Do you use Tinyowl or FoodPanda regularly? Then this news is for you guys. Starting from March, there will be a new player in town. The online restaurant search and discovery platform, Zomato is all set to roll out its own food delivery services from March 16, 2015 with almost 2000 restaurants to partner as confirmed by its CEO and Co-founder, Deepender Goyal on Techcrunch. The company believes that the number could go up to 10,000 within a few months of launch.
Zomato has already started testing deliveries with its internal staff and some handpicked restaurants. It has also promised to roll out the service internationally soon. Zomato wants to position itself as the Uber of food and will follow the ratings based commission model . What’s interesting is that a good customer review will mean a smaller commission, while a poor review could see the cut go up to 15 percent. That will also mean that a company has to manually accept orders first before it is processed unlike the model followed by other food ordering services.
Currently, the Indian Food Delivery Industry is populated with companies like TinyOwl and FoodPanda which regularly offer discounts and other offers through online coupons. The industry is also home to some niche players like Box8 which deliver their own food. It remains to be seen, what will the entry of Zomato mean for the competition but we are expecting some price wars in this space.
With this foray into food delivery, Zomato is giving out signals that it is now willing to venture beyond the Restaurant Search space. Earlier, Zomato had also started an in-restaurant payment system in Dubai. Slowly, but surely Zomato looks keen to expand its functionality into other facets of the food industry.
