Yelp’s Eat24 Acquisition Could Bring Online Ordering to 1 Million Restaurants

Yelp acquired the online food ordering application Eat24 this week because, why not put a ring on it?

OK, this is actually a huge deal. Full Eat24 integration will drastically improve the quality of the Yelp platform, which is somewhat janky on its best day. Yelp has been trying to offer services to connect businesses with their customers while creating higher engagement on their own website-application.

Yelp partnered with Eat24 in 2013 and has been attempting to seamlessly host their ordering application, but execution has been a little less than reliable. Acquiring Eat24 at the bargain price of $134 million will allow Yelp to focus on other service integration like scheduling doctor’s appointments.

Now Eat24 will have unfettered access to over 1 million restaurants in Yelp’s database, vastly outshining online ordering giant GrubHub Inc.’s 30,000+ restaurant inclusion and Eat24’s current base of about 20,000 restaurants. While it will still be the restaurants’ choice to use delivery-pickup features directly through Yelp, and they may already be using GrubHub or a smaller company like Caviar, it makes more sense for them to be on as many platforms as possible.

Yelp’s status in modern restaurant discovery will drive people to inflate Eat24’s status (which will likely be absorbed into Yelp’s powerful branding) and allow an industry standard to rise out of the dense food ordering-delivery market.

Finally.

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