Gurgaon-based restaurant discovery and food ordering app Zomato announced on Monday that it will be shutting down its online ordering service in Lucknow, Kochi, Indore and Coimbatore, reason being the size of markets in these cities are small as of now.
Zomato which started as a restaurant discovery platform launched its online food ordering business in April 2015, which allows the users to order food online from restaurants using its app, and had since expanded this offering to 14 cities across India.
Zomato has 75,000 restaurants listed on its platform in the country. Foodies can use the online ordering feature to order from 12,000 of them. Zomato also works with delivery partners Grab and Delhivery to offer delivery from restaurants which do not otherwise deliver food.
“We are shutting down the ordering business in Lucknow, Kochi, Indore, and Coimbatore. The size of the market is in these cities is small right now and is growing with time. We will re-launch when the time is right,” co-founder Pankaj Chaddah said in a statement.
“These smaller cities are not yet entirely ready for the online food ordering business, but once they are, Zomato will reconsider its strategy,” he added.
The company said despite its recent marketing efforts, including television ads, it didn’t see a significant increase in the order volumes in these few cities.
It said the combined order volume in these four cities accounted for less than 2 per cent of its total order volumes. Overall, Zomato’s online order volume is growing at 40 per cent month-on-month.
Leave a Reply