Rakuten Takeout

Launching a takeout service during a global pandemic

When Coronavirus hit in 2020, many restaurants were struggling to stay open due to lack of online ordering capabilities and/or reliance on third party delivery platforms that took a huge margin.

Overview

Leveraging infrastructure from existing products, the team built a multi-sided platform in less than 2 weeks. It enabled local restaurants to quickly stand-up an online ordering & payment platform for takeout. With integration into the Rakuten platform, restaurants were provided immediate access to a highly engaged audience. Even better, it was free for the first 6 months to all restaurants.


Tactics

As the Head of Brand Marketing, I employed the following tactics to accomplish our goals:

👍

Social

🔎

Search

🎙

Radio

📨

Email

🌐

Website



Radio





Banner Ads



Outcome

The initial rollout was only in San Mateo and Tokyo, Japan, in order to learn and scale as needed. After 5 months of testing, we knew we either had to expand to a bigger market to gather more intel, with a larger investment (to thwart incumbent competition), or solely focus on Japan. The decision was made to sunset the San Mateo product.

3,200

Orders

$150k+

Revenue

162%

increase in conversion rate