> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement.
> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees.
This is a particularly egregious sleight of hand. It's a relatively easy click-through to write for DoorDash, and it would result in the customer getting exactly what they were looking for (instantly looking at Saddleback's menu options and probably ordering). But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash.
> DoorDash uses our brand name “Saddleback BBQ” right in the advertisement.
> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees.
Well isn't that plain fraud? (And no adding some * somewhere with a disclaimer doesn't make it not fraud. The point is that it intentionally misguides/tricks/manipulates the user with the intention of harming the given brand (by on-the-fly replacing it)).
EDIT(clarification): It's like going into a shop and asking for a specific samsung tv and the salesman goes and comes back with a philipps tv saying here is your tv, the price is .... Sure if you look clearly at it it's not the PC you asked for but if you are in a hurry or social insecure you might still end up buying it even through you didn't want to.
I dunno about fraud, but it certainly seems reasonable that it would be trademark infringement. The name "Saddleback BBQ" is Saddleback's trademark. If another company uses it to sell potential Saddleback customers (which these clearly are, since they searched for that name) products from a competitor, that seems like something a good trademark attorney would be interested in.
(The potential hitch here is that most restaurants are small businesses, and small businesses aren't great about doing things like registering their trademarks. But you can still build a claim even around an unregistered trademark under certain circumstances: https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/what-good-unregister...)
I don't know, it doesn't seem that unreasonable to me. Walmart is allowed to advertise it sells Levi jeans, even though it sells other brands than Levi.
If doordash didn't sell Saddleback food, i'd agree, but given that doordash distributes Saddleback products, seems reasonable to me they are allowed to advertise "buy Saddleback bbq here"
A trademark doesn't mean no one can use your name. You would need to prove that customers are being misled to purchase BBQ from another company thinking they are getting it from Saddleback BBQ. You can call out competitors, you can create an ad that says "4 out of 5 doctors prefer our BBQ to Saddleback BBQ" (assuming you've got the data to back it up).
What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting Saddleback BBQ.
It would be like mentioning a popular brand on your website in order to get the search engine traffic for that brand, even though you don't sell it.
I think you may be overstating the legal standard. I believe the bar is “creates confusion in the marketplace” rather than “misleading”. A customer clicking a link for $Restaurant and being taken to a page of competing restaurants may or may not be misleading but I definitely think its confusing. Every consumer who clicks that link expects $Restaurant’s page or a page dedicated to $Restaurant and doesn’t get it.
You're right in your first para, wrong in the rest.
You can't lawfully squat a brands trademarks, neither in SERPs, domain names, nor in real world signposts.
You can use trademarks for comparison but having a signpost - virtual or actual - that has another brand on it is tortuous infringement. Bait and switch is rightly unlawful.
Hmm, I've been using "tortuous" as the adjective for tort for probably a couple of decades and you're the first person to try to correct me. Clearly I'm using what Wiktionary classes as usage that's obsolete.
Interestingly googling around the principle usage -- to mean pertaining to a tort -- of this spelling is in UK Terms of Use. It's quite hard to search though as often people will talk about tortuous caselaw [1], meaning 'twisting and turning'. Both usages can be in the same document, so Google Search - in particular - is no good here.
Spelling "tortuous": I find supporting documents from the UK Home Office [3], the UK IPO (including in court proceedings for trademark), and in private practice references to UK tort law, eg [2] dated 2019.
I don't consider my usage to be wrong per se but will consider using tortious in international forums (I so wanted to write "fora", lol); thanks for the query, terse as it was.
It's possible we're all using it "incorrectly" of course. I work in the IP sector, we might all be drinking from the same fountain (eg perhaps reading past UK caselaw keeps us archaic).
If "tortuous" didn't already have a completely different useful meaning, I wouldn't object. Calling harmful behavior "tortious" shouldn't be ambiguous. I'm not sure what happened in olden times, but over the last decade "tortuous" has dominated because of clueless spellcheck.
It's just a slight misspelling. It should be "tortious" instead of "tortuous" [1]. Interestingly, my spell checker does not recognize the former, but it does the latter.
