A few weeks ago, OrderIn, the popular online food ordering service, ran a promotion on WeChat where users could order three meals and get R50 discount with each order. Today, that has been revealed to have been a prelude to a bigger partnership between the two platforms.
It was announced today that OrderIn has become an official channel within WeChat. Users can now easily and securely order and pay for food from their favourite OrderIn’s more than 650 restaurants, fast food outlets and corner café’s in Cape Town, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Durban and Port Elizabeth.
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“Partnering with OrderIn is just another way WeChat is merging the online and offline worlds, by turning online food orders into real-life deliveries” says Brett Loubser, Head of WeChat Africa.
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This new partnership will allow WeChat users to order food from anywhere during restaurant hours and pay for their orders through WeChat.
“OrderIn is perfect for people while they’re at work, students who notoriously value convenience or busy families that don’t have time to cook” says Dines, Co-Founder of OrderIn.
OrderIn’s functionality will not change much: users will still be able to place their orders and pay for them. There are no extra charges unless a restaurant has a compulsory delivery service.
As it does on the web, the service will detect the users’ location or the user can enter a specific location and receive restaurants in the vicinity. If nothing else, this partnership continues WeChat’s strategy to gobble up whatever online service or app it can, like it has done with M4JAM, GoBeauty and Picup.
There are two major advantages to this partnership. The first is the customer care feature, which allows customers to be able to chat live with OrderIn’s customer service team, allowing them to track their exact progress of their orders.
The other is that it offers a seamless payment integration and users do not need to leave WeChat.
Users can still get R50 off their first three orders placed through OrderIn.
