New Delhi based online restaurant discovery portal Zomato is planning to start delivering food as well soon in the future. The decision from company came in order to boost its revenues. As per reports from Hindu Business Line, Zomato plans to start the service in another few weeks and has carried out some third party transactions on a pilot basis.
Zomato has presence in 13 countries including India and allows consumers to read menus of restaurants but a consumer has to still make phone calls to the restaurant to place an order.
Although earlier, founder of Zomato Deepinder Goyal issued statement that the company will never enter into online food ordering business due to lack of customisation, technological issues and poor logistics in India however number of online food delivery portal such as Foodpanda, TastyKhana, DeliveryChef, BigBite, Titbit, JustEat and JustDial are making success out this revenue model.
Online food portals have witnessed over 150 per cent growth in their orders last year on the back of increased Net penetration, growth in smartphone users and changing lifestyle. In 2012, the market stood at ₹1,000 crore and is all set to touch ₹6,000 crore by 2017.
Eversince Zomato's inception in 2008, the startup has done very few experiment on its model of business. In 2011, events section on Zomato was introduced however later Zomato shut down its events section and included some of the features into its core restaurant product.
From last two years Zomato is serially acquiring online restaurant portals abroad and most recent being Czech Republic's and Slovakia's largest online restaurant guides, Lunchtime.cz and Obedovat.sk, Zomato acquired it for a combined amount of $3.25 million.
Currently, Zomato covers over 250,000 restaurants across 13 countries including India, Brazil, UK, UAE and South Africa as major countries.
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