> What these companies are doing is definitely misleading but I don't think anyone is accidentally purchasing from Applebees thinking they were getting Saddleback BBQ.
That is exactly what is happening. Say Saddleback isn't open on Tuesdays. Boom, that visitor now sees a long list of BBQ joints to order from that can still be delivered. Since they are in the mood for BBQ clearly, they are going to order from Uncle Bucks BBQ instead.
I _really_ hope this results in real litigation, because even just this one example of screenshots of the flow, it is egregious false advertising and trademark infringement.
This should be open & shut huge fines for DoorDash, damages paid to this restaurant (and many others), and enforcement to prevent it from happening again.
People working for these companies and facilitating this should be ashamed of their employer and either quit or vocally demand changes internally.
It would depend on the terms of service. If it clearly outlines their self-serving goals when spending "your" advertising dollars, then it seems it falls back to the owners for signing into such an agreement.
It must be really difficult out there for so many minimal margin businesses to make such Faustian bargains. Then again, I never really understood how Groupon was able to do it either. Is the "restaurant owner" marketplace really that unsophisticated, or is it so bespoke that it's incredibly difficult for any one owner to fully do their diligence?
I think a closer analogy is a shop hanging a poster out front saying "Buy Samsung TV's here!" When you ask the shop keeper about the sign, they take you to the TV section where there is a huge philipps tv display says that the TVs are in here.
DoorDash isn't telling you that Applebees is Saddleback BBQ, they are just not making it as easy as they could to help you find what you are looking for.
Strongly disagree. Clicking on the link for Saddleback BBQ is effectively saying "take me to their ordering page" and I don't see how you could reasonably expect otherwise.
Fraud is hard to prove because you have to prove intent, but this at best incompetence, almost assuredly false advertising, and pretty clearly fraud although good luck proving it in court.
FWIW the measure of trademark infringement is balance of probability, as it's civil law. So that would probably be the best way to combat it. Damages are probably less.
I don't get this thread. The link is marked as an ad. How is it even remotely surprising that an ad spoke that is misleading? Yes, they're doing something wrong here, but the thing they're doing wrong is also standard industry practice--take out ads on every remotely related keyword for your own site that may or may not sell the specific product listed in the ad.
This is confusing because it goes against everything the marketing folks in previous jobs were always pushing on our front end engineering and SEO efforts. I'm more suspicious of landing page incompetence then you.
Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind.
The DoorDash approach seems very backward. If I saw that landing page I'd be inclined to think "wow, these people don't actually have Saddleback, let me check somewhere else." I'm not gonna get Applebees after googling a different particular restaurant.
> Our directives were always: If the user has showed intent for a specific thing, tailor the landing page towards that thing as much as possible, and get out of their way. Don't let them forget they already made up their mind.
That's if you're trying to sell them the thing they showed interest in.
Door Dash et al aren't trying to sell you Saddleback Barbecue, they're trying to get you onto their platform so they can sell you to advertisers. What you're interested in is just a way for them to manipulate you onto their platform.
Yes, but per the above post, what tends to work best is if you present people with the shortest path to what they want, and with up sell/retention opportunities either in that path or in follow up after successful conversion.
I guarantee you that a custom landing page for these campaigns would work out better for them.
That makes sense if the consumer is DoorDash's _only_ customer.
If Applebees is paying for some sort of marketing/relevance service, then all bets are off, and it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their opposing customers get screwed.
An alternate phrasing might be "it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their customers they optimize for." Giving preferred treatment to partners that are strategic or have higher margins is not screwing your other customers.
I do have issues with the misuse of the restaurant brands -- seems unethical to send me to Pizza Hut when I click on Dominoes.
I think it's what you're pinpointing in your last sentence that's the "screwing your other customers" part here. I don't have a problem with the concept of preferred treatment, but to me, that would be "if I search for a given category, put the preferred partners in that category first in the search results," but -- as you say -- a click for a specific restaurant should probably take you to the DoorDash page for that restaurant. At the very least it should take you to a search page that puts that result at the top.
