Zomato, Swiggy resort to discounts to tempt customers

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Here is another reason for you to skip the kitchen and order food online. Zomato and Swiggy have come up with discounts as steep as 60% on mouth-watering dishes available on their platform.

The food-delivery aggregators are offering such tempting offers as they look to shift gears. Earlier during Covid-19 pandemic order value had increased. But now they want volumes to go up too. They have also hiked marketing and advertising expenditures significantly to grab the eye-balls of the customers.

Discounts are the new flavour

Food-delivery aggregators Swiggy and Zomato have rolled out several discount schemes earlier too to bring in more and more customers. This strategy had worked well for them. Note that discounts aren’t very common in restaurants otherwise. But these revamped discount offers are a result of enhanced unit economics after the pandemic has battered the food business.

The nationwide lockdown in March 2020 had led to food delivery orders nosediving by close to 70-80% as most restaurants remained shut or operated on a skeletal capacity.

As restrictions eased gradually, the number of orders picked up and aggregators reached new highs in terms of orders in the months between August and December 2020.

Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities lead

According to media reports, Tier 2 cities saw the highest surge in demand in cloud kitchens and food delivery as compared to smaller cities during the second wave of Covid-19.

As per Swiggy, people from Tier 2 and 3 cities like Tirupur, Jodhpur, Belagavi, Agartala and Jamshedpur have adopted online food delivery on a big scale. Some Tier 2 cities saw a surge as big as 50%, while other cities clocked their highest ever numbers.

As per industry insiders, Swiggy began rolling out offers and discounts recently and more consistently, while its rival Zomato was quick to follow suit.

Rs 120 is the amount at which discounts given out by these companies have been capped at and it is a move to enhance volumes and subsequently expand their consumer base.