Yelp announced a new service called Yelp Platform on Tuesday in a bid for the increasingly competitive takeout and delivery space. The service will let users order food and services directly from Yelp, whether on a desktop or through the Yelp app. So far, the service is limited to a handful of participating restaurants in San Francisco and New York, but Yelp plans to expand to more locations in the coming months, as well as new categories like spas, hair salons, and dentists' offices.
It's a direct challenge to GrubHub, which currently serves more than 20,000 restaurants in the United States alone, having merged with Seamless to become the dominant player in the space. But Yelp brings a large roster of participating businesses and partnerships with other networks like Intuit's Demandforce. More notably, they're not the only challenger: LivingSocial is also targeting the space with their Takeout & Delivery app, which launched in March.