HUB

Definition

Our integration solution for online aggregators is called HUB.

HUB is a product that helps merchants manage their 3rd-party (Third Party) aggregators’(delivery
platforms) online orders efficiently.
A merchant(restaurant) in today's world deals with multiple online aggregators (e.g.,
Zomato, Swiggy & Dunzo in India, Talabat, Careem, Zomato & Deliveroo in the UAE, Jahez,
Hunger Station, Careem etc. in KSA and Deliveroo, Just Eat and Uber Eats in the UK). Managing
online menus, receiving orders in the Point Of Sale (POS), and maintaining inventory on each 3rd
party aggregator marketplace becomes a daunting task.
With Hub as a platform, merchants can manage and control menu modifications, inventory and
online orders across multiple aggregator portals from a single dashboard. Functionalities to
perform these actions depend on API availability with different aggregators in the region.
HUB helps brands manage their online orders with integrations directly into the Point of Sale or
independently through Urban Piper’s Satellite app. We have partnered with 250+ Point Of Sale
companies around the world to allow merchants to manage orders, menus and analytics
directly from their POS system/s.
Multiple actions that we support on aggregators are:
● Order relay
● Order status updates
● Menu sync
● Inventory

Problem Statement
Let’s look at the challenges a merchant faces while dealing with Third Party aggregators in the
absence of Hub.

Menu Management: Third Party aggregators either configure the online menu manually from
their dashboard or, in some cases, provide a dashboard to the merchants to manage their
menu. Managing multiple online portals in a fragmented way becomes tedious.
● The issue becomes more prominent when there are multiple outlets to manage. Also,
aggregators treat each outlet as a separate business, so for a multi-outlet chain, the
configuration done for a single outlet can't be replicated to other outlets for the same
 brand. Say, a merchant is online with three aggregators and has five outlets, the
configuration needs to be repeated fifteen times!
● Aggregators have teams to manage the catalog, who do the configuration and menu
structuring—categories, items, options, variants, recommendations, images, etc., based
on their understanding. So a brand, having the same menu, may turn up having
different menu structures across various aggregators and outlets, which impacts brand
value, credibility & eventually affects sales.
Multiple dashboards to take orders: Third Party Aggregators provide tablets/dashboards to the
merchants to receive the online orders and the operators need to punch the orders manually in
their point-of-sale.
● Multiple aggregators, and thereby managing multiple dashboards, become
unmanageable and prone to human error. The situation worsens during peak hours of
business.
● Missing orders and manual errors while punching orders in the point-of-sale become a
regular concern.
Inventory: Managing inventory by stocking items in/out in multiple dashboards becomes
wearisome. This, in turn, leads to order modifications or cancellations, thereby impacting the
revenue.
Brand visibility & delivery radius: Among hundreds and thousands of brands listed on a Third
Party aggregator, it's imperative to be visible and to be able to cater to the maximum delivery
area. Third Party Aggregators evaluate different parameters like order acceptance time,
preparation time, canceled orders, etc. and monitor the health of a restaurant—RHI (restaurant
Health Index). Better RHI means more visibility, and the delivery area gets extended. Maintaining
these parameters across multiple outlets and aggregators without automation is the place,
becomes uncontrollable.
Reporting & Reconciliation: It is challenging to get the required reports and do reconciliation
with different Third Party aggregators.

The Solution
As we act as the middle layer connecting Third Party aggregators and point-of-sales, we classify
the integrations as:
Upstream integrations: Integrations done with the Third Party aggregators(delivery
platforms)
Downstream integrations: Integrations done with the Point-of-sale systems (Point Of Sale)
We also refer to these integrations as CODEX.
Now, let us understand how HUB functions:
1. Catalogue Management (Point Of Sale --> HUB --> Third Party aggregators):
We provide APIs to the Point-Of-Sale partner to integrate with us so that the merchant’s
entire menu (categories, items, pricing, etc.) can be pushed from their Point Of Sale to
UrbanPiper, and then onwards, to the associated food delivery aggregators /
marketplaces. Once completed, a merchant only needs to use their Point Of Sale system
to push the entire menu to multiple aggregators across multiple stores simultaneously,
thereby gaining control over all menu-related changes and future alterations.

