Estimate how many restaurants could adopt Wallet in one year

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Uber is a mobility and delivery platform; its products include rides, Uber Eats, grocery and retail delivery, freight, driver and courier tools, and marketplace pricing.

Uber is evaluating the potential one-year adoption of Wallet by restaurants in its marketplace. In this context, “restaurants” should be treated as merchant partners that may already use or could use Uber’s delivery, payments, promotions, or operational tools. “Wallet” may represent a financial product that helps restaurants store balances, receive payouts, fund promotions, manage fees, or transact within Uber’s ecosystem.

Your task is to estimate how many restaurants could adopt Wallet within one year. This is a guesstimate, so focus on building a clear, defensible sizing approach rather than producing a precise number. You should define the scope, make reasonable assumptions, segment the market, and explain how adoption would vary across restaurant types, geographies, and levels of engagement with Uber.

The estimate should reflect Uber’s marketplace dynamics: restaurants differ by country, size, digital maturity, existing Uber Eats relationship, payout needs, trust in platform-managed financial tools, and operational incentives. Consider both the reachable restaurant base and the realistic conversion funnel over a one-year launch or expansion period.

The experience should consider:

- The exact unit being estimated: unique restaurants, restaurant locations, active merchant accounts, or eligible Uber Eats merchants.

- The geographic scope: global, selected launch markets, or markets where Uber already has strong restaurant supply and payment infrastructure.

- The starting population of restaurants and how much of it is realistically reachable by Uber in one year.

- Segments such as existing Uber Eats partners, high-volume restaurants, small independent restaurants, chains, and newly acquired merchants.

- Adoption drivers, including faster payouts, easier promotion funding, fee management, loyalty incentives, or integration with existing merchant workflows.

- Adoption barriers, including trust, regulatory/payment constraints, competing banking tools, low perceived value, onboarding complexity, and country-specific limitations.

- Funnel assumptions from eligibility to awareness, activation, first use, and retained usage.

- Sensitivity checks around key assumptions such as market coverage, merchant penetration, conversion rate, and definition of “adoption.”

The goal is to produce a structured, transparent estimate that an Uber product or business leader could use to understand the scale of the Wallet opportunity among restaurants, the assumptions that matter most, and the factors that would make the one-year adoption number higher or lower.