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Comment by jeromegv | Hacker News Reader

It’s not business. It’s restaurants. If there’s one thing restaurants are awful are, it’s technology. They have no time, interest or margin for anything sophisticated.

And that’s why they get ripped off by ubereats and other delivery services. They will outsource their whole ordering process and lose almost 30% of their margin because they can’t be bothered to have their own app or a proper website.

Restaurants are just not tech savvy. It’s just a common industry trend. Sure you’ll find exceptions and may be someone will track you with a QR code. The reality is that they won’t.

They’d get a lot more info from you if they had a free wifi anyway.

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Plenty of restaurants would like very much to have you order through their own website. But they are less (not not) tech savvy than the people that run the various large aggregators, who will stop at absolutely nothing to muscle their way in.

It started off with 25 cents per lead and it ends with 27% of your margin because the counterparty engages in unfair business practices, not because the restaurant isn't tech savvy. Blame the perp, not the victim.

I dunno. One of the best SEO people I know runs a Thai restaurant and on a good day controls the whole first page when searching for Thai restaurants in his town.

That would be the exception that proves the rule then. If he's able to SEO the whole first page for Thai restaurants, that would seem to say the rest of them are terrible at the web.

His main tactic is that he grabs all the "internet real estate" that he can, that is he has a landing page for his restaurant in absolutely every place a restaurant could have a landing page.

> And that’s why they get ripped off by ubereats and other delivery services. They will outsource their whole ordering process and lose almost 30% of their margin because they can’t be bothered to have their own app or a proper website.

I don't think this makes sense. For anything but the largest chains (McD's etc), few are going to install an app just to order from you. And food aggregators have the same advantage that restaurant streets or mall food courts do: people who would like to eat but are not sure what have a place to start looking at options. Pair that with a nice unified payment and uniform no-call ordering interface, and you have a virtually unbeatable advantage compared to any restaurant handling their own orders, tech-savvy or not.

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