Yelp Acquires Eat24 the Food Delivery Service

Yelp the review website has purchased Eat24, a food delivery service online that allows users to order food from over 20,000 restaurants in more than 1,500 cities across the U.S.

Shares of the company based in San Francisco were up 7% in trading after hours on Tuesday following the release of information that it acquired the service for $134 million of which $75 million was in cash and 1.4 million in Class A stock.

The service is in competition with GrubHub, which is currently the largest food delivery service online connecting over 30,000 restaurants with potential customers in the U.S. and the UK.

As more businesses move online for food ordering, integrating Eat24 further will enhance the experience of our user with a product that is easy to use and service, which allows our large audience to transact with businesses directly, said CEO and co-founder of Yelp Jeremy Stoppelman.

Eat24 and Yelp are not strangers with one another. In 2013, the companies entered into a partnership that allowed the 135 million monthly users of Yelp, more than half who log one with mobile handsets, to make food orders and have them sent to their location using the Eat 24 platform.

With Eat24 now integrated fully into Yelp, the food service could possibly allow users of Yelp to use the delivery service for the more than 1 million restaurants currently on Yelp.

This acquisition is part of the bigger plan of Yelp to increase its user engagement and convince the local advertiser and businesses to remain with the Yelp platform.

Yelp must also find new ways to convince users to continue opening for local business reviews, even as other big players on Internet like Google and Facebook are moving actively into Yelp’s territory.

During 2013, Yelp acquired SeatMe an app for seat reservations, which became fully integrated into the Yelp platform and allows users looking for local listings of restaurants to reserve a table at specific restaurants, as well as receive special deals.

Now with Eat24 under the Yelp umbrella, Yelp has expanded its reach to cater to those customers that are not planning a visit to any local business.