If you are hungry and want to eat a meal but are too tired or lazy to prepare one, you have a few options. Either go out to eat, eat whatever is around the house or just order a takeaway meal. We decided to check out the last option and see what it takes to order a door to door delivery to sate the hunger pains.
Our method was to order the same meal from the same restaurant from three different delivery companies, UberEats, GrubHub and DoorDash. For those of you who don't know much about these companies, here is a brief explanation of them.
UberEats is a service provided by ridesharing giant Uber; their service is usually door to curb since it is easier if the customer goes to the curb to collect the order rather than have the driver find a parking spot and deliver. This is a good solution when delivering in downtown areas of cities and building complexes. UberEats also only delivers from restaurants that the customer has ordered the food from, this cancels out any pick-up issues and money handling for the drivers, speeding up the process.
GrubHub and DoorDash are a door to door delivery service that will bring the food to the customer. Both offer customers a credit card solution, enabling their drivers to pay for the food and make the delivery. While there is no need for a customer to place a direct order with the restaurant, instead the order is placed through their app, drivers will sometimes need to wait to pay for the delivery rather than just pick it up.
After we placed our orders, which all cost the same for the food, we waited to see the difference in delivery time and cost of delivery.
Booking Fee
- UberEats $4.99
- GrubHub $5.99
- DoorDash $5.17
First Time Discount
- DoorDash $0.99
- UberEats 0
- GrubHub 0
Final Charge (without tip or discount)
- DoorDash $16.79
- UberEats $16.83
- GrubHub $17.61
Time to Delivery vs. Actual Delivery Time
- GrubHub 10:23 9:30 -30 (Half an hour early)
- DoorDash 9:58 9:45 -13 (thirteen minutes early)
- UberEats 9:42 9:40 -2 (two minutes early)
The difference in tipping is that Uber only enables in-app tipping after you rate the driver. The difference in order is that GrubHub requires a minimum order of $10.00. All sites offer a $10 discount first-time promo offer.
Conclusions
Since it was only a one-time test, and since one is not a statistically viable figure for evaluating a service, we conclude that all the companies are good since they all delivered before time. To make a viable comparison we would need to test them in the same way at least 10 times, maybe in our next article, we will do that.