> An alternate phrasing might be "it's up to DoorDash's leadership to choose which of their customers they optimize for." Giving preferred treatment to partners that are strategic or have higher margins is not screwing your other customers.
You're polishing a turd. Call it whatever you want, but if I'd prefer not to be a customer of a company who prioritizes competing interests over me.
Every business prioritizes competing interests over each other, at varying times. Amazon might be the closest to prioritizing customers uber alles, but that hasn't been a popular result on this board of late. Can you name a few companies you think do a good job of not prioritizing other interests over you?
Amazon is a terrible example of prioritizing customers--what part of selling counterfeits, putting sponsored products higher in search results, or retroactively deleting books off your Kindle serves users?
More friction will lead to dropoff. And, for the platform, it should matter -- they will have different margins depending on the deal, different levels of support, likelihood for the restaurant to churn, ad spend, all kinds of things to balance.
Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience.
One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. Google's blue button test doesn't matter to any product except that exact one. None of us can say, without seeing the results; our previous experience is not relevant.
EG, maybe a 10% conversion to order dropoff is OK if we can direct X% of users to an expensive restaurant. The 10% drop cost is offset by a 50% increase in order cost.
"Pushing the user into the "find a restaurant" model, after they want a specific one, gives the platform an opportunity to optimize for their needs. This may or may not be a positive for the customer, and it may or may not be enough of a lift for the platform to overcome the dropoff because of a poor landing page experience."
First, a custom landing page can both provide you with the restaurant and an option to search for more restaurants.
Secondly, if the goal was an optimized experience, why wouldn't they want that on their restaurant pages, even the ones that don't come in from search? There's a reason.
> One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable. One misconception I see about conversion optimization is that it's generalizable.
YMMV of course, but this one stretches credibility.
I don't think it stretches anything. The opposite -- that different websites, with interfaces that all vary subtly in a billion different ways, with different traffic sources, with different market positions, with different primary outcome goals -- are able to be compared? I would need to see quite a bit of specific evidence to believe that.
I've worked with brilliant conversion optimizers, in a single vertical niche where we had > 30 websites, each doing between 200K-2M visits/month. We would have loved to test + copy, but every time we ran this experiment, we found huge differences.
One subtle nuance is that "generalizable" needs to be more specific than "this change increased conversions". The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.
The Conversion industry tends to similar language as the complementary/alternative medicine space. "I did this thing, it had this outcome. I believe this happened because XYZ. It worked for me, it will work for you!" (People telling stories which may or may not be true.)
That is also why clinical trials for interventions is so important.
> The true goal of optimization is not the find the B that beats A; it's to find the global optimum.
FWIW, that's the goal of global optimization, a particual type of optimization, and one that rarely anybody on the market cares about wrt. business. Local optimization, "B beats A", is more frequently used, as usually all the business cares/can afford to care about is to find a C that beats B, if their competitors found the B that beats A.
Just because there are a billion possibilities with a billion traffic sources, different marketing positions, and you can do clinical trials and doesn't mean that providing someone the answer they expected and the possibility to search for other things beats just searching for things... which was what they were doing on the previous page.
If it was such a brilliant idea, DoorDash & GrubHub should change their sites so that links from their search results only take you back to their search page.
Not the best example since Dominos and Pizza Hut are both of equally terrible quality. If I searched for my favorite local pizza place and was sent to Pizza Hut, I would definitely go back. If I was searching for Dominos and got Pizza Hut, I'd probably assume Pizza Hut bought them out. I've had stuff like that happen before.
Of course it does. The most basic reason would be that since they take a percentage, door dash would prefer you purchase from a more expensive restaurant. But there are all kinds of other reasons, such as some restaurants spending more on advertising with the platform.
Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.
> Data says otherwise - plenty of e-commerce sites taking you to search, with the thing you saw just pinned at the top. I hate the pattern but it seems to result in higher engagement.
That's extremely different than the thing described here: "take you to a category page with something else entirely pinned at the top."
