Staring a local delivery service during COVID-19 crisis

Dear Users and Friends:

Hope everyone is staying safe during this COVID-19 crisis.

I wanted to share few thoughts and resources with you if you are looking to start a delivery service in your area to serve affected local businesses and also help people in the process.

1. Restaurant delivery (It’s not done yet!)

2. Small Businesses (Small business deliveries) 

3. Grocery Delivery (Needs are increasing everyday)

Restaurant Delivery: Start a restaurant centric delivery company. Charge commission free delivery fees. There are too many ways for restaurants to take online orders these days, but not many ways to deliver. 

We have partnerships/integrations in place with most of the online ordering platforms to bring orders in our dispatch system including ChowNow, Gloria Food, Grubhub and others. Here is a detail resource guide for you to consider: https://www.questtag.com/covid-19

Small Business Delivery: You can use our existing online order forms or create custom Google forms for businesses to send you their delivery orders. We are in the process of implementing payment for US and Canada based customers on order forms so that you can charge credit cards too during the order placement. The orders will come to your dispatch and you can run your delivery operations from there. 

Grocery Delivery: This will be a new business opportunity for many during this crisis to get grocery or farm items delivered to home. You can create your own ordering site with Shopify or other platforms, or use our existing forms or google forms for your local grocery store to send you orders. 

You can then manage everything from QuestTag dispatch dashboard and Driver App.

But please remember to practice safety best practices such as contact-less delivery and others measures if you choose to do it now. 

If you are interested to discuss more, please send us a quick note: info@questtag.com

COVID-19 Restaurant Survival Guide

Is your restaurant affected by the coronavirus shutdown and losing sales everyday?

You don’t have to shutdown or rely completely on third party services like GrubHub or DoorDash.

There is an alternate way. You can set up your own online ordering and delivery system. There are softwares (mostly from start ups) available with commission free affordable pricing.

In this way, you don’t have to loose out 25-30% commission on each sales, which can add up to thousands of dollars per month.

Imagine setting up your own Grubhub or DoorDash like system so that your regular customers can order online. There are two parts to it:

• 1. Take orders and payment on the website. There are many options in the market which are very easy to set up. Some are as follows:

  • ChowNow

  • GloriaFood

  • CloudWaitress

  • MenuDrive

  • UpMenu

• 2. Delivery dispatch system to manage deliveries. Like having your own Uber like system which also shows delivery ETA to customers. There are few software options available in the market for that too.

  • GetSwift

  • QuestTag

  • Onfleet

  • Tookan

Every time a delivery order comes in, it goes to the dispatch system and then to drivers automatically. Drivers will have an App and they will get orders like DoorDash or Uber. Once they accept and start, it will send order tracking and ETA inforomation to customers with SMS and email.

It’s not 100% plug and play, may be a little bit of set up involved. But it does not take more than 2-3 hours to get things set up and get it going. That’s not too bad given the alternatives now.

We believe it is defiantly better if you can keep deliveries in-house, especially at this time of coronavirus epidemic.

It also helps to keep your restaurant staffs employed by doing delivery jobs.

It’s a difficult time for restaurants but we think this crisis will make restaurants stronger on the other side in terms of being less reliant on third party delivery services and take control of their online business.

Route planning for meal deliveries

If you have a weekly meal delivery business, you must be thinking how do I do these deliveries in an efficient manner.

You are rightfully worried - it’s not easy! After all delivering 50-60 locations on a single day is no joke.

To put things in perspective, a UPS driver would do about 120 -180 deliveries per day in a well defined dense route. So, doing 50-60 random locations few days a week is challenging and may take long time if you don’t carefully plan it.

So, here are some of our tips to plan your routes efficiently:

• Divide and conquer: Don’t make a big route. Make 4-5 hour long routes. You can do one in the morning and another one in the afternoon. You can assign each customers to either morning and afternoon route to keep things easy.

• Cluster first, route second: That’s actually a legitimate mathematical concept to solve multiple routing problems. First, put the addresses on a map and visually identify clusters of addresses. It’s easy to do it on the map than looking at addresses.

You can try QuestTag dispatch to find these clusters visually:

• Create the optimal route: For each cluster of addresses, create the optimal route - i.e. the sequence of delivery stops that gives you the shortest distance and time. For that you can use many routing tools. At QuestTag, we offer a free tool that allows you to find the the optimal route with up to 20 stops. Here is the link, check it out.

• Send ETA to customers: Once the route is created and assigned to a driver to start, you can then send ETA to the customers on the route. Letting them know when your delivery is coming. You can offer a 30 mins window for delivery.

  It’s better to send a live delivery tracking page with updated ETA and a way to contact the driver incase customers want to change the time.

With right tools in place, it’s easy to manage your delivery routes in an efficient and customer friendly way.

Remember a bad delivery experience can ruin the taste of your meal.

GloriaFood Integration

Today we are very excited to announce our partnership with GloriaFood, one of the leaders which have created a global online ordering system platform.

We have been working with GloriaFood for last few months now to create a very easy integration process with our dispatch platform.

Once connected, any order placed on your GloriaFood ordering page will be automatically entered to QuestTag dispatch system to manage and track your deliveries.

With GloriaFood and QuestTag integration, restaurants can now easily create and mange their own system to get online orders and manage deliveries without any third party marketing companies and their hefty commissions and fees.

Here is how the integration works:

1.Open a QuestTag account by signing up here:

https://dispatch.questtag.com/signUp

2.Once you log in to QuestTag account, go under “My Account” from the Menu.

Under “My Account”, you will see “API Key” and a “show” button​

3. This will ask for Password to show the API key, Please enter you QuestTag account password

Once you enter the Password, you will see this long

alpha-numeric text. Copy to a text file, Save the API Key​

After the integration is complete, the order information will automatically come in to QuestTag Dispatch Dashboard. See how it works:

It is very easy to do and no coding needed at all.

We think this integration will give power back to the restaurant owners to control their destiny with the online orders.

By having a system of their own, restaurants can increase profitability (no more cuts to third party services), and get to know their online customers.