The troubles for Zomato seem to be nowhere close to coming to an end. Only days after the online food aggregator denied making further changes to its dining out programme followed by the restaurant body NRAI’s president Rahul Singh’s claims that the changes made wouldn’t be of much help to the logout situation, the restaurant body has now threatened to log out of the programme forever.
“The choice is with him (Deepinder Goyal) what he wants to do with the product. We will be permanently logged out,” Anurag Katriar, Mumbai Chapter Head, NRAI told Financial Express Online.
Zomato’s founder Deepinder Goyal had tweeted last week that “Zomato is logging out of the logout campaign. We have said enough and we are getting back to work.”
Zomato is logging out of the logout campaign. We have said enough and we are getting back to work. I am confident better business sense will prevail at the end.
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) August 22, 2019
NRAI on Monday had also written to the four leading food tech platforms including Swiggy, Uber Eats, Foodpanda and Zomato regarding the eight concerns around delivery business vertical that restaurants highlighted in their meeting with them in various cities.
“Nobody has the intent of killing the whole industry. They (food aggregators) have more riding on it than us. Restaurants existed even before Zomato and Swiggy but their existence is totally based on restaurants,” said Katriar.
Deep discounting, high and uneven commission charges, arbitrary terms and conditions, customer data masking, using customer data to build own brands, forced use of delivery service, unreasonable penalties, and lack of transparency in the ranking of restaurants are the grievance areas of restaurants against the four food aggregators.
“Zomato Gold is impacting 6,500 restaurants. Delivery anomalies (of online platforms) are impacting probably 100,000 restaurants,” said Katriar adding that the “ball lies in their court. Around 2,500 restaurants have already logged out from dine-out feature of platforms across India. The number is growing continuously.”
Goyal, on his part, has in fact highlighted a similar programme to Gold at Rahul Singh’s The Beer Cafe that offers 1+1 benefit on food and drinks.
“This proves that Rahul Singh, is not really against deep discounts, as these discounts are being offered on his own brand, on his own app,” Goyal tweeted on Thursday.
Here’s what I think is going on – pic.twitter.com/bo4DQTe3Qb
— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) August 22, 2019
NRAI is also currently in talks with Dineout, EazyDiner, and Nearbuy, which also saw restaurants logging out apart from Zomato, but are likely to be back in dine-out business in a few days.
“They are making changes to the platform even as we are trying to understand their problem. I am confident that up to a week’s time restaurants will again login on these three platforms,” said Katriar.
NRAI along with food aggregators will meet CCI and consulting firm EY on August 30 on the e-commerce policy and changes to be made.
“CCI had appointed for studying the e-commerce model, the finding of which will be unveiled on August 30 that would also highlight where are the anomalies and how to resolve it,” Katriar added.
