversight on Google's part tbh.
Edit: I believe that you can stop this to some degree also by registering your trademarks with Google. Here's their ads policy. https://support.google.com/adspolicy/answer/6118?hl=en
"Ads may use the trademark in ad text if they meet the following requirements:
"Resellers: The ad's landing page is primarily dedicated to selling (or clearly facilitating the sale of) products or services, components, replacement parts, or compatible products or services corresponding to the trademark. The landing page must clearly provide a way to purchase the products or services or display commercial information about them, such as rates or prices."
If I were a delivery service, I would argue that my business operates as a reseller of the restaurant's offerings and that my use of the trademark is permitted per this clause of the policy.
Hopefully it's a violation and can be fixed on Google's side, since I find that to be the worst part of all this.
Door dash seem to be very good at getting large chains onboard, I wonder if this is part of it. Most small restaurants last less than a year, with this kind of strategy door dash can show large chains a nice dashboard every year of how much in sales they redirected from a small restaurant to their chain.
I think the larger problem here is that DoorDash & GrubHub are better positioned to pay a higher customer acquisition cost (better capitalized, higher margin businesses long term, and also more drive to create brand awareness in this moment), since they can convert for people who want alternatives to whatever they searched for, and on top of that they can more easily justify investing in tuning their marketing campaigns. So from Google's perspective, it may be hard to perceive a strategic advantage of fixing this.
What is surprising to me is that investing in tuning their marketing campaigns hasn't resulted in developing custom landing pages for those campaigns that, for example, might put people on a page for the restaurant in question (maybe with a sidebar for "looking for alternatives?"). That'd no doubt improve effective CPA for their campaigns.
a system that generates the maximum amount of monetizable events without frustrating the user or advertiser towards other platforms is the 'net win' from the ad platfrom perspective
This is one of the most depressing parts about working in tech for me. Basically no company is content with making a good product (for some definition of what that even means, that phrase itself is obviously subjective). Ideally a site/app is solving a real problem for their users, and they could make a simple, clear, and consistent interface that exposes that solution and trust the user to make the best use of it to address their need.
Unfortunately that never seems to be enough. Even for companies that I genuinely believe have good motives (trying to provide real value rather than trick people into buying snake oil), they also need to sell it. They track conversion metrics and then they need to optimize their flows, which inevitably makes things more complex and more obfuscated. Basically every PM or product-focused founder I've worked with is thinking about how to push the user to where they want them, rather than how to make things clear so the user can choose what they want to do. It's the behavioral economics idea of nudging run completely off the rails.
The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly. And your competitors are doing this stuff too, so they'll eat your lunch if you're not good at growth, marketing, and optimizing conversions. It's similar to how I've never encountered a product person who takes the spirit of things like GDPR seriously. It's do or die and if you try to do things like respect users' privacy on principle instead of do everything you can to optimize conversions, you'll lose.
I've come to accept that there doesn't seem to be any way around it, this is the cost we pay for the tech products we use (and, contrary to perhaps a lot of others on HN, I do really believe that a lot of these services are genuinely useful in my life, and it's still worth it to me to use them despite this sad reality).
Your post nailed it. It's become positively disgraceful.
The only thing I would add, is that it's not just "tech" companies doing this. Every medium-large corporation is looking to squeeze more revenue out of existing customers no matter the moral implications, and no-matter whether it's good for the customer.
Someone will inevitably come along and claim this is how capitalism works, survival of the fittest, ruthlessly efficient markets, and all of that. Which, of course, is entirely reasonable if that "assume a perfect sphere on a frictionless plane alongside a perfectly rational actor" model of economics actually existed in the real world. It doesn't.
At the risk of sounding like I am moralizing, which I am but not in a negative or peacocking way, this is why I work to optimize my choices deliberately against financial gain and towards things like my community, my environment, and my society. I buy from companies that, best I can tell, pay their workers reasonably and act responsibly. I have walked away from projects at my employer--and, once, threatened to leave my employer (along with several of my coworkers) if my group insisted on proceeding down a path that it, happily, abandoned. I deliberately don't own a car, order from delivery services, or shop at Wal-Mart.
