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by tartoran 2043 days ago
How long until some actor emerges who provides a network of ordering sites hosted on the cloud that charge $30-50 a month for each restaurant and nothing more? As margins get thinner and thinner this is inevitable. And no marketing needed, if the service is good word of mouth would do it.
3 comments

A long time, I don’t think it’s a viable model at scale. The restaurant owners are only slightly more tech savvy than my mom and they really struggle with this stuff. Also Uber acts as a mini Facebook style walled garden and locks out more and more customers from using your restaurant. At some point 10-20% the walled garden is enough to drive your profit to 0 and bankrupt a restaurant.
ChowNow is exactly this: https://get.chownow.com/
And for what it's worth, I actually love using ChowNow. I can order directly from the restaurant, but I don't have to use a 2009 website built in PHP 0.2 by the owner's niece.
If I’m understanding you correctly, that already exists as Square Online, although I think they’re a bit more expensive than that. A lot of restaurants near me use it.