Swiggy has been in talks with restaurants for over a month and has been experimenting with sharing customer data and rationalising commissions or the take rates it charges restaurants for delivering food and unbundling services it offers restaurants under order direct. The plan is to charge a base fee, besides a nominal delivery fee. Finally, after much talks online food-delivery service provider Swiggy has started piloting ‘order direct’ in partnership with select restaurants in Mumbai.
Issues such as bundling of services, data masking, deep discounting, lack of transparency and exorbitant commissions have been highlighted in the submission that the restaurant bodies raised with Swiggy. Later, in an additional complaint, NRAI also claimed that the two aggregators forced restaurants to give discounts while charging them exorbitant commissions and delaying payments.
Now with smaller firms like Peppo and DotPe etc. emerging in the food delivery space, fueling a direct ordering channel for restaurants earlier this year. It is finally time for the biggies to bow down and adapt the new trend. While Peppo offers restaurants a platform through which they can manage online ordering, DotPe enables merchants to digitise their business. It helps merchants create online websites, make digital payments, provide analytics of customers and aggregate deliveries.
On an average, Zomato and Swiggy charge 28-30 percent commission from restaurants for facilitating an order. Now with the ‘order direct’ system Swiggy is reforming certain aspects for select restaurants only.
