Seamless’ friend-referral program, like many things on the social Web, entices you to spam people you know about joining you. I’ve used these coupon codes and sign-up offers since I was a college student, but only recently did I try to game the system. Most importantly, it’s why these services offer deep discounts to customers ordering with them for the first time. It’s also why, after you order, they encourage you to tweet or share with your Facebook friends the breaking news that you are a human being who has just procured some food to eat. These websites, the Seamlesses and the GrubHubs, have been engaged in a never-ending turf war.īecause there is yet to exist “the Facebook of” ordering food online, these sites, which are backed by hefty venture capital, like to buy up competitors and complementary sites and paper the subway cars, taxi-cab TVs, and Web browsers of urban dwellers with advertisements in an all-out dash to hit the tipping point of market-defining popularity that is the raison d'être of Internet startups.
Yet the concept of online delivery has remained more or less unchanged since then, with no clear market leader emerging. The service launched last century, in 1999. Seamless, which recently changed its name from SeamlessWeb, is practically Internet antiquity. Sites like Seamless can pool these restaurants together, digitize their menus, and take a commission on each order when it sends them to the guy working the fryer. Take-out joints are unlikely to have their own website, much less a well-coded, up-to-date portal allowing customers to order online.
Restaurant delivery websites are plentiful on the Internet, and it’s easy to see why - it’s an obvious and attractively simple business model.
0 kommentar(er)
