What You Need to Know About the GrubHub Website Controversy

nymag.com / July 1, 2019

For many better-off residents of cities like New York, GrubHub is a service so integrated into their lives that they don’t even necessarily think about it. You can imagine the conversations about life before the app: “You mean you used to have to call the restaurants?” GrubHub, ostensibly, is a boon for restaurants, which get marketed through the platform, get an increased online presence, and expand their delivery reach. But, according to a report in the New Food Economy, GrubHub and its subsidiary Seamless are, in effect, competing with its clients and finding sketchy ways to drive up its own profits by registering tens of thousands of domain names that appear to be owned by restaurant. Here’s everything you need to know about the report.

The company has registered a lot of fake websites.
GrubHub has registered either a bit more than 23,000 websites, according to the New Food Economy, or 34,000 over the last nine years, per the New York Post’s report. The last domain GrubHub registered was in May, when the Post detailed the company’s practice of creating phone numbers for restaurants in order to drive up its own sales.

Customers are effectively tricked out going straight to the restaurant.
These GrubHub websites are masquerading as ones operated by the actual businesses. As the Post reports, the fake sites use the restaurants’ logos and you have to scroll to the bottom of page (when you’re trying to get food as lazily as possible) to find a GrubHub Holdings copyright.

GrubHub actually makes more off sales made through these fake websites and numbers.
As Stacy Mitchell of the Institute for Local Self Reliance tells the New Food Economy, the fake websites are “predatory.” The phone numbers displayed on these websites aren’t the actual numbers of the restaurants but ones listed in GrubHub’s app. The calls are forwarded to the restaurant, and, GrubHub executives said at New York City Hall last week, the platform gets a commission from 3 to 15 percent on every order made this way. When a customer calls a restaurant directly, GrubHub does not get a commission.

MORE: http://www.grubstreet.com/2019/07/everything-you-need-to-know-about-grubhubs-fake-websites.html?fbclid=IwAR1b7WmsYAo4mFgb1ntarT0eUHzVIstHw9x8gGuBMY59hFtdGfYjjldR6ic