Including fees, another restaurant was sending the delivery company an average of $15,000 a month - all while using technology that regularly malfunctions. 'If I stop using them, tomorrow I close the door,' one restaurateur told Tribeca Citizen. Still, the restaurant told Tribeca Citizen it only broke even on delivery due to the higher commission and stayed on for the marketing.ĭespite the cost, restaurants feel they need to be on Seamless - a part of GrubHub, which also owns MenuPages and AllMenus - in order to get delivery business at all. But once they went up to a 30 percent commission, the restaurant started getting ten times more orders, even though they still didn't show up on the first page of search results. One operator claims that with a 15 percent commission, customers said they struggled to find the restaurant on Seamless. Placement makes a dramatic difference, too.

Restaurants can choose how much commission they pay Seamless, starting at 12.5 percent, and the more commission paid, the better placement the restaurant gets, Tribeca Citizen reports. It's no secret that restaurants end up paying a lot of money to be on the site - one restaurant in Greenpoint recently told Eater that GrubHub commission costs three times more than his rent - but the Tribeca Citizen spoke with 15 anonymous restaurateurs who said that the system is deep and unfriendly to restaurants, all without telling users why certain restaurants pop up first.

The corporate entity that is GrubHub/Seamless is raking in big cash from restaurants for better search placement, with some paying a more than 30 percent commission on orders for upgrades, according to a new report from Tribeca Citizen.

Seamless greenpoint