With delivery and to-go orders essential to most restaurants’ businesses right now, the last few months have seen an influx of tech services that promise to alleviate some of those restaurants’ reliance on third party delivery. The latest is inhousedelivery.com, a San Diego, Calif.-based company that today launched the beta version of its delivery platform. The service is available to U.S. restaurant customers as of today for a flat $99/month, according to a press release sent to The Spoon.
The inhousedelivery.com platform bills itself as “a driver management and dispatch solution” that restaurants can integrate with their existing tech stack to better manage online orders, drivers, routes, and scheduling. To be clear: the inhousedelivery.com platform does not actually process online orders coming to the restaurant. Rather, it integrates with existing ones a restaurant may be using. At the moment, that list includes ChowNow, Delivery.com, Drizly, Toast, Squarespace, and Grubhub, among other platforms popular with restaurants.
The bulk of the inhousedelivery.com platform is geared towards managing the last mile by providing driver scheduling, route optimization, and real-time tracking of orders. However, as today’s press release rightly points out, most restaurants cannot afford their own fleet of delivery drivers, hence the reliance on third-party services like Grubhub and Uber Eats. Currently, Grubhub is the only one of the big four of these services in the U.S. that integrates with inhousedelivery.com.
Addressing this issue of drivers, inhousedelivery.com also said today it has opened registration for its secondary platform, Driversharing.com, which lets restaurants share drivers. Theoretically, at least, that means multiple restaurants on the same city block could share a pool of drivers and bypass using third-party services altogether, so long as they were using an alternative service (e.g., ChowNow) for the order processing step.
That combination would fulfill inhousedelivery’s promise on its website to “bring delivery in-house” and eradicate the 30 percent-per-transaction fees restaurants typically pay third-party delivery services. This is a claim more and more restaurant tech companies are making these days as Gruhub et al. come under fire for what many see as predatory business practices at a time when restaurants need the delivery format. Several of those companies, including Square, ChowNow, and Toast, all pitch the same benefit of lower commission fees to restaurant customers with their restaurant customers.
For now, these companies can only lower those fees, not eradicate them, since restaurants still need drivers and third-party delivery services can most easily provide them. Inhousedelivery.com’s Drivesharing.com platform is only open for registration at the moment, so there’s no telling whether it could provide an alternative pool for drivers that truly manages to do away with sky-high commission fees.
