{"id":7037,"date":"2018-03-05T17:42:55","date_gmt":"2018-03-05T22:42:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digital.hbs.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/grubhub-delivering-a-valuable-platform\/"},"modified":"2018-03-05T17:42:55","modified_gmt":"2018-03-05T22:42:55","slug":"grubhub-delivering-a-valuable-platform","status":"publish","type":"hck-submission","link":"https:\/\/d3.harvard.edu\/platform-digit\/submission\/grubhub-delivering-a-valuable-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"Grubhub: Delivering a Valuable Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a former investment banking analyst, the mention of Seamless brings back unfriendly memories of dinners in front of excel sheets preparing for another late night in the office.<\/p>\n

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However, Seamless, and its parent company, Grubhub, provide tremendous value through their platform. Grubhub started as a digital platform that aggregated various restaurants offering delivery, allowing consumers a proliferation of choice. The platform benefits restaurants by offering a digital portal for customers to access take-out and delivery options more efficiently and freeing up staff resources to focus on preparing food and serving in-store customers. In addition, Grubhub\u2019s platform acts as a marketing tool to expand the restaurants access to customers. From the customer\u2019s perspective, Grubhub\u2019s platform makes ordering take-out or delivery extremely simple and provides a discovery process to find new restaurants. Grubhub captures some of the value that it creates through their two-sided platform by charging restaurants a commission fee to be listed on the platform.<\/p>\n

As a two-sided platform, Grubhub is the beneficiary of strong direct network effects in that the more restaurants that choose to use the platform the more consumers are attracted to the platform due to the abundance of choice. The more consumers that choose the platform, the more attracted restaurants are to it due to a broader population of prospective customers. However, the switching costs and barriers to entry in this market are extremely low meaning Grubhub\u2019s existing business historically operated in a winner-takes-all market where scale should create the biggest switching cost.<\/p>\n

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It appears that Grubhub saw this as a dilemma given how fragmented the restaurant delivery market is. Grubhub\u2019s existing strategy of \u2018subsidizing\u2019 consumer access to the platform to increase the strength of the network effects that attracts restaurants to the platform would be extremely costly and time consuming, if even possible given existing competitive forces in such a fragmented market.<\/p>\n

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Grubhub has subsequently looked to increase the value of the platform to the party, restaurants, it clearly views as more important, given the value the platform is able to provide to that party. They have aimed to improve the platforms value to restaurants over time to increase switching costs for restaurants. Decisions they have made to do this include: (i) providing data and stored information that improve experience on the platform and (ii) introducing delivery services to expand the addressable market of restaurants and\/or allow existing restaurant customers to outsource delivery logistics. These services discourage the propensity for customers to multi-home their delivery services as Grubhub has now inserted itself as an invaluable service provider to restaurants while increasing the \u2018pain\u2019 for consumers to use multiple platforms. In addition to increasing the switching costs of their platform, Grubhub has been able to capture additional value from offering these services. They charge additional commission both for prioritizing restaurants listing positions on the website as well as for providing delivery services.<\/p>\n

It appears that Grubhub has improved the value of their platform through these strategies. Have they set themselves up to be the winner in this competitive market?<\/p>\n

Sources<\/u><\/strong><\/p>\n