Deal.com.sg starts its own food delivery site, challenges Rocket Internet’s FoodPanda

Just days after the mighty Rocket Internet launched their online food delivery service Food Panda in Southeast Asia, Singapore’s second largest daily deals site Deal.com.sg unveiled their very own competitor today —  DEALivery.sg.

Both websites now join HungryDelivery.com and EatIt.sg in an increasingly competitive food fight — a boon for consumers.

Rocket Internet is a German technology incubator that has been aggressively expanding to Southeast Asia in a variety of online verticals: Fashion store Zalora, Amazon-like website Lazada, and a Pinterest-clone called Pinspire.

While the well-funded Samwer Brothers have plenty of resources at their disposal, local player Deal.com.sg is no pushover either.

DEALivery.sg brings with it the advantage of having massive reach to a large customer base and over 1,000 F&B merchants in Singapore through its fledging daily deals cousin.

Execution-wise, both Food Panda and DEALivery.sg do it slightly differently.

Food Panda prompts you for your postal code, then shows a list of restaurants that deliver to your location. Every restaurant has a different delivery cost, ranging from zero to S$20 (US$16). DEALivery.sg, on the other hand, charges a flat fee of S$5 (US$4) for online delivery and S$7 (US$5.5) for phone delivery.

Another key difference is that while Food Panda has a minimum order amount, DEALivery.sg has none. This gives the latter a bigger potential market size in Singapore, increasing their revenue but possibly at the expense of profit margin.

Finally, DEALivery.sg has daily deals built into the site from the get-go, while Food Panda has none. Consumers can get daily deals that get delivered to their homes, cleverly leveraging their home court advantage.

But with Rocket Internet’s regional play, I wonder if it’ll be a matter of time before they catch up, features-wise.

Both shiny new sites, however, look much more impressive than the incumbants — HungryDelivery.com and EatIt.sg.

HungryDelivery.com only does phone delivery, and that might deter customers that demand greater convenience.

EatIt.sg, on the other hand, has a high minimum order amount, suffers from a lack of options, and requires food to be ordered three days in advance. Sure, it positions itself as an online catering company, but I wonder if that’s enough for it to survive.