Rented visibility

The delivery app's account manager calls in January with a package.

Top of the category page for a fortnight. A banner inside the app. A place in whatever the app is calling its new-year promotion. There is a fee for it, and there is a condition attached: the kitchen funds the discount that goes with the placement.

The orders rise. That part is true, and it is the only number the app reports back.

Then the month closes and the margin is not there.

Count what leaves the ticket. The commission goes first, whatever the contract says it is, and it is never small. The placement fee is paid across every order, including the ones from customers who were going to order anyway. The funded discount comes off the price. Then the food, the box, the person on the grill, the rent on the kitchen itself.

What the app is selling here is not advertising. It is footfall, sold the way a landlord sells footfall, and the rent falls due whether or not the shop has a good month. The customers do not come home with the restaurant when it ends, either. They stay with the building, and next January the building will offer to rent them again, at a slightly higher price, on the strength of how well the last package worked.

There is one honest test and it is not the uplift. Take a single order that came through the placement. Subtract the commission, the funded discount, and that order's share of the fee. Look at what is left of it.

If one order does not make money, a larger number of them is not a better result. It is a bigger rent bill.