I think the discussion around Facebook and Russia opened a lot of eyes to how ads-based businesses can be exploited, and how the infrastructure they built directly lends to this phenomenon.
And yet, people still continue to use Facebook/Google/etc en masse. These companies are in the news what seems like every week, but the number of people who have left those platforms is negligible.
Because we are not all using the same brain. Many people have many opinions, and some people even sometimes act counter to their preferences based on the context! Wild stuff.
Your original comment implies that folks "slowly noticing" dark patterns is going to make some sort of difference in the grand scheme of things. I am arguing, based on my experience with humans, that it will not—and even if it could, that not enough people are paying attention for it to matter.
I don't think that's true. Or rather maybe it's in some sense the intent of some of their marketing people, but it's not the way it works in practice.
DoorDash and Grubhub make the overwhelming bulk of their revenue from simple fees on the deliveries made. They surely sell ads (and para-ads like list placement), but the eyeball value of my one visit is vanishingly small relative to the $70 I just spent on takeout. The scales are just totally different.
If they're not showing you the restaurant you followed a link for, it's not because of advertising. It's likely because they don't have a contract with that restaurant and still want to sell you a meal.
Now, that's not ethical. But it's not because of "advertising".
In this specific example, the restaurant does have a contract with the delivery service and they're still re-directing customers.
Advertising, or trying to redirect to other restaurants paying higher commissions are the only possible explanation (aside from incompetence of course, but if you believe that I've got a bridge to sell you).
They're trying to maximize revenue by double-dipping. They want the $70 food order and another $X because you viewed some ads.
While I don't think DoorDash cares too much about the advertising revenue, per se, I think what's going on here is roughly this:
- You search for a specific BBQ restaurant on Google.
- You see an advertisement for that restaurant! But it's actually DoorDash.
- You click on that ad, and DoorDash initiates a location-based search for BBQ restaurants, putting their preferred partners at the top of the result list.
DoorDash is happy if you order from any restaurant through them, but they're even happier if you order from a restaurant that they get more money from.
> DoorDash is happy if you order from any restaurant through them, but they're even happier if you order from a restaurant that they get more money from.
Is that that what they prioritize over having a functional app for customers, merchants and drivers alike, and proper development deployment that doesn't incur large blackout periods?
This is either dynamic keyword insertion in the ad copy or they did target a specific restaurant name but decided to use a more generic landing page. In my previous life doing more marketing oriented activities in the travel space, we found that even if someone was looking for a very specific hotel, if you dropped them on that page, it converted at a lower rate than dropping them into a search page for hotels in that location and "pinning" that hotel to the top of the page. The reason is that people may be more open to other similar options than you think. So in the case of Doordash, perhaps they have found a similar thing which is that you might have said McDonald's but net net more people will buy if you show them McDonalds, Wendy's, Burger King, Jack-in-Box, etc.
Also, showing all of the options may actually create more net value for Doordash since you're letting the customer know you have a wide breadth of options and this may create more long term loyalty.
So if someone was searching for Hilton would you drop them on a page with Motel 6 pinned at the top if they paid you some money? With Hilton nowhere on the page?
That's what's being claimed in the original comment here.
That's what feels like incompetence (or, more likely, a "targeted landing pages" project that just hasn't been very prioritized).
Yes, it's most likely that the ad that's matching is the generic one for "Lansing, MI BBQ" or something to that effect and therefore it's not pointing to a specific landing page. It may also be that Doordash has found that individual restaurant keywords that point to specific restaurant pages are just not profitable.
With how poor delivery services coverage in my area is, if I look for Saddleback and don't find it soon, I'm probably uninstalling because they won't have anything else I'm looking for. Might install again next year to see if it's better.
I had this happen with Hotels.com where they presented an 800 number for a hotel -- the person answering the call presented himself as the Hotel's registration desk. The entire time they are telling me this and that corporate discount code isnt available. Until I asked some key question and realized they were a 3rd party trying to book you at top-rates.
I NEVER use Hotels.com for this reason, it is meant to extract as much as possible and take away the pricing power from the hotel.
