Restaurants that can get their food into the hands of customers at their front doors hold a distinct advantage over restaurants without delivery options. The trend toward customer preference to home delivery had been on the rise before the pandemic, but millions of Americans became wholly accustomed to on-demand food delivery during the lockdowns in 2020.
It’s easy to understand why. For many diners, the expansion of food delivery marketplaces like DoorDash, UberEats, and GrubHub gave them access to a world of food delivery beyond pizza and Chinese. Better yet, they didn’t even have to call in an order thanks to easy-to-use apps.
It’s also easy to understand why many restaurants have hesitated to hop aboard the third-party food delivery train. Primarily, it’s quite expensive, especially within the context of the already-thin margins many restaurants operate under. Food delivery marketplaces take up to a 30% commission on every order.
Going through a third party also means mostly eliminating the restaurant-guest connection, reducing the restaurant’s ability to build long-term customer relationships and to have control over what happens to orders when they are picked up.
The Onosys platform eliminates these challenges while empowering restaurants to leverage delivery service providers for first-party online orders. Onosys clients enjoy benefits like automated order flows that are connected to in-house operational systems and increased order accuracy, not to mention happier guests.
The platform eliminates one of the major pain points restaurant owners face when partnering with third parties for delivery: managing a veritable stable of tablets to keep track of orders across multiple, disparate third-party platforms.
With Onosys, restaurant owners can add in-house based delivery in a way that appeals to modern diners by choosing one of three options:
Last-mile delivery features that allow restaurants to manage drivers, dispatch orders, and provide guests with delivery tracking capabilities. This option provides the most control over individual guest experiences.
Onosys customers that don’t have an in-house delivery fleet can easily integrate with well-known delivery service providers (DSPs) like DoorDash Direct and Uber Direct. These are different from their more consumer-popular marketplace sites in that they are a delivery service only.
Onosys clients can take a combined approach where they get to define rules like delivery zones, distance from restaurant, order value, days/times of the week, staffing levels, and more to automatically determine the best delivery option - whether it be in-house delivery or using a DSP - for each order.
It’s great to have options, but as many restaurant owners have discovered in recent years, too many options can lead to decision paralysis and a whole lot of confusion. It doesn’t have to be this way. Let’s clear up a few frequently asked questions.
1. From the restaurant owner’s perspective, what’s the true difference between having DoorDash show up to pick up a delivery versus a first-party ordering approach?
Onosys president Chris Anderle says the key difference lies in the technology powering the transactions which leads to ownership of the customer data. “It’s not just delivery — third parties are passing the order to the restaurant through their own technology,” he says. “Third parties receive the order directly from the customer, so in a sense, they own the customer.”
In contrast, instead of paying up to 30% of the sale price to third-party marketplaces, restaurants powered by the Onosys online ordering platform can receive orders directly, introduce upsells and make deliberate choices about delivery fees. Anderle says by utilizing the Onosys ordering platform results in customers paying a very small cost to obtain the order. The more volume clients have running through their platform, the lower the cost on a per order basis. It doesn’t take long for those kinds of savings to pay off.
If a restaurant brand utilizes DoorDash Drive or Uber Direct, they only pay the negotiated delivery cost. The restaurant then determines what to charge their customer. When restaurants subsidize a dollar or two on an average order size of 25 dollars, for example, they come out far ahead of the typical 20-30% marketplace fees while owning the customer relationship.
Onosys clients enjoy three significant advantages over typical marketplace partnerships:
Additionally, with Onosys, there is the ability to integrate with marketplaces and transmit orders to a restaurant POS.
2. What’s the difference between UberEats and Uber Direct or DoorDash and DoorDash Drive?
Delivery service providers (DSPs) like Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive provide delivery services, full stop. They don’t handle front end issues. Instead, their speciality is managing delivery drivers — sourcing drivers and handling logistics and dispatching. By contrast, marketplaces like DoorDash and UberEats handle front end tasks like order management and customer service.
DoorDash Drive/Uber Direct = sourcing and dispatching drivers
DoorDash/UberEats = marketing, order management and customer service
Onosys can integrate with DSPs like Uber Direct and DoorDash Drive to leverage drivers through these services for first-party online ordering. In other words, Onosys allows restaurants to source drivers through a DSP while bypassing expensive third-party ordering systems. Onosys clients retain end-to-end customer relationships instead of fully turning over control and ownership to a third-party.
3. How can I maintain autonomy and brand strength in the quick-delivery economy?
Restaurants that “lean in” and take ownership of their online delivery options have much more control over how they connect with customers. By leveraging DSPs or managing in-house driver fleets, restaurants can advertise dine-in directly to delivery customers, offer loyalty programs that include delivery orders, and free up marketing dollars by greatly reducing per order fees charged by DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub and others.
Learn more about Onosys, and set up a demo today.