How to Prevent Delivery App Outages from Costing You Thousands - QSR Magazine

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

Looking at data from more than 30,000 restaurants, Delaget calculated that the average restaurant is offline 3.5 hours per month, and each hour of downtime results in $24 in lost revenue. That might seem relatively small, but it adds up when multiplied by the number of restaurants in a group.

Also, this is an average—there are a smaller number of poor-performing restaurants skewing that data. Among that subset, the average skyrockets to 58 hours of downtime per month—$1,392 in lost monthly sales, nearly $17,000 per year—and that’s per restaurant! So an operator of 10 restaurants could be facing $170,000 in losses, just from delivery app outages.

There are four major categories of outage. In each case underlying causes must be addressed, or it will happen again. Here is what we learned about outages, plus tips on how to address or prevent these problems.

Taking action on outages

Fortunately, none of these issues are irreversible. Some can be resolved by building in a few common-sense steps to daily routines, while others might take a more holistic approach to operations. Here are few approaches:

Delivery channels are a major source of revenue growth for restaurants and a way for customers to enjoy their favorite food when and where they want. With a few simple steps and a focus on excellent performance, owners and franchisees can drop downtime and make sure they are switched on for success.

Rachel Auer leads product marketing at Delaget, a leading restaurant platform. She writes about delivery app optimization, loss detection, and franchisee reporting.