
Seamless and GrubHub Announce Merger - antr
http://press.grubhub.com/2013-05-20-Seamless-and-GrubHub-Announce-Merger
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antiterra
Seamless always struck me as the far better option. Here in NYC, radial
distance is almost useless to define delivery areas. On GrubHub and
Delivery.com, I would often see restaurants on the other side of the river
show up as in my area simply because of straight line proximity. Somehow
Seamless knows which restaurants actually consider me in their delivery area.

The most curious thing about Seamless was they were constantly running
promotions with a code that only worked in their mobile app. I don't know if
this was meant to help them test or what, but I think there's a huge risk
consumers will interpret that sort of thing as 'penalty for ordering in the
comfort of your web browser' instead of 'bonus for ordering with a mobile app'

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jeffasinger
I've written a system that handled delivery areas like this. Restaurants would
draw a polygon that showed where they'd deliver. It took 2 people about a day
to handle this.

I'm sure that if GrubHub wanted to, they would have done this also.

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untog
Although I don't have a huge amount of experience with it, GrubHub always
seemed like the inferior option. For a long time they didn't even save credit
card details.

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Hovertruck
I used to get an error page any time I would enter my address on Grubhub with
no other options, but Seamless/Delivery.com/etc worked great.

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jeffasinger
Geocoding is relatively tricky, was there something weird about your address?

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Hovertruck
Not at all. <Street Address> <Apt Number> New York NY 10027. It would present
me with three "corrected" options that were all the same, and then when I
chose one it would send me to an error page.

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LogicHoleFlaw
Speaking from experience... apartment numbers are one of the most difficult
things to process correctly when geocoding, particularly if your service is
backed by Google. The experience you describe sounds exactly like someone
didn't correctly handle the edge cases surrounding subunit numbers.

I spent quite some time banging my head against these issues for a former
employer. Lots of trial-and-error was employed to build up a basket of test
cases around apartments. Certain addresses remained intractable.

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SatvikBeri
Grubless?

Joking aside, this seems to make perfect sense. I spend a decent chunk of time
in New York, Boston, and California, and have noticed that Seamless xor
GrubHub seem to be well-populated in each location.

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untog
My bigger surprise is that the GrubHub CEO will become the CEO of the combined
operation- in NYC at least, Seamless has always seemed like the far bigger
operation. And GrubHub's web site was painful to use for a long, long time.

I wonder if this means Seamless are closing their offices in Utah?

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parsnips
This seems like a more and more likely scenario.

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parsnips
This is the first step on the way to going public for certain.

I always admired Grubhub for their dedication to the tech, but Seamless always
had the most amazing sales people (Looking at Wiley Cerilli)

(full disclosure: Former Seamless Lead Dev)

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veridies
Slightly worried. When GrubHub acquired campusfood.com, which had the best
coverage in my area, they ended up losing almost all of the restaurants in my
city. I called them up a couple times and GrubHub claimed that they would be
coming soon, but in the end I assume the deals fell apart I was left with many
fewer ordering choices.

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jeffasinger
This is because campusfood.com charged much lower rates than GrubHub does.

I was told by a few restaurant owners that when GrubHub came along, they tried
to renegotiate the restaurants to a higher price point, which caused a lot of
turnover.

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mu_killnine
Ill be honest: I read this as "Seamless and GitHub Announce Merger" and did a
spit-take.

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jcutrell
Now, if only they could talk Zifty (Zifty.com) into merging, Atlanta would
have every restaurant available in one service.

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jseliger
I wonder about the extent to which the GrubHub/Seamless model will prevail and
the extent to which the ChowNow model will. My brother works for the latter,
and now that I know what to look for I've seen a fair number of NYC
restaurants using "their own" ordering systems.

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pavel_lishin
What's the difference? At a glance, it looks like Seamhub organizes everything
under their brand, whereas ChowNow makes a custom app for every restaurant.

The latter seems nice if I already have a restaurant in mind, but if I'm too
lazy to cook on monday night, I'm not going to go through the apps one-by-one.

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jeffasinger
The Seamhub model is better for the user, the ChowNow mode typically doesn't
charge the restaurant per order, as Seamless/Grubhub do.

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CityLunchClub
This merger would be great for the rising food tech industry. It opens the
door to disruptive solutions to revolutionize the model that was created by
these two companies. The continued lack of innovation in the space is
precisely the reason we decided to build a curated lunch subscription company
that works with the toprestaurants in cities to introduce foodies to an
amazing variety of options and for companies to have an inexpensive way to
compete with Google when it comes to providing lunch for their employees.
We're looking forward to seeing the space evolve as a whole!

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jgalt212
I have to disagree if only b/c of a differing point of view. As a NYC
restaurant consumer and not a restaurant tech provider, this merger is bad for
me because it's lowering competition and will most likely just result in me
paying higher prices (either directly or indirectly) for delivered food.

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eigenvalue
Seamless is one of my favorite companies. I literally order food through them
every day and I have always been pleased with the speed and design of their
website and apps. The more you think about it, the more this appears to be a
an amazingly good business (a "tax" on takeout for making it easy!) with
important first mover advantages. Whoever puts together a big sales force
first will saturate the low hanging fruit, and then network effects kick in
after that. So I can see how this merger makes sense. I just hope that the
seamless engineers and designers don't leave now.

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rabble
I started reading this and i kept thing, why the hell would GitHub be buying a
food startup! I know they're doing well but this is really beyond developer
tools.

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salimmadjd
Running a restaurant is a tough business, so is running a restaurant-based
tech business. Probably for the same reasons-competition! For me Grubhub was a
consumer business and seamless an enterprise business. So not sure how this
merger makes sense, unless both companies were seeing slowdown in growth and
had to combine some of their operations.

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parsnips
More likely is that their combined revenue makes going public (and exiting)
more likely for both companies. The margins in this business are insane.

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aetimmes
I've been told by lawyers that M&A activity usually precedes an economic
uptick in a sector. If that's true, then today is a pretty good day to be in
tech.

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jonathanjaeger
Seamless has better design and more options. GrubHub has funnier copy. I use
the former for convenience and the latter for the laughs.

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eridius
Judging from the comments in here, I seem to be the only person who uses
eat24hours.com. I wonder how this merger will affect them?

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sGrabber
This industry to look for. Going in right direction

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stevewilhelm
Couldn't decide which comment I liked best

"Worsted merger announcement timing ever!"

or

"Did Matt pay Jonathan today's going rate; 1.1 billion in cash?"

