My new UK site is live but it is not on the app
Restaurant operators open a site expecting delivery volume from week one and discover the listing is not where they thought it was. Four causes account for almost all of it, and they need telling apart before anybody escalates. Onboarding may not be complete on the platform’s side. The site may not yet satisfy the hygiene registration requirement. The listing may exist but be unpublished. Or it may be live and visible only within a delivery zone much smaller than the catchment you were promised.
How do I check whether it is actually invisible?
Search for it as a customer would, from an address near the site, on a phone, not in the portal.
That single check separates two very different situations. If the listing appears from a nearby address but not from further out, it is published and the problem is coverage. If it does not appear at all from anywhere, it is not published, and coverage is irrelevant.
Most escalations skip this and start with a support ticket that describes the wrong problem.
What does onboarding actually require?
More than a signed agreement, and hygiene registration is the step that most often stalls it.
Deliveroo requires new partners to hold a rating of at least 2, and makes an explicit allowance for sites that have not been inspected yet: it will “allow new partners ‘awaiting inspection’ to be listed on the platform (an ‘Exception’) where they have been granted an ‘awaiting inspection’ status on the Food Standards Agency database and we can verify the partner is a legitimate business”.
Read that carefully, because it contains a dependency nobody plans for. The awaiting inspection status has to exist in the public database, which means the site’s registration with the local authority has to have been processed. A site that registered late, or whose registration is still being processed, cannot satisfy the exception even though it is behaving correctly.
Just Eat treats the same status as acceptable, accepting a partner “listed as ‘Awaiting Inspection’ on the FSA website” as meeting its minimum.
So the practical dependency is the council rather than the platform?
Often, yes, and that reframes who to chase.
If the site is not in the register, no amount of pressure on the platform helps. Confirm the registration went in, on the date somebody says it did, and confirm it has appeared. That is a phone call to the local authority, not a ticket to a partner support team.
For a group opening several sites, checking registration as a standing part of the opening checklist removes this failure entirely, and it costs nothing.
What if the listing exists but nobody can find it?
Then you are looking at coverage or at search placement, and those are different problems again.
A new listing typically starts with a small delivery area and little ranking weight. It will be invisible to customers who are further out and buried for customers who are not searching for you by name. That is normal for a launch and it is not a fault.
What is worth measuring is how small the zone actually is, from real addresses, because the answer is often much smaller than the catchment used in the site’s business case. Kitchain (kitchain.co) measures coverage from points on the map, and a launch conversation held over a picture of the real zone goes differently from one held over a promise about it.
How long should a launch take before I escalate?
Give onboarding the period the platform states and no longer, and start the clock from the date every dependency was satisfied rather than from the date you signed.
The common failure is a group that waits six weeks, escalates, and discovers the platform has been waiting the whole time for a document nobody sent. Establish what is outstanding at the end of week one, not week six.
What should be verified on the day a site does go live?
That it is orderable, that the hours are right, that the menu and prices match, and that the zone reaches where you expected.
None of those is guaranteed by the listing appearing. A site can go live with a default schedule, an incomplete menu or a placeholder zone, and every one of those looks like a working launch from the portal.