Website idea, needs your constructive criticism

[newtothis]

How are you,

I have came up with the website idea, and the only thing i cant figure out is how to go about making money from it.
I would love to hear some advices from some entrepreneurs who had this figures out.

Here is the idea:

Its a food website, that will connect people who is looking to order a delivery on a food to their door instead of going out, to the food shops. (Orbitz idea but not that complicated)

For instance someone will search for food delivery place on google and finds my site, t(he site will be dedicated to only one type of food) on the site, they will be able to put their zip code in and the site will shows all the places that are next to them in the particular mile range. there they will be able to see reviews of customers, menu of the place and place an order, also see pictures of products they offering.


Challenge:
I want to be a middle man for customers and those food places. So i am wondering how can i make money,

1) Just list all of those places in every state of every city, (get a database somewhere of every restaurant) and get money from AdSense from visitors. do i need to contact every restaurant and ask them if i want to place them on the site ?

2) Get more involved and have contact every restaurant, or let them sing up as they visit the site. and maybe charge for memberships that will allow restaurants place their photos, on the site and add the Menus so that customers can buy right from the site and maybe also charge % from the total. (in this case have to deal with all the customers and restaurants)

3) ???

I am looking for your suggestions and just thoughts about the site am i missing something.

thank you

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[rocksolid]

What value is your website bringing? What you are looking to do is basically the same thing people can do if they open up a yellow pages. Most people know the local restaurants in their area and if they don’t, they have local newspapers that can tell them places to eat. Now maybe if you built a website that offered all the info you are suggesting and then got the restaurants to pay you a fee for putting them on your website along with a premium listing for an extra cost and offer coupons to those places, you might be able to make some money. The tough part IMO is how are you going to drive local traffic to your site in order to get customers into the restaurants you are advertising? Without proof that you have traffic to your website I think it will be hard to convince restaurants to pay for advertising. You might have to open the website to everybody for free until you can prove value, that advertising on the website does actually bring in customers.

 

[lightweight99]

My initial thought was a delivery service for those restaurants that do not deliver, offering their menu's on your site and delivery.

From what I can gather, you want to build a site that contains the menu's for multiple restaurants within a given zip code? Am I right?

 

[EastWind]

don't do it.
terrible idea.

if you deliver, you have to charge, handle delivering, costs alot. you can't do it. 100 people ordering dinner to avoid rushhour traffic at 5, try delivering it on time, by the time you are done with the last meal, it's going to be what time? if you charge, when will you pay the restaurants? the want their money now. you get in the way of their cash sales sometimes.

if you just list directory. how are you better than yahoo or google listing? i can google "chinese zipcode" or "italian food zipcode" etc.

many have done this, in both ways, listings and delivery. fail. google/yahoo can list. they don't make their money directly from those.

sorry, terrible idea.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[lightweight99]

I have to agree with EastWind, very well put. My initial thought was delivery, but as you can see above it obviously wouldn't work very well. I wouldn't shut your initial idea down however. I hate to hear negativity when throwing idea's out at people.(not that EastWind was)

Maybe there's a different way you can do it, or a niche in the industry.

 

[EastWind]

I have to agree with EastWind, very well put. My initial thought was delivery, but as you can see above it obviously wouldn't work very well. I wouldn't shut your initial idea down however. I hate to hear negativity when throwing idea's out at people.(not that EastWind was)

Maybe there's a different way you can do it, or a niche in the industry.

actually, i was. i wrote a reply earlier, but decided not to post. but then realized i will just be doing him wrong by not posting it, so i wrote a new one when i came across the thread again, and did rush it.

but the truth is peeps really need to think things through. this is his business, he is suppose to think more about it than any of us, perhaps it's just knowing/intuition, but i just knew it won't work immediately. so there was no way to butter it up, maybe he could do it with a twist. again, you could say use the coupon sites, but why would I sell my food at a discount? and offer your site a better discount than i already off? unless you guarantee me that you are going to be sending me X amount of customers each month where X is a very decent amount. There are discount/coupon sites. There are directory listings. The delivery model has failed many times, some companies just do it indvidually. I believe I can go to papa john's pizza and order pizza. In the case of me being in a place I don't know, I will just use google/yahoo directory or drive around. It defeats the purpose of fast food, when people are hungry, they are hungry, they are not going to get on the computer and shop around. We shop around on computer when making expensive purchase such as electronics/cars. But the majority when hungry are going to get up and go eat. I'm sorry for calling it a terrible idea, maybe someone else can prove me wrong.

