Web brings restaurant delivery to fingers

Put yourself in this situation: You're in a foreign American city, hungry, and without a car (or maybe just too lazy to throw some pants on and drive to a nearby restaurant). What do you do? Call every restaurant in town to see if they deliver? By the time you track down a phone book, skim through the restaurant guide, narrow it down to a few choices, and call to see if they deliver only to find out that they don't, your stomach will have already eaten itself and moved on to other vital organs.

Wisconsin college students Becky Pauly and Tony Gribben found themselves in a similar situation while vacationing in Minnesota to visit the Mall of America. Wanting to order delivery from their hotel room, but not knowing which restaurants in the area would deliver, they were inspired to create the e-business that is now www.WeDoDelivery.com.

While they found that some websites exist to list delivery services in larger cities, nothing at that point was as comprehensive as WeDoDelivery.com already is, and is still growing to be.

"Our goal was to create a delivery restaurant website that travelers and college students could use, no matter where they were in the country," says the website co-creator Pauly. As Wisconsin residents, Pauly and Gribben began the website in 2007 by listing local Wisconsin cities and slowly expanding outwards to other states and the cities within.

Today, WeDoDelivery.com has 1,469 delivery restaurants listed in 119 cities throughout 43 US states.

"We strive to be the largest restaurant delivery guide on the web and hope that in the future virtually every city will be listed on our website," says Pauly.

With the website still growing, you may not find a particular city you're searching for listed. However, Pauly and Gribben have worked to list the most popular travel destinations and college towns nationwide on their site. Other cities have been listed through a request form that can be found on the website and submitted by users.

Once they have a city, Pauly and Gribben begin what Pauly describes as a time-consuming process.

"Confirming which restaurants deliver involves us either calling every restaurant to confirm that they deliver or finding their business website that indicates whether or not they deliver," she says.

Keep in mind while surfing the site that WeDoDelivery.com does not sort out which particular zip codes the restaurants will deliver to - that is to be determined at the user's discretion.

Funding for the site and revenue comes through advertisements on the site and also by allowing restaurants to place coupons and menus next to their listings.

Future plans for WeDoDelivery.com include improvements such as posting restaurant coupons/discounts, as well as user reviews.

The website can also be found on both MySpace and Facebook. Pauly says that they hope to eventually be able to offer special promotions and coupons to users exclusively found on their MySpace and Facebook friends lists. www.WeDoDelivery.com is completely free to use and does not require users to create an account to access the information.

So next time you find yourself car-less or pant-less and want to order in - just surf on over to www.WeDoDelivery.com, click on your state, then city, and bam - every restaurant that delivers in that area is listed with the phone number right next to it. "Click, call, and relax!" as the website says. Bon appetite!