Skift Take
Don't want to store your credit card info directly on Grubhub? Don't have a PayPal account? The company's got an answer for that.
— Erika Adams
Grubhub is partnering with Venmo to give users the option to pay for their delivery through the company’s suite of apps. The new partnership lets users pay for their order either with a Venmo-linked credit or debit card, or using any available Venmo account balance. (Some Grubhub users may have already seen the Venmo payment option for some time; the company tested the option ahead of today’s nationwide rollout.) The Venmo integration also gives users an option to split the bill.
“More than 60 percent of our orders are placed on mobile devices, so we always look for ways to make it easier for diners to find, order and pay for the food they want, when and where they want it,” Sam Hall, chief product officer of Grubhub, said in a statement.
The partnership will potentially help with integrating new users on Grubhub’s platforms. The company is coming off of a splashy acquisition of Yelp’s Eat24 last fall and an exclusive delivery partnership with Yum Brands announced in February, both of which will support Grubhub’s goal of breaking into at least 100 new markets this year.
Now, the pressure is on to start proving real returns on those bets. The Eat24 acquisition boosted Grubhub’s customer base by approximately 4 million, but those users have yet to latch on to Grubhub’s platform with the same frequency and voracity as Grubhub’s core user base. Likewise, the Yum Brands partnership (providing exclusive delivery for KFC and Taco Bell nationwide) is a big win for Grubhub in the second and third tier markets especially.
User integration is not the same animal in Owensboro, Kentucky, as it is Boston, Massachusetts, and the Venmo partnership is perhaps a small perk for new users who may be wary about storing their credit card info in yet another individual app. At the end of the day, this is an incremental move forward when the overall focus is on Grubhub’s ability to offer the most amount of delivery options from the most amount restaurants to the most amount of people — with the lowest delivery rates — in any given market. The Venmo partnership is a small building block in that larger picture.
