Doordash says you should rely on 3rd party delivery, but should you?

Doordash shared a post showing data about the unpredictability of restaurant delivery orders. One friday you get 20 orders, next friday you get 30 and the next one you get 16.

Of course, they wanted to make the point that having your own fleet is hard, since you don’t know if you’ll do 20 or 50 orders, so you should rely on Doordash fleet. I sort of agree for smaller restaurants that do 5-20 orders per day. Delivery is not your core, so you are better off trusting delivery to a professional fleet like Doordash - or foodpanda and Grab in Asia.

However, if you are a restaurant that delivers 50+ orders per day, I think it makes a lot of sense to have an hybrid set up. Delivery becomes part of your core, so you need to own the experience.

You want to have your trusted fleet for your base orders, and be connected to a 3rd party delivery for overflow orders. This allows you to cover the off peaks with your fleet, and leverage the 3rd party for the peaks. This way you can have a stable delivery experience, while scaling operations by accessing a deeper network of drivers.

At Kosmo we held multiple stories of merchants that built their own fleet of drivers to gain reliability. Depending on a single courier is too fragile. What if their fleet is busy? Then all your orders will be delayed. That’s why we focus our product around a hybrid set up, with your own fleet of drivers as the core and 3rd party delivery couriers when you need them.

Many people say “but managing your own fleet is hard!”. I agree, that’s why at Kosmo we are working on making it easy. Will share more about that in a future post.

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See the post from Doordash here:

https://about.doordash.com/en-us/news/only-the-recipe-is-predictable

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