Presented by: Loma Komeiha, Hassan Hodroj, Amar Abbani, Ahmad Abdel Malak, Yasmina Moghnieh, Fatima Baydoun
Zomato is India’s largest food delivery, dining and restaurant discovery service platform. Zomato grants customers the ability to order food online, track orders, benefit from offers and discounts, book a table, and discover top cuisines, restaurants, and dishes in their area. Arguably Zomato’s most distinguishing feature, the app allows users to access restaurant details by looking up menus, ratings, reviews, contact details, and map directions. Customers who have visited restaurants found on the app are also able to send in pictures from their experience in order to help other customers make an informed decision. On the opposite end, restaurants listed on Zomato are provided with industry-specific marketing tools in order to attract and retain customers. The app also regularly runs promotional campaigns for restaurants listed exclusively on Zomato, providing increased visibility. (Zomato, n.d.)
While Zomato sounds like any foodie and restauranteur’s dream on paper, in practice, it is very different. Many of the aforementioned services are available only in India, Zomato’s main country of operation. Zomato segments its operations into three geographical ones: India, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the Rest of the World (ROW) (Australia, New Zealand, Philippines, Lebanon, Turkey, Poland, Qatar, Ireland…) (Business Insider India, 2021). As of November 2022, Zomato was operational in its full capacity only in India and the UAE (Financial Express, 2022) after it gradually began halting its full operations in the 22 ROW countries it operated in, with Lebanon being the last international market it exited in November 2021(Business Insider India, 2021), though it has been confirmed that the app will surrender its delivery services in the UAE to Kuwaiti delivery app Talabat at the end of November 2022. Zomato’s CEO explained this move by claiming that the business has the capacity to grow at a much faster pace than its currently at, diverting its attention to more local ventures and businesses (Financial Express, 2022). It is important to note that users in the ROW are still able to access restaurant details through the app, providing some form of business for Zomato in these countries. However, even in this regard, the app has some shortcomings: Very few restaurants are listed in most countries (even before Zomato’s halt of full operations), average prices and ratings of restaurants on the app are skewed, there is little variety in the cuisines offered, and table booking is not available everywhere.
The below visualizations provide a sense of the distribution of restaurants on Zomato as well as their characteristics in order to better understand the outlined problems:
Given its current stance on its international presence, Zomato can still make use of its distinguishing feature and maintain its position as a restaurant aggregator, albeit without food delivery services, through:
Increasing the number of and diversify the restaurants available in the countries it operates in, especially in major cities. Starting with smaller restaurants first might be a cautious step, especially in countries where Zomato might be facing competition from other apps in its category.
Diversifying the price ranges of restaurants in different countries found on the app to cover varying tastes and budgets.
Increasing the number of restaurants that offer table booking, not only in India and the UAE, but also in the ROW countries where Zomato once offered this feature (UK and Philippines, for example), especially as a surge in the number of people dining-in has been seen in our post-COVID world (Franzreb, 2022).
Creating partnerships with local delivery service apps in ROW countries that Zomato can link its users to if they would like to place an online delivery order after viewing restaurant information on Zomato – similar to how Zomato currently redirects users who wish to place an online order in the UAE to Talabat per their partnership agreement.
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