2. Order Relay (Third Party aggregators --> HUB --> Point Of Sale):
Orders from the Third Party aggregators flow via UrbanPiper to the point-of-sale, with no
manual punching required and no scope for any human errors.
3. Order Status Update (the flow can work in either direction):
Outlet operators can take actions on all Third Party online orders—Acknowledge, Mark
Food Ready (MFR), etc., from their Point Of Sale. We also provide merchants with the
capability to automate a few actions—like auto-order acceptance, auto-MFR. This helps
in improving the RHI(Restaurant Health Index) score resulting in increased revenue.
4. Inventory Control (Point Of Sale --> HUB --> Third Party Aggregators):
All stock changes (stock in/out) can be sent to the aggregators via an inventory call.
Thus, reducing the order cancellations and modifications due to non-availability of items
listed on the aggregators.
5. Offers/Discounts:
Merchants can configure a few offers/discounts (depending on the feasibility from
aggregators) from our dashboard.
6. Special menus:
In the case of restaurants, there is a possibility to configure special menus—Swiggy POP,
Zomato Eazy, Quick Value Meal (QVM), Every-day Value Offer (EDVO). All of this can be
configured from our dashboard.
7. Easy Reconciliation:
As the revenue received by the merchants depends on a few nuances concerning the
canceled/modified orders, the merchants can get all necessary reports from our
dashboard for reconciling the data across aggregators.

Why HUB?

● Focus: There are a few other players in the market who have also integrated with the
Third Party aggregators, but most of them are the Point Of Sale companies. As the focus
of a point-of-sale company is to solve the internal operations—modules like billing,
inventory, recipe management, sales orders, purchase orders, etc., and the Third Party
 aggregator integration acts as an add-on and not a full-fledged product. As a decent
revenue generator for us, HUB becomes the focus, and due to that, our product offerings
and features are always ahead of the market.
● Partner network: As a middle layer, we have partnered with 250+ Point Of Sale
companies across the restaurant and retail domains. So, for a restaurant that already
uses a Point Of Sale, it is easier to extend our APIs for integration, instead of pitching
them to switch to some other Point Of Sale.
● Key merchants: We are powering most of the biggest food chains in India and UAE.
Taking that into consideration, it becomes easier to show value and to convince any
regional player to signup with us.
● Product enhancements: For aggregators, any new marketing strategy—like EDVO, QVM,
gets tested with the key merchants. As we are already providing integrations to these
merchants, we get to implement these features before it gets to the other players.

What is Atlas?
Atlas is the portal access given to your team to perform the above functions across multiple
locations.

● Dashboard - The first tab on Atlas is the Dashboard that gives you a business overview of
orders, revenue generated, average order value, appreciation/depreciation
percentage and much more on a periodical basis.

● Orders - The next tab on Atlas is Orders where all your online orders appear. You will be
able to see the Order ID# along with the aggregator platform it has come from and the
current status of the specified orders. You can also click on the OrderID# to view the
summary, logs and can also take actions for this particular order.

● Locations - We then move onto the “Locations” tab. Here, you will be able to create
multiple locations for your brand and make changes to the existing ones. Clicking on any
of these locations, will take you to an outlet specific page where one can edit/modify
various criteria related to the basic details of the store like enabling or disabling the store,
exclude the location from any aggregator, associate categories and items and much
more. We also support location-level pricing too.

● Catalogue - The "Catalogue" segment enables you to configure the menu or catalogue.
This is where you can create and modify menu categories, items, modifiers, modifier
groups, taxes, item tags and charges specific to your brand.
You can create a category by clicking on “Add Category”, enter the category name
with a description and choose the sort order. You can also associate a timing group at
this stage.
 Let’s look at a pre-configured item. In the item configuration page, you can configure the
title, description, price, image, associate category, food type - veg or non-veg, tags with
allergen information and so on.