I run quite a lot of Google search ads. To the tune of multiples of hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. There's a small distinction I want to make here.
It is not only allowed, but common, to bid on the name of a competitor. What you can not do is use their name in their ads. If I had to guess what's going on here is that at the scale DoorDash is at they're almost certainly utilizing dynamic keyword insertion where it grabs your search query and inserts it into your ad text. This is probably just an oversight honestly. I highly doubt there's some advertisers menacingly rubbing their hands together and cackling as they type in "saddleback bbq" into the ad copy. This is probably just an oversight on Google's part tbh.
"Ads may use the trademark in ad text if they meet the following requirements:
"Resellers: The ad's landing page is primarily dedicated to selling (or clearly facilitating the sale of) products or services, components, replacement parts, or compatible products or services corresponding to the trademark. The landing page must clearly provide a way to purchase the products or services or display commercial information about them, such as rates or prices."
If I were a delivery service, I would argue that my business operates as a reseller of the restaurant's offerings and that my use of the trademark is permitted per this clause of the policy.
It doesn't seem to me it meets the requirement of the landing page being relevant to the trademark and making it easy to purchase/view information: the ad takes you to a page that puts Applebee's front and center, and you have to search again for the restaurant.
Hopefully it's a violation and can be fixed on Google's side, since I find that to be the worst part of all this.
I suspect as part of being on door dash the businesses agree they can use their trademarks.
Door dash seem to be very good at getting large chains onboard, I wonder if this is part of it. Most small restaurants last less than a year, with this kind of strategy door dash can show large chains a nice dashboard every year of how much in sales they redirected from a small restaurant to their chain.
I agree, this seems to be an automated form of clickbait. It's not necessarily malicious, but an increase in the arms race for clicks and purchases. It's been like this on Youtube for years.
I do think this is something that Google could be smarter about mitigating. In the longer term picture, higher conversion rates advertisers will spend more on Google AdWords budgets, so an ad that drives right to the restaurant people wanted should be a net win.
I think the larger problem here is that DoorDash & GrubHub are better positioned to pay a higher customer acquisition cost (better capitalized, higher margin businesses long term, and also more drive to create brand awareness in this moment), since they can convert for people who want alternatives to whatever they searched for, and on top of that they can more easily justify investing in tuning their marketing campaigns. So from Google's perspective, it may be hard to perceive a strategic advantage of fixing this.
What is surprising to me is that investing in tuning their marketing campaigns hasn't resulted in developing custom landing pages for those campaigns that, for example, might put people on a page for the restaurant in question (maybe with a sidebar for "looking for alternatives?"). That'd no doubt improve effective CPA for their campaigns.
> so an ad that drives right to the restaurant people wanted should be a net win.
a system that generates the maximum amount of monetizable events without frustrating the user or advertiser towards other platforms is the 'net win' from the ad platfrom perspective
> But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised!
This is one of the most depressing parts about working in tech for me. Basically no company is content with making a good product (for some definition of what that even means, that phrase itself is obviously subjective). Ideally a site/app is solving a real problem for their users, and they could make a simple, clear, and consistent interface that exposes that solution and trust the user to make the best use of it to address their need.
Unfortunately that never seems to be enough. Even for companies that I genuinely believe have good motives (trying to provide real value rather than trick people into buying snake oil), they also need to sell it. They track conversion metrics and then they need to optimize their flows, which inevitably makes things more complex and more obfuscated. Basically every PM or product-focused founder I've worked with is thinking about how to push the user to where they want them, rather than how to make things clear so the user can choose what they want to do. It's the behavioral economics idea of nudging run completely off the rails.
The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly. And your competitors are doing this stuff too, so they'll eat your lunch if you're not good at growth, marketing, and optimizing conversions. It's similar to how I've never encountered a product person who takes the spirit of things like GDPR seriously. It's do or die and if you try to do things like respect users' privacy on principle instead of do everything you can to optimize conversions, you'll lose.
