Play It Again, Grubhub: Grubhub Adds Reorder Skill for Alexa

Ever eat at a place where you have a “usual”? There’s something kind of comforting about eating at a place where they know what you want right when you walk in the door, and where they even start making it.

I have a place like that; they actually call back to the kitchen to start a Steve. Now you too can feel that same familiar comfort thanks to a new move from Grubhub, which recently brought the Alexa reorder skill to its operations, making it incredibly easy to reorder your favorite meal.

With the new skill in place, Grubhub customers can simply issue a reorder command for any favorite dish from any of the over 50,000 partner restaurants that happen to be nearby. Putting it in place is simple; all users need do is enable the Grubhub skill, then access Grubhub by voice with a relevant command. Users can then look over past orders and select the one most desired, which Alexa will place accordingly.

Best of all, there’s a contest that goes along with it; those who use the new skill three times before the end of March will be entered into a drawing for a $500 gift card from Grubhub, which is plenty of grub in even the priciest places.

While this doesn’t exactly do a lot to improve the convenience and ease of use of Grubhub, it’s certainly one step up, and one step up is better than none at all. It’s the kind of thing that helps keep current users in the fold and may attract a few new ones besides, and these are activities that pretty much every mobile app has to engage in.

No one wants to lose customers to that shiny new whatever it is that has the features you don’t, so you add the features customers want to keep said customers in the fold.

Good news for customers, and likely for Grubhub as well; a new skill today can fend off competitors for quite some time, at least until those customers also add the skill in question.

That’s the nature of the mobile app market today, whether buying food, shoes, or anything else.