e–resistable: Why did no–one think of this before

In the interests of full disclosure I’m writing this now as apparently I can get some free food by doing so. It’s something I’d have written about eventually anyway, but given my backlog of blogging topics it might have been years.

Anyway,

e-resistible online takeaways is a simple concept. You visit the website. You tell them where you live. You tell them the sort of food you want. They they give you a list of all participating stores for which you are in the delivery radius. You pick one, look at the menu, choose what you want and then either pay them by card or arrange to pay the delivery guy on the door. There are even special offers, though to be fair generally not as many as if you get a promotional menu from the place itself.

But it’s so damn simple. Even if it ends up costing you a few quid more it’s worth it when ordering for a bunch of people as you can keep track of what the hell you’re buying and it’s not down to the poor sod phoning it through to try and remember. Obviously the level and speed of service depends on the place you’re ordering from, e-resistible are just a sort of middle-man service. They do encourage you to review the outlets and let them know delivery speed, food quality, etc.

I find myself wondering how they work. Do they have arrangements with individual restaurants, or do they just take your details then phone the order through for you? They have 8 places in Coventry, which is enough, extrapolated country-wide, that it seems unlikely to be the former. But if it’s the latter they’d have lots more.

Why I find this fascinating, is that I used to work for any question answered text messaging service Texperts, responding to customer questions. And you could guarantee that at around 11pm-midnight there’d be a ton of people asking for an open pizza place or chinese takeout that delivered. And those questions were really hard to answer. e-resistible would have been awesome for research back then. And oftentimes customers would ask us to order for them, which we weren’t allowed to do. It’s weird that it’s taken the internet this long to do something people have been after for years. And people laughed when they first announced you could order real-world pizza in Everquest…

Where it’s most useful though is if you’re away from home, or have just moved somewhere new, and don’t know any decent take-out places. I am kind of surprised though that, despite ordering multiple times from a nice Indian place, they’ve never put a menu in with my food to try and convert me to a ‘regular’ customer. I wonder if there’s some rule against it.

Well there you go, worth a try next time you fancy takeout and don’t know where from. Given what I saw at Texperts, that applies to a lot of people!

Dean Love : 03 Feb 2010 23:04 |  Comments (2) |  Report a problem