What is Zomato?

Zomato operates as a comprehensive platform for restaurant discovery and food delivery services, catering to the requirements of its customers, restaurant partners, and delivery partners. The company facilitates seamless connectivity among these stakeholders, thereby creating a unified ecosystem.

This platform provides users with the ability to discover and explore various restaurants, peruse menus, leave and read reviews, as well as order food for delivery or book a table for dining in. Simultaneously, restaurant partners have the opportunity to enhance their visibility and engage with customers while utilising a dependable source for deliveries.

How Does Zomato Work?

Zomato is a comprehensive platform that facilitates the connection between customers and restaurants. Restaurants can partner with Zomato to grow their business by increasing their visibility and exposure to potential customers. By creating a profile on Zomato, restaurants can upload their menus, provide information about their establishment, and showcase their best dishes to attract customers.

Zomato also provides various marketing tools and systems to restaurant partners to help them promote their business. These tools include online advertisements, email marketing campaigns, and social media promotion, among others. By utilising these tools, restaurants can reach a broader audience and increase their customer base.

Zomato’s system streamlines the ordering process for customers, providing them with a user-friendly platform to place orders for delivery or book a table for dining in. Zomato’s delivery service provides restaurant partners with a reliable source of delivery while ensuring that customers receive their orders promptly and accurately.

Overall, Zomato’s platform provides an excellent opportunity for restaurants to grow their business, market themselves to a wider audience, and take advantage of efficient systems for ordering and delivery.

Zomato’s Key Activity

Zomato’s business model comprises six main categories of key activities.

1. Restaurant listings:- Zomato’s initial focus was on being an online directory for restaurants. The company collaborated with restaurants that wanted to increase their visibility on the platform and charged them a commission for featuring them prominently in the feed. Additionally, restaurants paid for the promotion of their events and offers to improve their chances of converting Zomato users into customers. Only after establishing a stronghold in this segment did Zomato expand into other business areas.

2. Food Delivery:- Zomato’s food delivery operations play a crucial role in connecting customers, restaurants, and delivery partners. Customers pay a delivery fee to the restaurants, which then compensate Zomato with a commission for each delivery it facilitates. The revenue earned through this commission is shared between Zomato and the delivery partners. Nonetheless, the earnings from these commissions are dependent on whether Zomato manages the delivery process or if the restaurant handles it on its own.

3. Live Event:- In 2018, Zomato made its foray into the world of branded live events by launching Zomaland, a food festival. This event has been successfully hosted in various Indian states and offers attendees a chance to experience live musical performances and other entertaining activities.

4. White Label Access:- Zomato provides an additional service called Zomato Whitelabel, which consists of a set of technologies that restaurants can utilise to manage their online businesses. One of the main advantages of this platform is that restaurants can create tailor-made food delivery applications to interact with their customers effectively. Furthermore, Zomato collaborates with specific restaurant operators to identify potential expansion opportunities with minimal expenses. The platform also assists by supplying the necessary licences and fulfilling other requirements that may be necessary for such endeavours.

5. Zomato Kitchens:- Zomato offers kitchen infrastructure services to a limited number of restaurant operators by collaborating with diverse entrepreneurs, aiding them in establishing and managing Zomato kitchens with different brand names. This approach enables entrepreneurs to finance restaurants with an investment of at least Rs 35 lakh. With more than 180 functional kitchens presently, Zomato offers investors monthly returns ranging from Rs 2 to 4 lakh.

6. Hyperpure:- Zomato’s initiative, Hyperpure, seeks to facilitate direct access for restaurants to a wide range of products including fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry, seafood, dairy, groceries, and beverages. This is achieved through collaboration with farmers and mills, involving both producers and processors, in sourcing these goods.

Zomato’s Key Partners

Zomato’s business model can be divided into the following customer key partners

1. Local Restaurants:-By collaborating with restaurants, Zomato assists them in enhancing their online visibility and presence, enabling them to attract their intended audiences and explore untapped customer markets.

2. Users:-Zomato serves as a one-stop solution for users, offering them a platform to search, discover, and explore various restaurants and eateries, as well as order food or reserve a table for dining out.

3. Delivery Personal:- Zomato’s doorstep delivery services for its customers are made possible through partnerships with delivery providers who provide full-time or part-time delivery services, thereby completing the entire delivery chain.

4. Reviewers:- Users who actively review restaurants, cafes, and other food establishments on Zomato provide valuable information to other users about the cuisine and other aspects of the eatery, often in the form of text or graphics.

In addition to its core services, Zomato has formed partnerships with a range of other businesses, including Uber Taxi, Visa, and PayPal. Through its collaboration with Uber Taxi, Zomato’s customers are able to book a ride directly to the restaurant of their choice, eliminating the need to use multiple apps and providing a seamless solution for both transportation and dining needs. Zomato’s various partnerships also offer support in areas such as location scouting, hiring procedures, market research, accounting, and navigating political and legal issues.