The Items tab under Categories helps you manage your item availability and item pricing
here. Let’s try changing an item price and see how it reflects on the UI of the UberEats test
store that’s linked to the Main Site on Atlas. As you see, the price for “Fish & Chips” is EUP 6.
I’ll change the price from EUP 6 to EUP 8 on Atlas. This will now be added to pending
changes. Then the system will prompt you in case you want to cascade the same changes
to the other stores. I’ll skip this for now. You can check the item is now showing in the
pending changes section. Now, to update these changes on the aggregators we need to
go to the “Locations” section,select the stores, click on Publish, select the relevant
aggregators and click on “Publish”.

The updated price will be pushed to UberEats. Let’s take a look at the UberEats store. As
you see here, the Fish & Chips price has been changed from EUP 6 to EUP 8. The changes
made are reflected on the aggregator platform in real-time. You can also enable or
disable the store or an item from here. You can link the aggregator store URL in the HUB
section on the locations page to take the store live on integrations.

To create a Modifier Group, click on “Add Modifier Group” and enter the minimum and
maximum number of modifiers that a customer can choose from for this particular group.
Modifier Groups can be of two types - Add-On or a Variant. An example for Add-on can be
toppings on a Pizza and a Variant can be the size of the Pizza. For any add-ons or variants,
you’ll have to associate modifier groups and modifiers to the item. Let's look at a
pre-configured Modifier. You will be able to add the title, food type, price,set the sort order
etc. You can also associate locations and modifier groups from here.

Taxes can be configured as per your region, items and so on.

You can also configure charges relevant to items and associate them too.

● Groups - You can associate a timing group with categories and further list items you wish
to be listed under that category.

● Analytics - The Analytics segment of Atlas helps you analyze the health of your business.

The Sales tab under Analytics is an overview of the brands business trends and helps you
identify the peak hours of business, best selling items, number of orders,revenue
generated, total number of items sold, lost orders and revenue lost due to cancellations.
You can use filters and date ranges to view aggregator specific orders. You can either
 use the presets or customize the date range and also compare the same. You can
download a CSV report for the same too. It also gives you a breakup of the numbers of
all aggregators when you click on each grid. In the performance section, it takes you a
step ahead, and gives you a detailed understanding of the performances of items,
stores, categories and cities. You can add a channel to the gauge aggregator for
specific performance.
The Operations segment gives you a summary of order status and cancellations for each
location. You can choose presets or custom date ranges similar to the Sales section. You
can also view the average time taken by your staff to perform each action in the order
cycle. You can add a filter to gauge an aggregator specific health index. You will be
able to view location specific order status update analysis.
The Reports section has certain standard pre-configured reports which you can email to
yourself. Some of the available reports are order transactions, item wise order
transactions, order summary, order status transitions, customer-wise transactions, store
action report, aggregator discounts if allowed and so on.

● Settings - You can access your profile, users and billing related information.

Stock Control

You can choose a location and search for items by Name or Category. The list of items from the
menu appears and you can choose to toggle the availability of a particular item with a single click
on all aggregators. We support modifier level stockin/stockout too.

Session Settings

Under Session Settings, you will be able to preset the preferences you would have relating to
platforms, notifications and print options. After selecting a particular location, you will be able to
enable/disable the store on different aggregators. You can choose the notification tones for new
orders or cancellations. One can configure and set up printer automations from the printing tab.

