The convenience of food delivery used to be restricted to pizza and the occasional Chinese restaurant. But now, more and more restaurants are offering delivery for their customers. Websites like GrubHub and Seamless have made it easier by providing information on delivery to restaurants in large cities. A new website, BringMeThat.com, is taking that idea and expanding out of large cities, bringing a database of food delivery nationwide.
BringMeThat is a website that provides restaurant menu and location information for restaurants that already deliver. Customers can order right from the website to have the food delivered to their door. By typing in an address, customers are given a list of restaurants that will deliver to their location.
The website was launched at the end of 2012 by Jason Liang in Cuyahoga County, Ohio. He chose this as the first location because it was his hometown and no online delivery platform existed there at the time. Since then, he has grown the company and hired five other employees.
“Whenever I go home, there are no good delivery services,” Liang said. “I want to create a site for the entire country, not just one for every state, that you can rely on.”
Liang aims to make it easier for anyone ordering food by ordering online. After the order is placed through BringMeThat, it will be emailed, faxed, or in some cases, called in to the restaurant. The order is then in the hands of the restaurant, which provides the delivery. The website is based on an algorithm that finds restaurants that currently deliver. Their menu and location information is included on the site. In some cases where a restaurant does not have delivery, BringMeThat works with some of the 400 third party delivery services across the country.
Liang wants to have a strong focus on customer service throughout the ordering process. He encourages customers to call about any issues and features a satisfaction guarantee on the site. BringMeThat will provide a full refund if a customer is not completely satisfied. However, some of these issues must be directed to the restaurants themselves, such as food quality or delivery. BringMeThat also encourages customers to recommend any restaurants that currently deliver, but are not yet on the website.
“About 90 percent of the time, orders go through smoothly, and the other 10 percent is handled with our customer service staff,” Liang said. “We want to focus on going out of our way to make amends to any issues.”
Websites like GrubHub and Seamless provide the delivery for restaurants, and therefore charge them a fee for the service. BringMeThat has no fee for including the restaurants on the website. The restaurants featured may have partnered with BringMeThat, or the team just places the available information for customers. However, some orders will charge the customer a small fee for the service, and delivery fees and order minimums vary depending on the restaurant.
“We found that many restaurants actually reach out to us to be placed on the website,” Liang said. “It costs the restaurant nothing to be on the site, so many see it as free marketing.”
Liang said the website is growing fastest in cities that other delivery websites have not yet targeted, such as college towns and small-to-medium-sized cities.
“We want to capture the 80 percent of cities that the other websites are not in, and then rely on that branding to expand into larger cities,” Liang said. “We want you to know that you will have complete coverage wherever you go.”
As for Philadelphia, Liang said that business is expanding even with the competition of GrubHub and Seamless. There are 344 restaurants to order from in Philadelphia. The website includes chain restaurants that deliver, such as Domino’s, Pizza Hut and Papa John’s, and restaurants like Marathon Grill and City View Pizza. However, much of their traffic in the area comes from the suburbs, where the competitors do not service.
As with many delivery services, the website has been growing on college campuses. Although not many of the restaurants on and around Temple’s campus are on the site, others in the city will deliver to the 19121 and 19122 area codes, such as Darling’s Diner in Northern Liberties and Tiffin, an Indian restaurant on Girard Avenue.
The website currently services over 7,700 restaurants in Delaware, North Carolina, New Jersey, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. Liang wants to expand that to 10,000 restaurants in 10 states, including New Hampshire, Virginia and Georgia, in the coming months. His ultimate goal is to be nationwide in the next 12 months and hopes to develop an app for the website.
Sarae Gdovin can be reahed at sarae.gdovin@temple.edu.
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