Zomato has announced its plans to start accepting table reservations and will introduce cashless facility in India soon
By Shruti Dhapola
Months after they entered the food ordering segment in many Indian cities, Zomato has announced its decision to start accepting table reservations and launch a point of sales system for restaurant owners in the coming months.
The latest announcements are a further indicator of Zomato’s big shift this year, with the company moving from search and discovery to food ordering and now table reservations in India. The shift comes in the light of increasing competition from newer rivals like FoodPanda and TinyOwl which were already present in the food delivery space.
“Our search traffic gives us lot of leverage. For instance, we now have around 10,000 orders per day. All of this was supposed to be a natural extension for our product, but the timing was not supposed to be now. We saw the competition and went ahead with the new products,” says Deepinder Goyal, CEO and co-founder Zomato.
“With reservations coming soon, we want to ensure that we are the first in the market,” he added. The table reservation system will be a fully automated and will work in realtime. Users who call ahead as well as walk-ins will be able to take advantage of the feature. Once a table is ready, the restaurant will send a notification, even to walk-in users, through the Zomato Book feature. “We’re going to have our systems at the restaurants and it will be all real-time confirmations. So you won’t have to wait for someone to come call you, it will be all automated,” says Deepinder.
Zomato plans to start with the top 20 per cent restaurants to roll out the table reservation system as, Deepinder says these restaurants drive 70 per cent of the revenue in the industry. “We have not yet decided whether the table reservations system will also get its separate app. It all depends on how many restaurants we can get on board,” he adds.
Zomato claims to be the leader in 18 countries out of the 22 it is present in. However, the cashless facility like it offers in Dubai is yet to hit India. “The experience is very bad in India because of the two-factor authentication,” says Deepinder. The company plans to bring cashless feature to Australia and New Zealand by next month. “We don’t always have to start everything with India.”