Fee Transparency
Our industry is proud to work with local businesses to bring everything from food and groceries to prescription medicine to consumers’ doorsteps via transparent, pro-consumer services and business models.
Fees for App-Based Delivery Make Sense
Every day, app-based delivery platforms help millions of consumers get food, groceries, and other goods quickly and conveniently. These platforms facilitate a logistically complex three-sided marketplace that seamlessly brings together consumers, local merchants, and a network of independent delivery workers.
In three-sided marketplaces like app-based delivery platforms, there are two basic cost components: 1) the price of the goods, generally set by the restaurants, grocers, and other businesses that choose to sell on these platforms and 2) service and delivery fees, set by app-based platforms, go toward running the logistics and services crucial to making on-demand delivery possible—including compensating app-based delivery workers.
These fees are not “junk fees”—they are transparently disclosed to consumers and reflect costs associated with delivering convenience on-demand and at the push of a button.
Overwhelmingly Positive Consumer Experience with App Platforms
87%
Three-Side Marketplaces Offer Many Benefits
- Consumers benefit from centralized platforms featuring a plethora of merchants competing for customers.
- Consumers and merchants can reduce their transaction costs and save time via highly efficient matchmaking intermediaries like app-based platforms.
- Merchants, in particular smaller businesses and mom-and-pop stores, can leverage app platforms to reach wider audiences at relatively low costs.
- Delivery worker can avail themselves of flexible, independent income-earning opportunities on their own terms.
Delivery is Highly Competitive
App-based delivery platforms understand that consumers have a wide range of choices for delivery, and that they are competing among themselves as well as with other delivery entities, restaurants and retail partners that have their own delivery services, meal delivery kits—and consumers themselves who could always choose to pick-up their orders themselves.
This deeply competitive industry has demonstrated its commitment to fee transparency and continues to drive significant economic opportunity for workers and small businesses. Well-intentioned efforts to curb actual “junk fees” should not undermine transparent, pro-consumer services and business models, including those offered by app-based delivery platforms.
Read more in Flex’s blog here and in Flex’s comments to the FTC.
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