Sales Narrative

Pitch:

“This is regarding the orders that you receive from food delivery platforms such as Zomato,
Talabat, Careem, Noon, UberEats etc. We have a solution that helps bring all these orders into
a single dashboard without having to juggle between multiple screens.”
Probing Questions:

- Are you listed on platforms like Zomato, Talabat, Careem, Uber Eats, Noon etc. ?
- How many outlets do you have?
- How do you manage the tablets that you have from them?
- Do you face cancellations regularly?
- How do you manage your menu changes?
- How do you handle stock control/inventory?
- How long does a change process take with these aggregators?
- Do you have visibility of your brand value and performance as a business owner?

Atlas Dashboard Videos:

Catalogue Management:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652342968894199

Categories:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652342994883399

Items:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343003340809

Modifiers:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343010304409

Modifier Groups:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343027858989

Taxes:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343034526399

Location Groups:
https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343051605119

User Access:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343062189679

Timing Groups:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343083987989

Store Toggle:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343094766839

Publish catalog:

https://urbanpiper.slack.com/archives/C03EL6Z6N9H/p1652343103737149

Case Study:

Mr.X is a restaurateur who has 5 cloud kitchens holding 3 brands in each outlet. His business has
been seeing a constant growth in revenue with more orders pouring in. At a point, after hitting
the peak, he saw a decrease in the order volume and revenue loss due to cancellations. The
other observation was that his brand ratings/reviews had gone down with aggregators too. He
wanted to drill down and identify the root cause of the situation. With a lot of introspection and
feedback from his employees, he was able to list down the challenges that could have led to
this.

● The staff was over-occupied with kitchen operations and packaging so they could not
focus on acknowledging the orders on time, resulting in canceled orders.
● Manually punching all the orders into the POS at the end of the day resulted in the
discrepancy of sales numbers.
● Orders were getting canceled due to the non-availability of items as the staff was not
able to mark them “stocked-out” on the platforms in time.
 ● Managing multiple dashboards became a problem as there were different
dashboards/tablets for different brands.
● There was no way to track brand performance, reviews and ratings and pin point what
factors were impacting it.
● He was not able to get a clear view of the sales happening across all stores and brands
for any given point of time as the sales reports are shared by aggregators on a weekly
basis.

After analysing the situation, he started to look out for a solution that could help ease operations
and increase his gains.

Q1. How can UrbanPiper be a fit for Mr.X? List down the solution we have for his pain point.
Q2. How is UrbanPiper different from any other solution which can be appealing to MR.X?
Q3. How does UrbanPiper help in the reconciliation of reports for MR.X and make his life easier?
Q4. How can UrbanPiper help Mr.X with improving his restaurant ratings?

A1. UrbanPiper can help Mr.X in the following ways:

- A single platform to manage all aggregator orders in real-time
- Multi-brand support: Get all the online orders for all the brands in one dashboard
- Order relay automation: Auto acknowledge and auto Mark Food Ready (MFR) to avoid
missing out on any order/ cancellations
- Integration with POS: No more manual punching of orders into the Point of Sale. Receive
all the online orders directly into the Point of Sale
- Stock out of non-available items from all aggregators from one source and only for one
time
- Reports: Downloadable reports to track the sales for any given period of time
- Update price changes on aggregator platforms real time

A2. While the other companies providing solutions similar to UrbanPiper have their own POS, they
include the online order management system with their POS. Whereas UrbanPiper can integrate
with any POS. Mr.X can change his POS if he wants to without having any effect on how he
manages online orders.
A3. UrbanPiper’s reports give Mr.X a detailed view of all the transactions and breakup of his
online orders. He can download the reports at any given point and between custom time
ranges. Apart from the downloadable reports, Mr.X can see how the aggregators are
performing for him, which channel(delivery aggregator) is generating the highest revenue and if
there is a growth in the number of orders and revenue from a channel when compared to a
historical timeline. He can also identify his bestseller items, categories, next performing outlet and
much more.

A4. UrbanPiper’s solution calculates the parameters like acceptance rate, mark food ready rate
etc, that are used by the aggregators to rate a restaurant. It also helps in automating the order
relay process like auto acceptance and auto Mark Food Ready(MFR).