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The perfect delivery starts with the right incentives.
Three-sided marketplaces like food delivery have a lot of moving pieces. Food delivery platforms use Village to drive merchant & courier uptime, on-time deliveries, and retention.
The best way to keep restaurant & delivery partners on task & on platform.
Stay online, stay on time
Village's programmatic rules engine lets you easily create and distribute monetary and non-monetary incentives to keep restaurants and couriers online and on-time.
Cut through the noise
Multiple delivery apps, in restaurant orders, staffing challenges can become overwhelming. Village real-time incentives delivery communicates benefits at the right time to drive the right actions.
Increase merchant LTV
Churn is a huge cost. Easily deploy long-term structures like revenue share, quarterly payouts, or top-restaurant loyalty programs to drive restaurant and courier LTV.
Create a real partnership
Merchants and couriers are running businesses too. Provide opportunities to boost earnings through affiliate programs, revenue share or in-app placement boosts.
Sample Incentives Programs
Make your platform a restaurant's priority.
The problems
- Delivery apps aren’t always a restaurant's top priority, especially during busy times.
- It can be tricky to get restaurants to accept and have orders ready on time.
- It's difficult to create a shared sense of partnership and loyalty.
- There are high support costs, manual overhead, and operations challenges.
The solutions
- Automated recurring incentives make it more rewarding for restaurants to be online and fulfilling orders when it matters.
- Not all restaurants are alike: target highly specific behavioral changes for different cohorts.
- Village Benefits make restaurants engaged and loyal platform advocates.
- Increase revenue, on-time deliveries and reduce churn.
The implementation details
Online Bonuses
Purpose: Reward restaurants for being online and accepting orders during peak hours.
Time to set up: 5 minutes
- Create Incentive Rules within your Village dashboard that reward Restaurants being online and accepting orders during peak hours. You can make these recurring.
- Choose any conditions you want to apply to these rules. eg. You don’t just want restaurants fulfilling orders, you need them to be ready when couriers arrive.
- Choose which restaurants you want these rules to apply to. SMBs might have different behavior than larger chains.
- Choose your Awards (cash or non-monetary) and put them live. A mixture of cash and non-monetary awards are best.
- Village automates the rest. You can review data and iterate from here.
Non-Monetary Quality Incentives
Purpose: Managing performance at scale at every step from ordering to eating.
Time to set up: 30 minutes
- A lot can go wrong between an order and a full belly, and managing performance at scale can be difficult. These structures can be set up in minutes.
- Set which actions are most valuable to you - being ready when couriers arrive, having photos on menu items, getting good reviews - and configure automated incentive rules that reward these behaviors with Restaurant Points.
- These points can be used to redeem in-kind benefits like more prominent placement in-app, in-app status medallions, or other benefits.
Elite Restaurant Program
Purpose: Create a sense of partnership and loyalty with restaurant partners.
Time to set up: 2 hours
- This structure works to create a sense of partnership and loyalty with restaurant partners. It takes 30 mins to set up in your Village Dashboard.
- Map out 5-10 actions that signify a healthy relationship (set up test cohorts within Village if you want to experiment).
- When a Restaurant completes an action, they’ll automatically receive a non-monetary award in their wallet (in this case, called ‘XP Points’). The wallet can be embedded in your existing UI or white labeled with your platform’s branding.
- Assign ongoing rewards (called ‘Benefits’) for each tier. In this case, Top Restaurants get a badge that qualifies them for better in-app placement to increase their revenues, while Elite Restaurants receive a share of a monthly Elite Restaurant payout pool.
- When Restaurants fulfill less orders in a given period, they lose accrued XP points and risk losing their benefits.
It's Sunday night and delivery times are ballooning.
The problems
- Not enough couriers are on the platform at the right times.
- Sometimes spikes in demand are predictable, sometimes they aren’t.
- Scheduling peak-hour incentives requires a lot of overhead.
- Churn can mean your best couriers leave the platform.
The solutions
- Village Incentives automate recurring peak hour incentives in particular markets.
- Deploy and push additional Incentives in real-time as needed.
- Longer-term Incentives and Benefits structures reduce courier churn.
- Cut overhead costs and boost revenue.
The implementation details
Recurring Weekly Incentives
Purpose: Educate couriers about the best times to earn and create habitual behavior.
Time to set up: 5 minutes
- Create Incentive Rules within your Village dashboard that reward couriers being online and doing more deliveries during peak hours. You can make these recurring.
- Choose any conditions you want to apply to these rules. eg. You want couriers to be both online and doing a minimum number of deliveries.
- Choose any Cohorts you want these rules to apply to (maybe it’s only for couriers who aren’t normally online at these hours).
- Choose your Awards (cash or non-monetary) and put them live.
- Village automates the rest. You can review data and iterate from here.
Real-Time Incentives
Purpose: Bring couriers online instantly when demand outpaces capacity.
Time to set up: 5 minutes
- Some days there are unexpected delivery spikes that your team needs to react to. Hello, Superbowl Sunday.
- Create an added courier-online Incentive for Cohorts you want to bring online immediately (this takes about 5 minutes to set up in your Village admin dashboard).
- Couriers get pushed the offer in real time and are automatically paid out as soon as they fulfill the Incentive criteria (in this case being online for the next 4 hours and completing 20 deliveries minimum during the period).
Top Courier Program
Purpose: Create a sense of partnership and loyalty to retain the best couriers.
Time to set up: 2 hours
- Food delivery platforms often incur huge costs acquiring and retaining couriers - it can be a stressful job.
- Use Village to set up a Top Courier Program. Distribute awards to couriers for completing valuable actions like on time pickups and deliveries, good ratings and doing more deliveries. This takes about 30 minutes to configure in Village.
- Set up Benefits Rules in Village proportionate to how many awards your couriers have earned. You can set tiered thresholds or test different structures for different cohorts to understand what works best in each market to drive retention and sentiment.
- Demonstrate what your best couriers mean to your platform with engaging badges (“Top Courier”) and status, as well as valuable awards like revenue share or priority dispatches.
Common Use Cases
Designing Incentives Programs
Read more about how to set up the right incentives for your specific use case on our blog.
