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A Kansas restauranteur was able to make some dough placing orders at his own pizzeria through the food delivery app DoorDash, according to a report. The owner of AJ’s NY Pizzeria said he only learned that his business was on the delivery app after receiving complaints about orders, according to strategist Ranjan Roy, a friend …
A Kansas restauranteur was able to make some dough placing orders at his own pizzeria through the food delivery app DoorDash, according to a report.
The owner of AJ’s NY Pizzeria said he only learned that his business was on the delivery app after receiving complaints about orders, according to strategist Ranjan Roy, a friend of the restaurant owner, who blogged about it.
“He had never spoken with anyone from Doordash and after years of resisting the siren song of delivery revenue, certainly did not want to be listed,” Roy wrote in his blog post, “DoorDash and Pizza Arbitrage.”
Roy said the owner was getting bad Yelp reviews because of the delivery drivers and the app wasn’t selling his pizzas at the correct rate.
“He was frustrated that customers were seeing incorrectly low prices,” he wrote. “A pizza that he charged $24 for was listed as $16 by Doordash.”
Roy said it was unclear at the time whether the app had been offering the discounted prices by mistake or for customer acquisition purposes.
But the pizza shop owner saw an opportunity to make money off of DoorDash and ordered some pies to a friend’s house to test it out.
“If someone could pay Doordash $16 a pizza, and Doordash would pay his restaurant $24 a pizza, then he should clearly just order pizzas himself via Doordash, all day long,” Roy said. “You’d net a clean $8 profit per pizza.”
It was only later that the owner learned that his restaurant had been placed on the app in an attempt to gauge customer demand.
“They have a test period where they scrape the restaurant’s website and don’t charge any fees to anyone, so they can ideally go to the restaurant with positive order data to then get the restaurant signed on to the platform,” Roy wrote.
DoorDash did not respond to request for comment, BBC reported.
