New Tech Platform, vGrubs, Allows Restaurants to Streamline Delivery Services, Boost Revenue
Ask anyone who owns or manages a restaurant, and they’ll tell you: it can be a highly competitive market where it’s necessary to scrape and claw to earn every dollar you can while experiencing intense competition from all sides.
A helping hand is always appreciated and there’s a service called vGrubs that is helping restaurateurs rake in the cash. The restaurant tech platform combines cutting edge technology and innovation to assist with the management of home food delivery services proving to be a serious boost to any eatery’s bottom line.
Consolidating Delivery Apps in One Place
Ordering food from restaurants via delivery apps such as Uber Eats, DoorDash, and GrubHub has grown massively in recent years and the popularity of these food delivery services only continues to increase. Restaurants are finding it difficult to juggle multiple apps, which prompted vGrubs founder Mark Suleman to create the platform. Essentially, vGrubs combines all of the different delivery services that a restaurant might subscribe to into one single streamlined interface, as opposed to having them spread out amongst multiple platforms.
“We aggregate all of their services, such as Uber, DoorDash, and GrubHub, all into one tablet,” Suleman said.
However, that’s not all that vGrubs does.
A Food Marketplace to Promote Specific Menu Items
In a crowded restaurant marketplace, vGrubs also allows restaurants to essentially create virtual restaurants where they are able to advertise various dishes or styles of food that they might not be as well known for, leveling the playing field in terms of competition for orders.
“If an establishment is a pizzeria, people might not realize that they can also specialize in pasta or salad; with vGrubs, the owner of such a restaurant can multiply his own store by as much as three, four, five different brands that he can service,” Suleman explained. “So, what we do is we put one of our pre-existing brands into his restaurant – say a pasta brand or a salad brand –and when people search for pasta online, they’ll see a nice pasta brand that they’re familiar with that they’ll order from, and that order will go right to his kitchen.”
Suleman cited Long Island’s own Bagel Boss as a prime example of how this “restaurant-within-a-restaurant” ordering concept works.
“Obviously, Bagel Boss is well-known for their bagels, but they also have salads, Philly Cheesesteaks, omelets, and other things besides bagels,” he said. “So, we allow them to have separate restaurant listings for, say, pancakes or omelets and so on, so their bagel shop pretty much multiplies.”
This is done through vGrub’s series of well-known, pre-existing brands that run through a variety of food types, giving restaurants additional traction when it comes to attracting online orders.
Recapture Lost Revenue
Aside from aggregation and virtual restaurants, vGrubs offers one final service which Suleman referred to as the “Concierge,” which gives eatery owners the ability to recover otherwise lost funds from disputed or canceled orders.
“Sometimes people will order an item and then 10 minutes or an hour later they will dispute it, claiming they might be missing something or whatever, and these adjustments get taken out of the owner’s pocket,” he said.“All these $2, $3, $5 charges add up, and the restaurants that use our Concierge service can recover anywhere from $300 to $800 a month on their payouts.”
Suleman noted that this is achieved via a team of agents that constantly monitor vGrub restaurants; when they notice a cancellation or an adjustment to an order, the agents will automatically contact the delivery service in question – be it Uber, GrubHub, or others –and automatically recover the lost funds for the client in question.
“Unless you directly call Uber or DoorDash and spend sometimes an hour or more on the phone, they won’t refund you anything. There are no automatic refunds when it comes to delivery services,” Suleman said. “Obviously, restaurants can be very busy, and they don’t have time to spare constantly calling the services to recover their funds, so we handle it for them.”
Concierge is a 24/7 support system just one text away. Delivery tablet aggregation competitors take days, or sometimes weeks, to respond to technical issues, resulting in thousands of dollars of lost revenue. If something goes wrong with the vGrubs tablet, you can just shoot them a text and they’ll be with you within minutes.
A Trifecta of Services at a Great Price
With a trifecta of unique and innovative services making up the vGrub suite of offerings, Suleman said that utilizing his surfaces should be a no-brainer for any restaurant owner.
“Not only are you saving money by combining all of your tablets into one, and making money from all of the virtual restaurants, but you’re also recovering funds that would otherwise be lost as well,” he said.
Considering everything that you get when utilizing the platform, restaurant owners might be surprised to learn that vGrubs is incredibly affordable and will help to enhance their bottom line as opposed to detracting from it, Suleman said.
“Right now, it’s one month free, and after that it’s $129 a month,” he said. “In addition, we offer an unlimited trial of the service. Essentially, it’s free until they make money or recover enough of it to pay double the amount of the $129 fee. So, unless the restaurant makes money, we won’t charge them.”
At the end of the day, Suleman believes that vGrubs is a boon to the restaurant industry and said that he’s pleased and excited that he’s able to make it available to entrepreneurs working in such an incredibly competitive and stressful field.
“The feeling is great, obviously, especially since everyone wins in this equation,” he said. “The restaurant wins because they’re making more money, services like Uber make more money from us, and the customer’s happy because they have more variety in their ordering options. Plus, we demand quality from the restaurants we work with, so they work hard to keep up to make sure our brands are working properly. So again, it’s a win-win situation for everyone involved.”
To find out more about vGrubs, visit their website at www.vgrubs.com.
