Toby Waite, Director of Engineering, Restaurants, also contributed to this post.
Following last year’s announcement of our partnership with Grubhub, we’re excited to share that, starting today, users will be able to access Grubhub’s food ordering businesses directly through Yelp.
The partnership will bring thousands of additional restaurants to Yelp, providing users more food ordering options while also giving Grubhub’s restaurant partners access to new potential diners and the opportunity for increased orders. By tapping into Grubhub’s enormous restaurant network, Yelp now offers users the largest and best selection of restaurants across the country.
The offering is currently available to mobile app users on iOS and Android and will be available on desktop and mobile web in the coming weeks.
From left to right: ordering delivery on Yelp, fulfilled by Grubhub
As we continue to provide more options and ease-of-ordering to users, we’re also carefully engineering new product experiences to make it even easier to find, order, and transact with businesses who offer food delivery and takeout.
To accompany the inventory on Yelp, we’ve introduced new ways to highlight and feature the best of food ordering. Over the past few months, we’ve been experimenting with a new mobile Delivery tab where users can find the very best of local food delivery and takeout. We help surface the most useful food ordering information, paired with the millions of photos and reviews on Yelp to help consumers find the very best available options. Keep an eye on this new Delivery tab as we continue to improve and refine food ordering experiences on Yelp.
Technically speaking, it’s hard to create a unique, intuitive ordering experience. To ensure that we’re delivering on this, we’ve worked closely with Grubhub’s team to offer an efficient ordering process from start to finish.
To start, we built a native ordering platform to increase the speed of starting an order by 7x. We’ve also built an innovative transaction model using shared tokens through Braintree technology, giving us the power to facilitate payments on Yelp while all transaction information is managed by GrubHub.
We’re also using a blend of contextual information analysis and machine learning to integrate Yelp’s enormous stores of photo and review content with GrubHub photos and menu data — a complex and intensive process.
Lastly, we are enhancing search results and ranking by ingesting data from GrubHub to present users with the best available results. By using data from the largest delivery partner, the user search experience will be better than ever.
