Yandex.Food has introduced a fee for delivery of orders

All orders in the Yandex.Food service will become paid for buyers in Moscow from February 1, found out RBC . Prior to this, the service charged a fee of 99 rubles only for orders less than 500 rubles. The main competitor, owned by Mail.Ru Group Delivery Club, is not going to introduce paid delivery.

More. A service representative confirmed that the company is introducing a fee for all orders. The cost of delivery will be from 39 rubles and will depend on the category of the restaurant, the distance from it to the client, the level of demand and the number of available couriers.

• The service has already begun to warn about the innovations of its partners, a source in one of the companies cooperating with Yandex.Food told the publication. At the same time, the decision was made unilaterally, it was not discussed with key partners, says Anton Krasulin, general director of the Vocker noodle chain.
• Maxim Firsov, CEO of Yandex.Food, called the innovation "a necessary step in the long-term development of business" and noted that "high speed and reliability of delivery stimulate more frequent use of the service, which in turn develops the market."

Reaction. The main competitor of the service, Delivery Club (owned by Mail.Ru), does not yet plan to introduce a fee for all orders, Ruslan Gafurov, managing partner of the company, told RBC. Now they charge only for the delivery of orders from KFC (99 rubles).

• The introduction of paid delivery may reduce the number of orders and provoke a flow of customers to the Delivery Club, Anton Krasulin, general director of the Vokker noodle chain, believes.
• We can expect a decline in the number of completed orders in the next one to two months, but then demand will recover and the company's growth will continue "with a much more attractive economy," says Vahan Kerobyan, founder of Menu Group, a food delivery service in Armenia, Georgia and Belarus.

Context. The food delivery service appeared at Yandex after the merger of Yandex.Taxi with the Russian Uber in 2017. At the end of 2017, the company bought Foodfox, one of the largest delivery services in Russia, for 600 million rubles and launched a separate Yandex.Food service.

• According to Yandex.Food , from December 2017 to December 2018, the number of orders on the platform increased 10 times and reached 1 million.
• A similar service Uber Eats is the fastest growing division of the American Uber: in the third quarter of 2018, the number of orders in Uber Eats doubled , the service's quarterly revenue reached $2 billion.
• In preparation for the Uber IPO, the food delivery service was valued at $20 billion (all of Uber at $120 billion).

Liana Faizova