 

[newtothis]

Thank you for your posts. I guess you right, i was thinking to group some authentic food in under one roof, for instance all Indian restaurants.
so for instance someone would be interested in Indian food, he would put a zip code in and see what restaurants are closest to him, then see who has what promotions or a particular plate that he/she is looking for.
I don't want to get involved in to delivering and taking orders, that's why i was thinking to just combine them together and just work on getting the traffic on the site and placing ads.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[CommonCents]

look at takeout taxi? I think i've seen them in hotels. Delivery for multiple restaurants.

 

[faq88]

I think I see what your saying like Orbitz or any other travel website. You would have to keep up to date on the local deals and offer special ones. If I want pizza and I'm at work on my computer I don't know who will deliver. In fact it can be a pain in big cities to figure out who is your closest restaurant that will deliver for you. So I enter in Pizza pepperoni Large into your search options. I get 4-5 different restaurants with different prices. Then I can look at reviews of these restaurants from prior shoppers (will be important for locale chains, like Barro's in AZ). Then they place the order on your website, you charge a 1.00 service charge and send it to the restaurant. I think this could work well, but would be a heck of a program to design. Best of luck, don't give up.

Also if you offer programs like Paypal you could offer safer means of making orders, then giving somebody your CC.

Mike

 

[EastWind]

Thank you for your posts. I guess you right, i was thinking to group some authentic food in under one roof, for instance all Indian restaurants.
so for instance someone would be interested in Indian food, he would put a zip code in and see what restaurants are closest to him, then see who has what promotions or a particular plate that he/she is looking for.
I don't want to get involved in to delivering and taking orders, that's why i was thinking to just combine them together and just work on getting the traffic on the site and placing ads.

if you are not delivering, cool. but don't forget google does the directory listing, really good. now, i can understand offering the coupon. but this will now require you to call up all the restaurants, get them offer coupons if they do. some wouldn't. then you have to get your site, and have it up for free. build it up till many people are using it before you can start charging.

you need to provide value, solve a problem. what value are you providing? what problem are you solving? (1) if people wanted to find a restaurant on the computer, they can yahoo/google it. (2) coupons are cool, but there are things that matter most to people when they are hungry, LOCATION/PROXIMITY, their preference of food, then maybe that coupon. I have rarely used coupons for food, except for fast foods, and that's cuz I will throw the coupon in the car, and have it around and handy when I need it.

It seems more, you are looking at your own problem first. I need to make money, then trying to wrap a solution to meet your problem of making money. Solve actually problems. What problems are restaurants having? What problems are making the owners scratch their heads on a daily basis? I don't know. Do you know? Probably not. How would you know? Go out, talk to many restaurant owners! Interview them, do surveys. That's how you would know, then come up with a solution. Don't give up, there are still problems to be solved!

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[CommonCents]

Open Table did a great job at restaurant reservations. I'm actually kind of shocked that they were able to monitize that function to the extent they did. Read about some up and coming challengers on the way too.

OpenTable (OPEN, 37) operates the leading online restaurant reservation network, with 10,850 restaurants on its system. It fills tables by taking reservations from diners at opentable.com and via handsets like the iPhone. It's free to diners, but the company charges restaurants an average of $275 per month plus 67 cents per diner for reservations booked online.

I'd never think a site could get that kind of money from restaurants for reservations. I would have thought it would have been a free or nearly free for restaurants and hope to make money on advertising. Good for them.

 

[BurnBright]

Your idea:
Its a food website, that will connect people who is looking to order a delivery on a food to their door instead of going out, to the food shops

You need to ask yourself more questions, better yet ask people that you think may use your service, restaurants and consumers what they would like. Provide a unique application to address these needs. Even great ideas need a market.
My valueless idea: iPad it! let the consumer see the food, educate the restaurants on how to present a dish on line with pictures and copy that makes your mouth water. Then set up a system with one touch ordering for the customer. Monetize with restaurant setup fees that would be waived for early adopters and a % of each order which is processed by yourself. This is just a start you still need to drive usage on the two fronts.

 

[LondonLife]

Some people are inherently hesitant to phone up and place orders. People don't like phones, don't like talking to strangers, and particuarly don't like phoning up someone who can't speak perfect english like alot of takeaway places. Many people also don't like giving credit card details over the phone, and some people don't carry cash to pay for deliveries on reciept.

