After celebrating more than a year in operation, UberEats is fine-tuning to help improve its food delivery service. The company now has more than 40,000 restaurants signed on across 71 cities. With so many choices, UberEats is leveraging machine learning to now provide tailored recommendations, filtering, and order management, and it even lets you schedule your order.
There are days when you elect food delivery, but when you open up an app, you start to stress because you don’t know what you want to eat. Do you want a burger? Pizza? Chinese? Italian? Sushi? Taco? While UberEats isn’t psychic, it can try its hand at eliminating some choices. The company has updated the app so it’ll surface recommendations based on several things, such as where you frequent the most, restaurants that can deliver within 30 minutes, and popular establishments based on past orders and other location and time details. Thus you won’t have to scroll through an endless list of restaurants that may or may not be what you want.
When UberEats launched, it was limited in its categorization terms. The app was previously sorted by things like your “go-tos,” places with delivery times under 30 minutes, popularity, and cuisine. Now, Uber is expanding the capability to include criteria like speed, price, and dietary constraints.
On-demand food delivery services such as UberEats, Postmates, and Caviar all specialize in bringing your order within an hour — it’s an immediate response. But what happens if you’d like something to be delivered later on in the day, such as when you know your family will be home? Now UberEats is supporting scheduled orders, enabling those who like to plan ahead to do just that. The app lets you schedule anytime up to an hour before you want it delivered and as far as a week out.
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Other ways Uber wants to reduce the stress of ordering from your life including being able to customize where you want the food to be dropped off, being able to track your order from preparation to delivery (previously Uber only let you see the car coming and was a “hacked together experience” pulled from its main ride app), and no longer needing a mobile app to place an order — you can now order on the web through UberEats.com.
In the beginning, UberEats was quickly ramping up to reinforce Uber’s ability to handle other logistical issues besides human transport. Now that it has a good selection of restaurants partnering with it, the time is right to implement additional controls and features to enhance the experience so it’s more efficient and effective. The company has likely applied its learnings from shuttling people around to the food delivery service.
