One of the biggest online food delivery and dine-in aggregator in India- Zomato’s founder and chief executive – Deepinder Goyal late on Saturday tweeted: “In the interest of consumers, we request restaurant owners, to stop the logout campaign, and have a collaborative discussion with internet aggregators for finding a sustainable way forward.” This is the chief’s direct plea to restaurant owners to stop the ongoing “#Logout campaign” where hundreds of restaurants have delisted from the dine-in platforms of Zomato, Nearbuy, Magicpin, EazyDinner, and Dineout.
The move, led by the National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI) that represents 500,000 restaurants nationwide, was triggered in major Indian cities where restaurant owners have listed the cause for such a step being “unsustainable deep discounting.”
According to reports by ET, the logout campaign started at Gurgaon, with 300 restaurants delisting to detox consumers from their “discount addictions.” Commenting on the situation, Priyank Sukhija of Fiddle Foods said, “We were being arm-twisted enough — it was high time we took such a step. We can’t offer such unsustainable discounting to consumers, it disrupts our entire books.”
Zomato Gold has been a major hit but took the brunt when a lot of bargain hunters also joined in. This has continued to badly hurt segments of the restaurant industry. In another tweet, Goyal pointed out that despite a 4.5x difference in the per capita incomes of China and India, the average cost per delivery order is almost similar.
According to the Live Mint, “Last week, over 1,000 restaurants pulled out of membership over concerns that reservation/ordering apps were hurting business with their discounting driven model.”
Over a series of tweets, Deepinder said that Zomato is “committed to working with the industry” and will make modifications in Zomato Gold for a win-win situation for both customers and restaurant owners. Last year too, the community had raised concerns with Zomato Gold rules and the required modifications were made.
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