Would your website offer a fully intergrated online ordering system for all takeaways that deliver to a certain postcode and allow people to pay using a credit card online?

If the above is true, I wouldn't write off this idea just yet as it's worked before and could work again.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[CommonCents]

An online/mobile biz could really help by letting consumers order ahead of time that plan on dining in the restaurant. I'm thinking millions of regular business lunch folks who might be on a tight schedule. Would be ripe for a mobile app as well. Restaurants would pay some good money if you were to help them with faster turnover especially during peak periods.

 

[JaysenK]

Building a good list of followers is going to be key to turning your idea into a revenue generator. You might consider starting a Blog on dining out to gauge interest and start building a good list of prospective customers.

Good luck!

 

[Melody]

That is a great concept however, there are already sites out there that do the exact same thing, some have taken it one step further and allow you to order online from restaurants in your area.

 

Dislike ads? Remove them and support the forum: Subscribe to Fastlane Insiders.

[EastWind]

Some people are inherently hesitant to phone up and place orders. People don't like phones, don't like talking to strangers, and particuarly don't like phoning up someone who can't speak perfect english like alot of takeaway places. Many people also don't like giving credit card details over the phone, and some people don't carry cash to pay for deliveries on reciept.

Would your website offer a fully intergrated online ordering system for all takeaways that deliver to a certain postcode and allow people to pay using a credit card online?

If the above is true, I wouldn't write off this idea just yet as it's worked before and could work again.

okay, so let's assume 500 people order from your site with their credit cards. how would you pay the restaurants? cash? or use your own company credit card? or will you convince the restaurants to sell to you with credit and you pay them perhaps every week? how will you pay? i wouldn't imagine you are going to be passing the credit card info to the restaurants...

delivery. - if you have one central business location. you can leave from that location, go deliver to a different location, come back to central location and repeat.

but if you are delivering from multiple location, you have to go to many locations, then deliver at many locations. what do you do if you need to get order from restaurant A,B, and C in this order and need to deliver to location D, E, F respectively? what if you get to A, to pick up the food which should be ready, but it is 5 minutes late? that will add 5 minutes to getting to B, C, D, E, F. if you get to B and it takes extra 2 minutes, C, D, E, F will be 7 minutes late. if you get to C on time, but going to D to deliver food from A, and run into a little traffic, 5 minute late? E, F will be 12 minutes late. Every little event cascades, because you are not leaving from one central location.

If you had a pizza place, you can schedule for the delivery person to pick A, B and C at the same time.

The problem is that going from one restaurant to another you end up with time you will not be able to control and you end up with maybe having to wait for the food. 2 uncertain time events.

I guess the problem could be solved by each restaurant having it's own delivery guy, but you need to be big. How much is he going to add on the price of the food? Say for a $10meal or $20meal. What will be your mark up? You will have to pay the delivery guy, and let's suppose he brings his own car, insurance, gas, then you have to pay him fairly.

It will be an interesting problem. But scaling it might be hard and the profit margin will be thin. The scaling involves the people, the more orders you take, the more drivers/cars, you need, the more HR you need to manage em. scaling people is terrible for fastlane.

Maybe a website, where cab drivers deliver. Each driver will have a GPS, and you can find the nearest cab driver to the place your package is, then connect that driver to pick up the package and deliver to the destination. LOL Might be able to use it for food and more things. lol.

 

[kwerner]

Newtothis - You asked for some constructive criticism, so here it goes...

You started with this premise:

I have came up with the website idea, and the only thing i cant figure out is how to go about making money from it.

However, that shouldn't be your focus, or at least how you should phrase your question.

A better way to approach this would be to say, "I've recently discovered a NEED in the food service / restaurant industry, where customers desire to have food from their favorite restaurants to be delivered to their homes; but many of these restaurants do not offer delivery service. I believe that I may be able to fulfill this need by creating a business that delivers the customer the food that they want, when they want it, and perhaps have them place their orders through a website, for convenience and ease. I would appreciate ideas / feedback on how to make this type of business work."

You could then expand on this question by taking BurnBright's suggestions:

You need to ask yourself more questions, better yet ask people that you think may use your service, restaurants and consumers what they would like. Provide a unique application to address these needs. Even great ideas need a market.

Remember, 1) focus on the right premise and 2) ask better questions and you'll get better answers.

:cheers: