I'm watching you
I bit of spying into how food delivery apps fight for users and develop new features faster
I work in the food delivery space, and I watch the industry closely. One of my favorite things to do is to listen to food delivery platforms' earnings calls. This gives me some idea of what the big guys are up to and what the markets are concerned about.
Lately, I felt that Uber, DoorDash, and other industry leaders talk more about product capabilities and less about their marketing/expansion efforts. The focus seems to be on the features that allow to keep users active and get them to order more often. This makes a lot of sense with the changing economic landscape. Money is expensive now and it’s more important to earn than to expand the footprint at all costs.
I think that this shift of focus also impacts the nature of the competition. If it was more of a marketing game before - you had to outspend your competitors to win users - today it becomes more of a product play when you have to outsmart the others to keep those users active (and profitable!). This is very, very tough. I don’t want to say that marketing is easy or not important today, but creating a consumer product that makes people stay and spend is a real challenge. Especially when consumers have many other options to use. Now, try doing this without subsidizing much of the demand. Wow, hard.
Based on the amount of negativity towards the food delivery platforms, I feel this hard work is underappreciated.
Recently I came across a report created by our Israeli friends from Watchful. The company specializes in watching consumer apps, tracking releases, new features, tests, onboarding changes, and other moves that impact users. Based on the tracking data, Watchful produces intel about which app does what for which personas (types of users with certain traits).
A lot of the data is unfortunately private to the company’s customers among which are the largest players in Food Delivery, Retail, Travel, and Dating. But even from the public food delivery report, you can understand what kind of a race the food delivery companies are into.
The report is from a couple of months ago and reflects the observations on 8 leading food delivery platforms from November 2022 to April 2023. Some data is from Q1 this year, nevertheless, it is worth taking a look at.
Here are my top 5 stats:
Doordash is a clear leader by the speed of new updates, releasing new app versions every 5-6 days
But then if we look at the number of updates released in every version, the leaders change. During the analyzed 6-month period, Rappi released close to 2K updates and Foodpanda (a Delivery Hero company) released almost 1.5K updates. DoorDash ranks third by the number of updates. This counts new features as well as new pages, flows or even changing the UI copy
This means that on average every release for DoorDash has about 30 changes and 90 for Rappi. Deliveroo has 7 updates per version on average, which is the least across the analyzed apps. The question is whether the quantity of the updates translates into quality, yet, note the intensity of the work
Another interesting metric analyzed was the speed of the app. According to statistics a 1 second delay may lead to a 20% conversion loss. So you don’t want to lose your users and you especially don’t want them to open a competitor’s app and have it loaded faster than yours. Hence extra attention to the speed of the app loading and the restaurant search. Zomato is the winner there with only 2 sec loading time for the app and less than a second restaurant search. Surprisingly, over the reporting period DoorDash was taking more than 8 seconds to launch and more than 2 seconds for the restaurant search
As for consumer expectations, the top three features that everybody has (and is expected to have) are:
Payment with a gift card
Order groceries (not only restaurant food)
Schedule an order for later and order together as a group
There is more data in the full report here.
There are also other reports by vertical available for free on the company’s website.