From time to time, even the most in-demand food delivery platforms must make adjustments to address the financial burdens it is encountering occasionally, such as Uber Eats competitor Coupang Eats.
Earlier this week, Coupang Eats revealed it is lowering its commission fees for restaurants using its platform this April to ease their financial burdens, a report on South Korean online news platform Naver said.
"It is possible to reflect the appropriate pricing plan section in the month when sales are low due to factors such as seasons, which can ease the burden on business owners in difficult times,” a Coupang Eats official stated.
This measure came after an agreement that even involved the government, working with Coupang Eats, and other major online food delivery platform operators, such as Yogiyo and Baedal Minjok, as well as a range of restaurants using those platforms.
In particular, Coupang Eats’s new commission rating system will lower its current rate of 9.8 percent per order’s sales to just 7.8 percent and even as low as two percent.
For context, Coupang Eats applies various rates to its member or affiliate restaurants through sorting them into four categories based on their month-by-month sales.
Under this new scheme, for orders amounting to around $17 each, the new commission system allows restaurants in the lowest of the three categories to save up to $1. This amount may be small, but restaurants in the bottom 65 percent of monthly sales will all save on the costs using this new system.
Furthermore, following the tripartite agreement that laid the foundations for this new system, Coupang Eats will change its customer receipts to break down the final price in detail to enhance price transparency. The updated version shall include the commission fee the platform charges to restaurants and the amount of the deliveries.
"Based on the purpose and consultation of the win-win consultative body, we plan to faithfully implement a win-win pricing plan that can support small business owners and ease the burden on new business owners,” the Coupang Eats official added.
Baedal Minjok, which is bigger than Coupang Eats in terms of the online food ordering market, is also planning to update its commission fee system later this month, a bit earlier than Coupang Eats’s April.
Interestingly enough, Coupang Eats is headquartered in the United States, particularly in Seattle, but it was founded by a Korean in 2010, named Bom Kim. Coupang Eats is also a retail business and OTT streaming service with offices in South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, India, and the United States.