Restaurant tech company Ordrslip announced today it has partnered with Postmates to add delivery integration into its mobile app software, according to a company press release sent to The Spoon. Per today’s announcement, Ordrslip’s software lets restaurant customers “create custom-looking whitelabel mobile ordering applications via Ordrslip.”
It’s no secret that, since the pandemic pushed the restaurant industry to off-premises formats, usage of mobile apps for ordering and payments is on the rise. It’s also pretty commonly known at this point that sophisticated apps a la Starbucks are far too expensive and resource-consuming for most independent restaurants and chains to create themselves. Hence the growing selection of tools (see below) various third parties offer to get restaurants the digital properties they need without decimating their already decimated margins.
The Ordrslip approach is this: Ordrslip creates a branded mobile app for the restaurant with all the features needed to fulfill pickup and delivery items, including order-ahead capabilities, payments, iOS and Android compatibility, POS integration (only with Square and Clover for now), and order tracking. You can read the full list of features here. The app looks and functions as if it belongs to the restaurant but is powered by Ordrslip’s softare in the background. As of today, there is the option to add Postmates integration in order to fulfill the last-mile delivery end of the operation.
The promise is that by using Ordrslip with the new Postmates integration, restaurant customers can bypass the controversial per-transaction commission fees they normally get charged by third-party delivery services. Ordrslip pricing is $100/month per location or $1100/year per location, with one-time setup fees of $1,000 and $750, respectively. (The setup fee applies to all locations a restaurant might operate.)
On the one hand, those are high numbers for already struggling restaurants, which would have to be doing enough delivery to surpass $100/month in commission fees per transaction. On the other, there’s a pandemic happening and folks are staying at home and ordering more delivery. In other words, $100 in commission fees to Grubhub Et al is probably on the low end these days, though restaurants still have to pay some commission to Postmates for delivering the order.
Ordrslip is one of a growing number of companies offering restaurants workarounds to 30 percent commission fees on delivery orders. POS platform Toast, ChowNow, and many others have various tools in the market that let restaurants process orders and payments through a separate platform so they only need to use the delivery service for actual deliveries. Another company, ShiftPixy, bypasses delivery services altogether and provides the drivers itself. And even the delivery services themselves are participating in this trend. Uber Eats is piloting a tool that lets restaurants process orders through their own platforms, though Uber Eats retains the customer data.
Uber Eats also just announced its plans to buy Postmates for $2.65 billion, a deal that is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. That deal is unlikely at this point to affect a partnership like the one Ordrslip announced today.
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