Curious if any of you work with a restaurant delivery service? and how you like working with them? Be interesting to hear some feedback form the other point of view… The pizza shops who i promote and sell love me, extra biz!
I have been on both sides of this fence. I ran a delivery service for 17 years and delivered for just about every place in this city.
I now have a service that delivers for me. The drawback to a service compared to staff drivers is there is little or no control over timing of the deliveries. This is especially true when it comes to busy times of the night and the drivers are taking orders from multiple clients. To save time for the drivers they will often make stops for other clients while they have your order in the car.
Seems that delivery would be one of a pizzeria’s core competencies and best not outsourced.
sounds like a good idea if delivery was not your main business,
Otis
guy tryin to put together one up here im all for it but just cant get past how good will be product once it get there due to multple stops and then do you really want the cust first impression cold or luke warm food at best. to remeber your name? plus every one up here on the mountain business wise is so worried about the next store price cuttin to gain more businees. so it will probally not work in our location but we will see
I just pulled my stats off the computer for last year and we did 9372 deliveries with delivery sales over 260,000.00. Delivery charges (we charge for del) were over 13,000.00. I dont think I want that amount of business going to someone that I cant controll and the 13k i collected in del charges help to pay for my delivery driver so I think its worth it to have my own.
this is true, and we add on beer and wine for the customer as well. I managed all deliveries and phones for a pizza shop here and as chinese shop and it worked well because they put delivery second to dine-in, so customers had to wait for delivery. In my resort town in the winter its just nuts with the restaurants so deliveries are always well over an hour, buys me time.
I think though for a new pizza shop who is starting out a multiple restaurant delivery service (RDS) would be a benefit for them. The RDS publishes a menu for them (gets the name out there for the new pizza shop) so free advertising and most people know to call the pizza shop as they either charge cheaper for delivery or the delivery is free. The RDS only pushes delivery for the rest to generate their own deliveries, unless a deal is made. When some of the pizza shops here are slammed they sometimes call me to come in and grab a few orders for them and i charge a flat fee (6 to 8 bucks) as opposed to the sales commission i get when i call in my own orders. Beleive it or not about 40% of my overall business is pizza sales and my customers pay the $6.50 delivery charge without hesitation and if they add on beer or wine, they pay $13.00 for delivery. I even got locals trained to call me for pizza and they pay our VIP delivery of $5.50, they know I have more drivers on and i’m faster and more reliable.
what is the market price range to the restaurant for delivery ?
of course, it is not available in my small town or most other small towns…
When I was in Chicago, I remember it being rather pricey due to the time element involved.
Otis
not sure I understand your question? A RDS should be getting between 20 to 30% commission on sales generated by the RDS.
Hi. We actually just stopped using a delivery service as of Jan. 1 Here’s the reasoning. It first started out okay. Deliveries were good, coming in every night. The company (out of Southern CA - we’re in Northern CA) sold to a place in Texas. They said they were getting new flyers out ASAP. We waited 4 months before we saw anything from them and they still haven’t gotten anything out. They took 25% off the top and then charged a marketing fee of $10 per week. It got to the point where we were making $7.00 off a $20.00 order (not including delivery/tax/tip) and it just wasn’t working for us. I saved all the names of those who ordered from us and sent them a letter, a magnet and a new menu. The letter states several thing but mostly lists the benefits of coming to pick up their pies instead of delivery. We’re still thinking about doing it ourselves, but it’s expensive to do right now for us.