Increasingly, restaurant technology companies are looking to take on a greater share of total restaurant orders. DoorDash, for its part, announced Tuesday (March 1) that it is set to acquire restaurant ordering and payment technology provider Bbot, aiming to leverage the company’s solutions both to improve its online channels and to power in-store ordering and payments.
Related news: DoorDash Buying Contactless Ordering Firm Bbot
“We’re excited to bring our combined suite to an even wider selection of merchants across the hospitality space — including bars, hotels, and ghost kitchens — so these businesses can engage with more customers, increase their quality of service, and grow sales,” DoorDash Chief Revenue Officer Tom Pickett said in a statement. “Bbot has built best-in-class features and highly customizable tools that will enable DoorDash to better support the ever-growing range of merchant needs.”
Research from the December 2021 edition of PYMNTS’ Digital Divide report, The Digital Divide: Delivery Service Aggregators And The Digital Shift, created in collaboration with Paytronix, which drew from the results of a census-balanced survey of more than 2,500 United States consumers conducted in late October, found that 42% of all consumers had used an aggregator in the previous 18 months, and of those, 54% had used DoorDash.
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Still, the share of consumers who have used DoorDash, a little over 1 in 5, remains well behind the total population of restaurant customers. Findings from the January edition of the report, The Digital Divide: Minding The Loyalty Gap, which showcased the results of a survey of a census-balanced panel of over 2,400 U.S. adults, found that more than two-thirds of consumers order from at least one type of restaurant at least once a month.
Read more: Restaurants Compete to Make Loyalty Programs Stand Out as Consumers Join Multiple Programs
As such, by utilizing Bbot’s technology for in-store orders, DoorDash could significantly grow the number of total transactions in which it has a hand.
“The expectation for consumers has completely changed, where they expect their phones to be more powerful than their restaurants …. and I think that trend will only keep growing as people expect more out of their digital tools,” Bbot CEO Steve Simoni told PYMNTS in an interview in November.
See also: Growth of Ghost Kitchens Threatened by Outdated Digital Payment Tech
The news comes days after New York City-based B2B Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) restaurant technology company Olo shared two major steps in its plan to achieve “digital entirety.” On Wednesday (Feb. 22), the company announced the launch of its Olo Pay payment solution as well as the acquisition of restaurant technology provider Omnivore with an eye towards increasing its on-premises capabilities.
“We’re excited about that pulling us into this on-premise opportunity and … [improve] our ability to touch, add value to, and derive revenue from every restaurant order, not just the off-premises orders,” Olo CEO Noah Glass told PYMNTS in an interview Thursday (Feb. 23).
See also: Olo CEO: Removing Payment Friction Equips Restaurants to Compete With Aggregators