Why? Because while individual actions make a very little impact, setting the example for those actions gives others both the courage and the cover to take them alongside me. I can't sit idly by and wait for "the group" to do something, even to my own financial detriment[0]. Make no mistake, I work in tech like a lot of us on HN--though I am not a software developer so perhaps not as well off as many but still doing fantastically well compared to the most--so I am coming at this from a position of privilege and have a very long way to fall before I hit bottom.
Most of us do, which is why it is incumbent upon us to make decisions not solely in pursuit of money and to translate that into our businesses and, frankly, if the shareholders don't like it then they can say so while I'm converting my corporate format to a SPC.
0 - "Detriment" here meaning that I'm spending slightly more than I "should" if I optimized output solely for cost and making slightly less than I "should" if I optimized input solely for gains.
If you ain't cheatin', you ain't even tryin' ... "privacy" is mostly just a sales job
You could switch the sites two around, or substitute any other web sites and have the same problem.
Or how about if you try to vote Democrat and instead of registering your vote you are shown a list of non-Democratic candidates with Republicans at the top? Or vice versa..
If you're in favor of the one, you should be in favor of the other.
To argue in favor of this is to argue for less consumer choice and power.
I don't see how this would qualify for fair use exclusions.
I'm not a lawyer, but this is failing a smell test for me.
In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do. If they are not, I would think that there is an extremely strong legal case for copyright infringement, especially since Doordash is not even working to generate revenue for the restaurant, but redirecting you to a generic bbq restaurants page.
Hm. If they're doing that, and using every restaurant's trademarked content in their ads without an agreement in place, I think that would be a problem legally.
> In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do.
The post explicitly states that there is a contractual agreement:
"Our only recourse is to immediately terminate our contract with GrubHub and DoorDash, which we are considering doing."
I'm not sure about that. How would non-authorized resellers work then? In the most absurd case, sellers on Ebay wouldn't be allowed to say what exactly they're selling. You would have to list something as "a watch" instead of "Casio G-Shock". Same goes for any used car lot, etc.
The primary cause here would be "trademark infringement", which requires "likelihood of confusion" in the marketplace [1]. Doordash isn't particularly causing confusion here. They do, in fact, sell Saddleback BBQ from Saddleback BBQ. The only source of confusion I can think of is that the link doesn't take you directly to Saddleback BBQ, but rather to a generic list of BBQ restaurants (which Saddleback BBQ is on).
[1] https://cyber.harvard.edu/metaschool/fisher/domain/tm.htm#7
I'm not happy with it; their behavior is clearly not acting in good faith, even if on paper they have some contractual language that gives them a legal defense if challenged.
Now the (gradually becoming less common) practice of auto-creating order pages for restaurants that didn't agree to be a partner, I would agree should be totally illegal, or at least needs a very large disclaimer that the restaurant is not involved.
The recourse is exactly what the author of the article is considering; cancel the DoorDash contract.
the online menu needs to be separate from the pos that receives the order, the request for dispatch to the delivery driver should be another component, and the online marketing another, allowing the restaurant and delivery driver to mix and match. at a minimum the advertising+menu+order placement should be broken up from the on site order processing+delivery. And with regard to the roads, there shouldnt be a bitesquad, uber eats, grubhub, postmates, and doordash delivery driver waiting in the lobby at the same time all driving to the same neighborhood. theres obviously better ways to load balance and distribute the tasks, than by which company submitted the order.
I'm not sure I buy it. I work for one of the delivery companies, and small locally owned merchants give better margins and more profit compared to these giant chains who can negotiate really low commissions.
On top of that, you risk losing the customer because you have to keep them interested. They were literally looking to order food and you brought them back to the 'browsing around' stage. Is that actually a good idea? I'm not so sure.
> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees.
This is a particularly egregious sleight of hand. It's a relatively easy click-through to write for DoorDash, and it would result in the customer getting exactly what they were looking for (instantly looking at Saddleback's menu options and probably ordering). But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash.