Munish Narula, who owns restaurants in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, sued Grubhub in December 2018 for $5 million, claiming false charges for phone calls from customers asking questions and not actually ordering anything. The Yelp calls may also be concerning to restaurant owners because of the number of false positives generated by Grubhub’s phone tracking system. This involves dodging Grubhub-owned properties (Seamless, AllMenus, LevelUp, Tapingo, MenuPages, and Eat24) as well as the Grubhub-created websites and the Yelp app. Natt Garun, a Verge writer whose parents own a restaurant, wrote a guide to finding a restaurant’s real contact information and avoid Grubhub’s fees to businesses. The piece sparked a backlash from conscientious customers pledging to order directly in the future in order to protect their favorite restaurants’ profits. Claire Brown at The New Food Economy reported that the food delivery platform Grubhub has been creating thousands of websites in restaurants’ names, sometimes surpassing the restaurant’s own website in search engine visibility, in order to drive more online orders and commissions for Grubhub. The average user may not understand how this works, either. Grubhub’s CEO seemed to say as much in March 2018 when the two companies announced that customers could now order through Grubhub from within Yelp. This suggests that Yelp may be driving callers to Grubhub rather than Grubhub’s marketing efforts driving callers to Yelp and then to restaurants. However, people have been using Yelp as a directory since long before it partnered with Grubhub. The Yelp website does not list referral numbers.īoth companies said they do not measure call volume.
In other words, Grubhub is claiming that every phone call to a restaurant originating specifically from the Yelp app is attributable to Grubhub’s marketing efforts. “The order is the result of our marketing efforts.” "It is important to keep in mind that we are a marketing platform and, in almost all of these cases, the diner would not have discovered or placed an order with this restaurant without our platform,” Brendan Lewis, a spokesperson for Grubhub, told me in an email. She deferred further questions to Grubhub. “It is our understanding that Grubhub has marketing agreements with some restaurants that allow Grubhub to utilize referral numbers on third party partner sites like Yelp,” a spokesperson for Yelp said in an email. Grubhub says it provides phone numbers for restaurants that sign up for marketing but not delivery in order to capture all orders that could be eligible for its fees. It also offers a physical delivery service, which costs restaurants another 10 percent. Grubhub offers a “marketing” service to restaurants, which includes being listed on the Grubhub platform, for between 15 percent and 20 percent of each order total. To not have all the practices clearly spoken about and understood by the businesses is really scary in my eyes.” “So many of these practices make it hard to trust the companies.
“We're working with these companies to help generate orders, but so many times, we're put in a position where we need to compete against them to get access to our customers,” he said. Robert Guarino, CEO of the Manhattan restaurant group 5 Napkin Burger and a board member at the New York City Hospitality Alliance, was also not aware that Grubhub numbers were showing up in Yelp for two of his four restaurants. “It’s not fair because this is our customer who called directly into our restaurant,” he said. Mohammad Zaman, an owner of Afghan Kabab and Grill House in Brooklyn, insisted the phone number that showed up in Yelp was a mistake until a call placed to the number rang at his desk. Restaurant owners may not be aware of the change.
“It’s not fair because this is our customer who called directly into our restaurant.
But Yelp began prompting customers to call Grubhub phone numbers in October 2018 after the two companies announced a “long-term partnership.” Yelp has historically functioned like an enhanced Yellow Pages, listing direct phone numbers for restaurants along with photos, information about the space, menus, and user reviews.
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