I've come to accept that there doesn't seem to be any way around it, this is the cost we pay for the tech products we use (and, contrary to perhaps a lot of others on HN, I do really believe that a lot of these services are genuinely useful in my life, and it's still worth it to me to use them despite this sad reality).
>This is one of the most depressing parts about working in tech for me. Basically no company is content with making a good product (for some definition of what that even means, that phrase itself is obviously subjective). Ideally a site/app is solving a real problem for their users, and they could make a simple, clear, and consistent interface that exposes that solution and trust the user to make the best use of it to address their need.
Your post nailed it. It's become positively disgraceful.
The only thing I would add, is that it's not just "tech" companies doing this. Every medium-large corporation is looking to squeeze more revenue out of existing customers no matter the moral implications, and no-matter whether it's good for the customer.
> The thing is, it really works. So anybody not thinking this way is leaving money on the table by growing more slowly.
Someone will inevitably come along and claim this is how capitalism works, survival of the fittest, ruthlessly efficient markets, and all of that. Which, of course, is entirely reasonable if that "assume a perfect sphere on a frictionless plane alongside a perfectly rational actor" model of economics actually existed in the real world. It doesn't.
At the risk of sounding like I am moralizing, which I am but not in a negative or peacocking way, this is why I work to optimize my choices deliberately against financial gain and towards things like my community, my environment, and my society. I buy from companies that, best I can tell, pay their workers reasonably and act responsibly. I have walked away from projects at my employer--and, once, threatened to leave my employer (along with several of my coworkers) if my group insisted on proceeding down a path that it, happily, abandoned. I deliberately don't own a car, order from delivery services, or shop at Wal-Mart.
Why? Because while individual actions make a very little impact, setting the example for those actions gives others both the courage and the cover to take them alongside me. I can't sit idly by and wait for "the group" to do something, even to my own financial detriment[0]. Make no mistake, I work in tech like a lot of us on HN--though I am not a software developer so perhaps not as well off as many but still doing fantastically well compared to the most--so I am coming at this from a position of privilege and have a very long way to fall before I hit bottom.
Most of us do, which is why it is incumbent upon us to make decisions not solely in pursuit of money and to translate that into our businesses and, frankly, if the shareholders don't like it then they can say so while I'm converting my corporate format to a SPC.
0 - "Detriment" here meaning that I'm spending slightly more than I "should" if I optimized output solely for cost and making slightly less than I "should" if I optimized input solely for gains.
For those arguing in favor of this madness, think of how you'd feel if you typed in google.com in to your web browser or clicked on a Google link or selected a Google bookmark and instead of taking you to the google.com website the browser took you to a list of websites with Duck Duck Go at the top.
You could switch the sites two around, or substitute any other web sites and have the same problem.
Or how about if you try to vote Democrat and instead of registering your vote you are shown a list of non-Democratic candidates with Republicans at the top? Or vice versa..
If you're in favor of the one, you should be in favor of the other.
To argue in favor of this is to argue for less consumer choice and power.
The article says DoorDash charges restaurants an advertising fee. I would assume that includes a contractual agreement that allows DoorDash to use restaurant trademarks in their advertising.
Doordash lists every restaurant they deem worthy of delivery in a particular area - the restaurant doesn't have to be part of a contractual agreement with them. They call this OTT (Over the Top) where the courier orders the food like a normal patron and gets the food to the customer.
In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do. If they are not, I would think that there is an extremely strong legal case for copyright infringement, especially since Doordash is not even working to generate revenue for the restaurant, but redirecting you to a generic bbq restaurants page.
> Doordash lists every restaurant they deem worthy of delivery in a particular area - the restaurant doesn't have to be part of a contractual agreement with them.
Hm. If they're doing that, and using every restaurant's trademarked content in their ads without an agreement in place, I think that would be a problem legally.
> In this case, it doesn't really sound like the owner of the restaurant was on the Doordash platform. The blog post doesn't seem to clearly indicate that they do.
The post explicitly states that there is a contractual agreement:
"Our only recourse is to immediately terminate our contract with GrubHub and DoorDash, which we are considering doing."
