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10 GrabFood Mistakes That Cost Restaurants Orders, and How to Fix Them

The ten mistakes that quietly cost restaurants orders, rating and margin on GrabFood, and the fix for each, based on what Grab actually publishes.

A board with one line marked with a warning and one with a check, beside a bowl and a receipt: GrabFood mistakes and their fixes

The ten GrabFood mistakes that cost restaurants orders are small ones the dashboard does not flag, from ignoring the numbers Grab's quality programs grade to promotions with no end date, best sellers without photos, avoidable cancellations and ads judged on clicks, and each comes with its fix.

Most restaurants that struggle on GrabFood are not doing anything dramatic wrong. They are making small mistakes that the dashboard does not flag: a pause button pressed too often, a promotion nobody switched off, a best seller without a photo. Each one costs a little. Together they cost a lot. Here are the ten we see most, and what to do about each.

Mistake 1: Ignoring the numbers Grab actually grades you on

Grab does not publish its ranking formula, but it does publish what it rewards. Its merchant quality programs grade stores on a handful of numbers and give badges that bring visibility. In the Philippines, the published criteria included avoidable cancellations below 1%, missing and incorrect orders below 1%, a store offline rate of 5% or less, a rating of at least 4.0 and a minimum order delay target.

Fix: open the quality program screen on the Home section of your GrabMerchant app. It shows your own numbers and your own targets, which vary by market. Pick the metric furthest from target and work on that one first.

Mistake 2: Leaving promotions running with no end date

A promotion that never ends stops being a reason to order and becomes your normal price, paid for out of your margin. It also tends to be used most by customers who would have ordered anyway. Research on discounts has found that deep, repeated discounts can reduce future buying by established customers, and that customers won with deep discounts are worth less over time.

Fix: give every promotion an end date or a review date. Each week, check its redemption rate and how many redemptions come from new customers, both shown in the GrabMerchant Portal. If regulars are using it most, change the offer or stop it. Our campaign checklist walks through the decision.

Mistake 3: Best sellers without photos

Customers choose with their eyes, often in a few seconds of scrolling. A 2025 study of over 500,000 food delivery orders found that better dish images raised sales, and DoorDash reports that merchants with photos on at least half their menu sell more. Grab encourages merchants to show their food in photos and offers training on smartphone food photography in some markets.

Fix: start with the dishes that already sell. A clear, well-lit phone photo of each best seller does more than a professional shoot of dishes nobody orders.

Mistake 4: Hours that do not match reality

Grab expects the hours on your listing to match your real opening hours. In the Philippines, its Code of Conduct caps pausing or busy mode at 1% of weekly operating hours, and its quality program asks for an offline rate of 5% or less. A store that keeps disappearing during its listed hours loses orders now and counts against itself later.

Fix: set hours you can actually hold, then keep the store online for all of them. To decide when to be open, use your own peak hours, shown in the Insights tab of the GrabMerchant Portal, rather than a generic rule.

Grab itself says long menus are harder for customers to read. Grab's search also matches what people type against dish names, so a dish called "House Special No. 3" is invisible to someone searching for "beef noodle soup". And Grab Malaysia states that items with descriptions sell better.

Fix: put best sellers first, group items into clear categories, name each dish the way a customer would search for it, and give every item a short description: ingredients, portion, spice level.

Mistake 6: Cancelling orders you could have kept

Most cancellations are avoidable: an item that ran out, an order nobody saw, a kitchen that fell behind. Grab treats item unavailability as an avoidable cancellation. In the Philippines, merchants are expected to request more time within 2 minutes using "Extend", and to flag an order they cannot fulfil within 5 minutes. In Indonesia, Grab's terms allow it to move a merchant from automatic to manual order acceptance based on cancellation and acceptance rates.

Three avoidable causes of cancelled GrabFood orders: an item ran out, an order nobody saw, a kitchen fell behind, each beside its fix
Each avoidable cancellation has a fix in your hands. Where available, automatic acceptance also catches the orders nobody saw

Fix: keep the device attended during service, use automatic acceptance where available, switch items off the moment they run out, and set a preparation time that matches your real kitchen, not your best day.

Mistake 7: Not reading reviews

Your rating and the number of ratings appear on your store thumbnail before anyone opens your menu. Grab reported in 2023 that sessions where customers read reviews converted 7 percentage points higher. Reviews are also where customers tell you, for free, what is going wrong.

Fix: read every review each week in the Feedback section of the app. Look for complaints that repeat: portion, temperature, missing items, packaging. Reply where your market allows it. Grab has said merchants can reply to reviews, but access may vary by market.

Mistake 8: Paying for visibility without measuring it

Grab sells real visibility: search ads, banners, rank boosters and campaign placements. The mistake is not using them. It is judging them on clicks and impressions. Grab's own Portal guide warns that clicks do not necessarily relate to sales.

Fix: judge every ad on the orders, revenue and return it brings, shown in the ads section of the Portal. Give a new ad a few weeks, as Grab suggests, then cut what does not pay for itself.

Mistake 9: Wrong prices, missing stock, old dishes on the menu

Grab's Code of Conduct asks merchants to keep store information, including hours, prices and photos, up to date, and its Indonesia terms require the merchant to correct inaccuracies in menu, images and prices. A price you raised in store but not on Grab eats your margin. A dish that no longer exists turns into a cancellation.

Fix: after any change in store, update Grab the same day. Once a month, go through the menu row by row: prices, availability, descriptions and seasonal items.

Mistake 10: Packaging that does not survive the trip

The food is judged when it arrives, not when it leaves the kitchen. Missing and incorrect items count directly in Grab's quality programs, and Grab has looked at packaging as one of the dimensions customers rate. Spillage and soggy food show up in reviews long before they show up in the numbers.

Fix: seal liquids, separate soups and sauces, vent fried food, and check the reviews for any mention of packaging. If it comes up more than once, it is not bad luck.

A Kontimo screen reading the dishes that never sell and the share of dishes with a photo
In Kontimo's demo account, with invented figures: dishes without a photo and dishes that never sell, two of the mistakes above

Questions people ask

What is the most common GrabFood mistake?

Ignoring the service numbers Grab grades: offline time, avoidable cancellations, delays and missing items. They are visible in the app and they decide whether you earn the quality badges that bring visibility.

Do I need a promotion running at all times?

No. A promotion should have a purpose and an end date. Promotions left running tend to subsidise customers who would have ordered anyway.

What hours should my store be open on GrabFood?

The hours you can reliably hold, matched to your own peak hours in the Portal's Insights tab. Frequent pausing during listed hours counts against you.

Keep reading: How the GrabFood Algorithm Works · Reduce Cancellations on Grab · How to Get Grab Reviews

Sources

16 sources, each claim traceable to one

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