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发帖数: 1034 | 1 February 10, 2015 6:19 AM
Harrison Weber
Today Yelp announced it’s acquired Eat24, an online food ordering service
and long-time Yelp partner. The deal, which has already closed, is valued at
$134 million and amounts to $75 million in cash and 1.4 million shares of
common stock.
Founded in 2008, Eat24 competes with the GrubHub Seamless food ordering
monolith. Eat24’s 2013 deal with Yelp, where it added an ordering widget to
various restaurant pages, gave the service a fighting chance against larger
competitors. Following this deal, Yelp and Eat24 will only get closer. Yelp
chief Jeremy Stoppelman says he plans to further integrate with Eat24 to “
enhance our user experience [allowing] our large consumer audience to
transact directly with businesses.” In the same statement, Stoppelman
called online ordering “a key vertical for Yelp.”
Reached by VentureBeat, a Yelp spokesperson declined to share if it will
stop working with competing Yelp partner Delivery.com. Later, a separate
spokesperson said, “We expect our online booking and ordering partners to
continue as Platform Partners.”
This news means quite a bit for Yelp, which has largely sustained itself on
advertising, with mixed results. It’s noteworthy, however, that Yelp is in
no way giving up the ad business — in fact, it will apparently increase its
sales staff by 40 percent this year.
In other news, Eat24 only yesterday announced a deal with Sidecar — Sidecar
will power some of Eat24’s food deliveries in California.
Here’s what Yelp said about the Eat24 deal on its blog:
Eat24 joined the Yelp Platform as a transaction partner in 2013 and since
then we’ve been looking at them, well, the way they look at bacon. We
couldn’t resist any longer and I’m excited to announce that we have
officially brought them into the Yelp family!
For those of you who haven’t used the service, its mission is to keep you
from having to cook, shop, or wear pants. Eat24 is an online food ordering
app and website that covers about 20,000 restaurants across the country. As
a Yelp Platform partner, they’ve been a valuable driver of our growth in
the restaurant category while continuing to build an impressive business of
their own.
Online and mobile food ordering is still in its infancy and restaurant and
food searches are extremely popular on Yelp. We believe that the acquisition
of Eat24 will allow us to build a better, more seamless ordering experience
for consumers that we can grow through 2015 and beyond.
We are excited to welcome the Eat24 team to Yelp as we work on delivering
the best local search and transaction experience available to consumers and
great local businesses. |
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