Does your restaurant offer delivery? Share your challenges and successes with the group!

[ElisabethB]

Let's talk about delivery! 🚚

Do you currently offer a delivery option? If so, do you handle deliveries yourself or do you use a third party service (e.g., DoorDash)? What advice would you offer to someone thinking about adding a delivery option? 

[gemcityjunction]

We offer our own deliveries M-F 9a-1p.  It works really well.  I've been surprised by how many we do.  We did offer delivery through GrubHub, but was not getting the volume I thought so I discontinued that a few months ago.  My suggestion would be to talk it up with schools and childcare places in your delivery radius (we do 3 miles).  We also get regular deliveries with the local Y.  Feel free to message me with any further questions.  We've been doing it for almost 2 years and it really pays off!

[bombcharcuterie]

I want to offer delivery but I don’t want to use a courier!  I will be handling the deliveries personally.  Do you know if there is a way to set this up in the delivery section?  I don’t understand why it’s telling me I have to pay $.50 to use my own courier? 

[gemcityjunction]

There are some technological considerations when building technology like that, but I agree.  We charge a $1 delivery fee to which $0.50 goes to Square and the other $0.50 goes to my delivery driver.  Since we only deliver within 3 miles it's not all that bad.  We are considering increasing that because of gas prices so that we are paying the driver a little better for the trouble.

[londontea]

We use Square’s option for third party deliveries, and it’s been working great. We get to control what costs are absorbed by us and what gets passed to the customer. 

We were listed on Postmates for several years, up until mid-2020. We removed ourselves from Postmates because they were taking so much of each transaction, and when there was a problem with an order they refunded the customer instead of trying to get it resolved. 

Deliveries are a very very small part of our business, we maybe get 4 or 5 orders a week. However, I was very surprised to find that many customers were ordering our retail items (such as loose leaf tea) for delivery. 

I would never go back to being directly listed on an app. DoorDash or UberEats keep pestering me to be on their platform but it’s just not worth it. We’ve had a great experience with DoorDash as our partner for deliveries through our website, but I’m not going to be listed on their app and have them take 20%+ of my revenue.

[sugarlab]

This is something we want to explore. As a bakery, we handled most deliveries ourselves, mainly for weddings or larger orders. With COVID, we started offering delivery via our online store and handling it ourselves. As we picked back up, we tried the third party service via our online store. That came with challenges. If a customer scheduled a delivery, 9 times out of 10 they were late. We want to offer delivery for our customers (who wouldn't want cupcakes delivered?) but we dont knkow how to take it on ourselves in a way that makes sense.