> Is a delivery app that is basically a glorified basic ordering system really worth 30% of the transaction? No.
To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.
I interviewed at doordash, they really pride themselves on being able to optimize when a driver gets to the place to get the order to maximize everyone's time and not have useless waiting. It's NOT an easy problem and they had a huge prediction engine per store/item.
Looking at problems naively it looks simple but it's -really- not that simple if you want it to do WELL.
To be fair, it’s only “an ordering system” if you look purely at pick-up ordering. For deliveries, these apps are two-sided real-time resource schedulers (allocating a driver to N orders they can efficiently deliver through pickups and drop offs on a single precalculated connecting route to optimize both time and fuel consumption.) The value is in the backend software, as the very same backend software should be reusable for e.g. routing driverless taxis.