Zomato is a one-stop solution for all the food lovers and explorers. It provides a unique platform where the food entrepreneurs can meet their potential customers, showcase their food items and raise the lust for food by posting exquisite food images and getting their valuable feedback and review on the food items. It is a food paradise for the customers as it provides the facility of searching for food, based on locations, choice of cuisine, restaurant type and many others and then place the order with simple payment methods, and all of these available under one roof.
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Foundation
Zomato which started as Foodiebay was established in July 2008 by two IIT Delhi alumnus, Deepinder Goyal, and Pankaj Chaddah. It has its headquarters in Gurugram, India.
Business Model
Zomato primarily being a food porn site stepped in as an online review platform for restaurants, bar, and cafe. The model basically consisted of subscription system for the restaurants registered in their system and transaction charges on event booking and orders. They also collected banner charges from their owners. The best part of their working style lies in their process of updating their data every 3 months so as to stay relevant for their users. Let’s have a look at its revenue streams:
- Restaurant advertising, this is where they charge for the restaurant banners on their portal and makes them visible to the users when they go for a restaurant search. This accounts for about 70% of their revenue.
- Event advertising, it is mostly restaurant based advertisers who promote their event through Zomato and revenue of around 20% is generated by promoting as well as selling tickets for the event venues.
- Consulting services, They help to find the restaurant owners a perfect place for setting up the next outlet of their chain using their previous data also to predict the scope and demand of a place.
- Food Ordering, It has recently jumped into food ordering space wherein they collect 7.5 to 15% transaction fees for orders delivered through its portal. It has also introduced the system of the reserving tables and collects charges on that as well.
- Merchant widgets, through this feature, it provides premium access to the merchants to modify their menu listings, food images, and others whenever they need and also enables them to collect ratings from the customers after their order delivery. This feature also allows listing all their chain branches at a single place.
Journey
It entered the market with the name of Foodiebay in July 2008 and was renamed to Zomato in November 2010. In 2011, it launched the mobile application for users. In September 2012, it expanded overseas to UAE, Qatar, Sri Lanka, UK, and others. It acquired UrbanSpoon in the US, Cibano in Italy, Gastronauci in Poland, Lunchtime in the Czech Republic and Obedovat in Slovakia.
It began with a restaurant search tool later on added reviewing system and then went on to food ordering. The expansion was fairly smooth and now it has integrated with cab booking giant Uber too. It currently operates in 24 countries including Australia and the US. It has currently employed more than 2500 people. It has partnered nearly 12,000 restaurants and has a listing of 1.4 million restaurants over 10,000 cities, it receives monthly orders of 3 million on an average and has 90 million monthly visitors to the portals.
Competition
Zomato believes in a healthy competition and works upon strategies for improvement in what they do in their space. In the Indian market, they have competitors like Foodpanda, JustEat, Burrp, Swiggy and in global markets, Yelp, Zagat, and Opentable.