Now, food is just a click away in Dubai

In a world where we live most of our lives online, a new food delivery portal hopes the way to the nation's stomach is via the internet.

Foodonclick.com, which launched last week, has tied up with 200 restaurants to offer Dubai residents one more way of getting dinner onto the table – without any extra costs and by excising the stress of placing an order over the phone.

But while most of us already have our favourite restaurants on speed dial, regional CEO Shekhar Rao says the site is convenient, easy to use. "It's simple, straightforward, precise communication. You know what you're paying for and if anything goes wrong, we will step in and leverage our relationship with the restaurant to make things all right."

Launched in partnership with yemeksepeti.com, a Turkish service that has become the world's largest online food delivery portal, the site has signed with some 200 restaurant brands so far and hopes to reach 1,000 by the end of the year. Among these are familiar names such as Chillis, Wagamama, Johnny Rocket's, Labneh wa Zaatar and French Connection.

"By the end of the first year, we aim to have 20,000 reigistered users across the UAE and handle between 300 and 400 transactions a day, or about $2 million (Dh7.34m) in sales," yemeksepeti.com CEO Nevzat Aydin tells Emirates Business. The Turkish site, launched in 2000, has half-a-million users and generates 22,000 orders a day or 800,000 orders a year, he adds.

He says it's so successful there that it generated 20 per cent of Domino's Pizza sales in Turkey last year, and that restaurants give away 15,000 classic DVDs on the site each month.

The Dubai website is part of an expansion plan that has already seen a launch in Russia; regional launches are planned for Abu Dhabi and Sharjah within the next few months, before further expansion across the region.

So far, Aydin and his local partners, Mac Advertising, have invested $300,000 with another $1m to be spent on marketing, Aydin says. "It is all self-funded on a 50-50 basis," he says. Another $1.5m has been spent on developing the software that runs the Turkish and Russian portals – and which has been adapted for the UAE.

The site makes its money on a commission basis, invoicing restaurants each month for up to 10 per cent of sales according to how much business it generates.

"Most restaurants are already in the delivery business, and because we handle the marketing and the branding, it's a cost-free way of bringing in more revenue," says Rao. "The quality of product is not compromised because restaurants handle delivery. And, in addition, companies can drum up business by running specific short-term promotions without the cost of printing menus and later having to explain to customers promotions have expired."

Farida Bahar, who runs the French Connection chain of restaurants across Dubai, says she's happy and that the site is bringing in business. "It's amazing. They only launched last Thursday, and we had orders the next day. So I'm happy," she says. As for the consumer? In the newsroom, we ordered lunch on two different occasions last week. It was an easy, hassle-free process and neither order was messed up.

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