What follows is anecdotal conjecture: Grubhub has not really evolved much beyond the same core business model they have had for the past decade. The other companies are doing all sorts of partnerships, rewards, referrals, gamification of algorithms etc. Grubhub stagnated while these companies innovated
> The other companies are doing all sorts of partnerships [..]
GrubHub partnered with Amazon. Amazon Prime now includes a GrubHub+ account.
I have Prime, but have yet to use GH+, but that's more because I just stopped getting food delivered in general. Not because of the price (I used DD and had the DashPass which is very much worth it if you get at least 2 deliveries/month), but because I started getting deliveries with missing items. When that happens, they won't offer to do another delivery, they'll just either refund the item or I can go pick it up. Both options defeat the purpose of ordering delivery. I either don't get my food, or I have to leave the house.
GrubHub was always my go to. That miiight be just because I lived in Chicago when it launched so it was the default for me for so long. I used it pretty much exclusively all through Covid lockdown, but have since stopped doing delivery much. Maybe once or twice a month. I do not have Prime (so I don't have GH+), but my credit card provides "free" DashPass so I now pretty much exclusively use Door Dash when I do get food delivered. If it wasn't for the free DashPass I'd probably still use Grub Hub
Another armchair opinion: "GrubHub" has negative connotations in a food service situation where you're already so far removed from being able to grade how skeevy a kitchen is. Cheap chinese takeout from UberEats sounds cleaner than from Grub Hub...
I agree. I think a lot of the growing pains of that industry were attached to GrubHub's name. Possibly fairly, but it still is a bit of a net negative image wise.
Agreed. I spoke with a small restaurant owner last night (he was delivering catering for a corporate event), and he mentioned in passing that GrubHub was the only platform he wasn't on because of how aggressive and exploitative they were in terms of fees.
Doordash prioritized selection, they did online ordering even when restaurants didn't want it. Eventually the demand was high enough that restaurants adapted. Grubhub focused on the traditional take out restaurants. Doordash also mixed in multi-delivery to handle mixed alcohol/food purchases.
Beyond this, tech always follows a power law distribution in returns. Doordash is the number one player, and as such will be about 10x bigger than the next runner up. How much of this is network effects/first preference vs. manufactured return is anyones guess, but most people do not want to spend time price matching doordash/grubhub on orders - so whoever has the bigger network/more customers will get the most folks.
DoorDash and Uber Eats also operate internationally and have a single cohesive brand whereas each country seems to have its own Just Eat-owned service as a result of acquisitions: JustEat in the UK, GrubHub in the US, SkipTheDishes in Canada and Menulog in Australia. All with the same branding and logo but different names and with distinct mobile applications.
Do DoorDash and Grubhub have the same business model? DoorDash handles logistics end-to-end; as I recall (it's been a long time since I've used Grubhub), they at one point did not, but were instead just a market front-end to a variety of different delivery services.
I use Grubhub regularly, they almost always have their own drivers. For a few pizza places that had existing delivery services, they're just a front end onto the pizza place's delivery service.
Maybe this was different per region, but I used GrubHub when it first launched in Chicago and even back then they had "their own drivers" (contractors same as Uber/DoorDash).
However, I wouldn't be surprised if their roll out involved capturing businesses that already offered delivery drivers until they had a critical mass of drivers in the region or something.
I have never used any of these delivery websites, but I assumed grubhub was fungible with Ubereats/Doordash/Instacart. All of them being websites that pay independent contractors to pickup and deliver things.
I think Doordash realized people in middle America would pay to get Taco Bell and McDonald's delivered while Grubhub never really moved out of big cities.
having worked at grubhub and spent a fair amount of time in discussion with ceo/founder matt maloney:
- the leadership during the peak of competition for mindshare in the space was exceptionally weak and overconfident. the grubhub/seamless merger led to a completely split company culture between NY and chicago.
- when they were on top, they were a shitty company with scummy practices (even for the space) that made restaurants very skeptical of them specifically. grubhub effectively ran like a protection racket. they bought up tons of "menu pages" websites and restaurant listing sites and launched fake websites to overtake the online presence of grubhub restaurants (including replacing their phone numbers in google summaries with voip numbers, calls through which restaurants were billed an "order origination" premium for.) they broadly resisted the desire of their restaurants to share ownership of their customers (or even be able to determine who their customers were.)
- they completely lacked the ability to plan long-term or even guess the consequences of any action they would take and would do things like "suddenly, without warning restaurants, offer a 50% off deal on lunch all across new york city," leading to huge numbers of canceled and delayed orders and further eroding their public perception.
- they were already public by the time that uber eats, doordash, and postmates were really aggressively entering the food delivery space and thus had to grow and ship with realistic constraints instead of burning investor money to disrupt in hopes that they would be profitable.
probably a million more reasons beyond that, but just off the top of my head a few ways the ball was dropped/the deck was stacked against them.
