Deliverect, a company that helps restaurants integrate delivery orders, now wants to bring them orders from Facebook and Instagram too.
On Wednesday, Deliverect announced it is acquiring ChatFood, a company that specializes in social media ordering. ChatFood integrates with Meta apps including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp to allow customers to place orders directly from a restaurant’s profile on those platforms. The deal will give restaurants that use Deliverect yet another source of orders.
“There’s a massive push on these social platforms,” said Deliverect CEO Zhong Xu in an interview. “Where your end customers are, that’s where you need to be.”
Deliverect works with about 41,000 restaurants around the world, about a third of which are in the U.S. Adding Dubai-based ChatFood will expand its restaurant base by about 2,000 locations.
Deliverect’s clients in Europe and Australia will get access to the new social ordering and payment product this month, while those in the U.S. and Canada can expect to see it in the third quarter.
It will enable them to add an ordering option to their Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp accounts. Customers will be able to place an order from there without leaving the app.
“As a guest, you don’t want to go to different places to place an order. You want to place an order exactly where you interact with the business,” said ChatFood CEO Ben Mouflard.
Mouflard co-founded the company in 2018 with CTO Vini Rodrigues. Both will remain aboard after the acquisition. ChatFood’s next step, Mouflard said, is to create integrations with other social media apps.
Deliverect is also adding another ChatFood feature, Order & Pay, which allows dine-in customers to order and pay digitally by scanning a QR code at their table.
These new options fit well with Deliverect’s core software, which consolidates orders from a restaurant’s various digital channels into a single stream that goes directly to the POS. It also offers online ordering and kitchen display systems.
Terms of the deal were not disclosed.
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