> Hm. If they're doing that, and using every restaurant's trademarked content in their ads without an agreement in place, I think that would be a problem legally.
I'm not sure about that. How would non-authorized resellers work then? In the most absurd case, sellers on Ebay wouldn't be allowed to say what exactly they're selling. You would have to list something as "a watch" instead of "Casio G-Shock". Same goes for any used car lot, etc.
The primary cause here would be "trademark infringement", which requires "likelihood of confusion" in the marketplace [1]. Doordash isn't particularly causing confusion here. They do, in fact, sell Saddleback BBQ from Saddleback BBQ. The only source of confusion I can think of is that the link doesn't take you directly to Saddleback BBQ, but rather to a generic list of BBQ restaurants (which Saddleback BBQ is on).
> I don’t know how I feel about the ‘moral’ aspect of the practice
I'm not happy with it; their behavior is clearly not acting in good faith, even if on paper they have some contractual language that gives them a legal defense if challenged.
They can't, but most people don't know how to ask Google to take it down. Google makes the form challenging to find and implement. Without a rep it will also take a while.
I know when I try to use my competitors trademarks in my Google Adwords, Google rejects my ads every time. It's typical Google bullshit that DoorDash gets a free pass here.
It would not surprise me if "we can use your brand for advertising" is explicitly mentioned in the GrubHub/DoorDash contracts. I think the overall problem is that restaurants don't have much leverage; their main option is to refuse to cooperate.
Now the (gradually becoming less common) practice of auto-creating order pages for restaurants that didn't agree to be a partner, I would agree should be totally illegal, or at least needs a very large disclaimer that the restaurant is not involved.
I would guess the DoorDash contract that the restaurant signed explicitly gives DoorDash permission to do this. They even probably think it's a service, run Google ads for mom & pops so they don't have to.
The recourse is exactly what the author of the article is considering; cancel the DoorDash contract.
these vertically integrated proprietary institutions need to be broken up. they cause competition in the wrong way, by forcing restaurants to sign up for all of them, and juggle multiple, competing, non-compatible infrastructures. its a different kind of anti-trust that creates an arms race, the necessity to invest in all the oligopoly's participants or be left behind by those that do. its like a weird hostage situation, where multiple people can hold you hostage simultanious.y
the online menu needs to be separate from the pos that receives the order, the request for dispatch to the delivery driver should be another component, and the online marketing another, allowing the restaurant and delivery driver to mix and match. at a minimum the advertising+menu+order placement should be broken up from the on site order processing+delivery. And with regard to the roads, there shouldnt be a bitesquad, uber eats, grubhub, postmates, and doordash delivery driver waiting in the lobby at the same time all driving to the same neighborhood. theres obviously better ways to load balance and distribute the tasks, than by which company submitted the order.
Why not create your own Google ad for your restaurant and point it directly to your website. With doordash likely doing this for millions of restaurants, it can’t possibly cost more than a few cents per customer to outbid them.
> The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash.
I'm not sure I buy it. I work for one of the delivery companies, and small locally owned merchants give better margins and more profit compared to these giant chains who can negotiate really low commissions.
On top of that, you risk losing the customer because you have to keep them interested. They were literally looking to order food and you brought them back to the 'browsing around' stage. Is that actually a good idea? I'm not so sure.
> Possibly the most maddening thing is that if a customer clicks on the link, it does NOT take them to a webpage to order from Saddleback BBQ. It takes the user to a general page to order BBQ from anyone that serves BBQ. At the top of the list? Applebees.
This is a particularly egregious sleight of hand. It's a relatively easy click-through to write for DoorDash, and it would result in the customer getting exactly what they were looking for (instantly looking at Saddleback's menu options and probably ordering). But DoorDash isn't content with delivering what they promised! The customer must perform a secondary search within DoorDash just to find that same restaurant again, because Saddleback is nowhere within sight on the page they've actually landed on. It's sneaky because it seems like incompetence, but the reality is that they've absolutely done it on purpose so they can double-dip one customer and display ads to them from restaurants that paid more to DoorDash.