[Popular yet?] Uber Eats in Japan.

Nowadays, I see some men delivering and carrying food in a characteristic box printed "Uber Eats" in Tokyo. Finally, this service has started in our living area. I found it astonishingly easy and convenient!

Would it be popular in Japan?

Uber, a parent company of Uber Eats, is not popular yet in Japan because there is a strong regulation to do the Taxi business which is making them difficult to grow business here. It means their Uber brand is not well known in Japan even today. People who have experience with Uber service in abroad know it as a popular company very well. Even if some people have ever heard the name of "Uber", might remind them of scandalous news caused by some drivers.

So it may sound like people in Japan have an only negative image or none about Uber, however, Uber Eats is expanding their service area rapidly and getting attention so much.

This is only my opinion, but this service needs more bicyclers, less car drivers because the population of Japan is concentrated in small urban areas, also positive effects it may have on environmental issue. Their service would grow more in Japan, I think.

How is it differ from other services?

Once you register in Uber Eats, you can select a restaurant from various choices you see there. I thought, when I tried it the first time, this almost gives me the same kind of feeling with net-shopping at web-malls such as Amazon. We don't have to make a contract with each store. It's like a convenient cluster of delivery service shops to get away from it all.

One of the most attractive point of their service is, the delivery fee. For every order exceeds 700 yen in total gets free delivery. And even for the order less than 700 yen, the delivery fee is as low as 150 yen (about 1.5$). It makes me wonder, how Uber Eats makes profits by only 10% service fee and this delivery fee.

My experience with Uber Eats

At first, I tried to order foods from my desktop PC but the system didn't recognize my living area well. I gave up using it and installed the Uber Eats app on my smartphone. The installation was easy, but I had some trouble registering my address since App only allowed me to enter a rough address, not the detail including a room number of my apartment and such. There were small trials and errors but I nailed it at last. I guess that this app of Japanese version is based on the US version, and the developers don't know us, Japanese, are living densely. I hope they soon realize the difference and improve the inputting form in near future.

After overcoming the registration phase, there was no trouble, it was astonishingly easy and convenient to order.

And I enjoyed watching the process of delivery visualized in App. I could see where my food was and who was delivering it in real-time.

Hope you enjoy your meal!