How to prevent delivery app outages from costing you thousands

Delivery isn’t new to the restaurant business, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t still growing pains. In the past five years, delivery as a percentage of revenue for quick service restaurants has surged, from 2.4 percent in 2020 to 11.1 percent in 2023 (our last full year of data), and tracking to be even more in 2024.

What that doesn’t show is lost sales in this critical channel. At Delaget, we recently rolled out our new Delaget Delivery solution, which aggregates and provides insights into delivery data. We worked with existing clients during development and testing, and when we showed them how many hours their locations were “offline” each month on the major delivery service providers (DSPs) portals such as DoorDash, Uber Eats and Grubhub, they were consistently shocked.

Part of the problem is that the outage can be invisible. If a drive through window is closed or register goes down, everyone in the store knows it. But a DSP outage can come from many sources, and unless someone checks or is notified the restaurant might stay offline for hours. During an outage, the DSP will reroute orders to another location nearby – and won’t send business back until the store issue is resolved.

The cost of downtime: Up to $17,000 per year per store.

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