Yelp Serving Up Direct Food Delivery Services Through Start-Up Partnerships

Millions of people already dish about restaurants on Yelp and now the company will start literally dishing out those meals though new food delivery partnerships. The company will collaborate with startups like Delivery.com and Eat24 to provide food-delivery services directly through Yelp Platform. The company plans to extend this kind of customer convenience to booking services for businesses like spas, salons, and dentists in the near future. Bloomberg.com reported on why Yelp is taking its services beyond the home page and into the home.

“It’s a logical extension to move into food-based transactions, because Yelp can deliver an immediacy or instant gratification,” said analyst Brian Blair. “It’s too early to tell how easily this could extend beyond cities like San Francisco and New York, but even if it only catches on in major urban centers, it will drive revenues and more closely tie users into regular use of Yelp.”

Yelp is adding these direct services in order to entice, satisfy, and keep advertisers and consumers alike. After all, local businesses that display ads on Yelp accounted for more than 75 percent of their sales in 2012.

Adding home food delivery is likely to attract more convenience-seeking consumers and keep them on the site longer since their activities will increase from just finding restaurants to now selecting, ordering, and entering their delivery information. This will mean more opportunities and exposure for advertisers’ display ads on Yelp. The company will also take an unspecified commission from each home delivery transaction. Now it’s easy to see why Yelp ventured into food delivery and partnered with these delivery startups.

Yelp already allows customers to make restaurant reservations from its site through a partnership with OpenTable. This new food delivery service will make Yelp even more appealing to customers craving a taste of convenience.

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