Zomato asks partner restaurants to serve 45-day notice before opting out of Gold discounting scheme

Food delivery major Zomato has asked some of its partner restaurants that they are required to give a 45-day notice if they wish to opt out of Gold discounting scheme as part of the existing terms and conditions, a media report said. According to Mint, Zomato, in an e-mail on 15 August to its Gold partner restaurants, said that in case members wish to log back to its Gold platform they will be required to pay a sign-up fee. Zomato Gold has 1 million subscribers and 6,500 restaurants as its partners. The Economic Times on Thursday reported that as many as 300 prominent restaurant brands in Gurgaon were delisting themselves from aggregators and table reservation services including Zomato, citing “unsustainable” deep discounting. [caption id=“attachment_7112701” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. News18[/caption] In February, Zomato delisted over 5,000 restaurants for non-compliance with the hygiene standards set by food regulator FSSAI. Recently Zomato laid-off 60 employees in its customer support team at its office in Gurgaon. “Over the last few months, our service quality has improved, and the percentage of orders requiring support has come down significantly creating redundancies for about 1 percent (60 people) of our workforce. Most of these redundancies are in the customer support department and also include movements to other departments as part of our Internal Job Placement (IJP) exercise. Our IJP program is a key lateral movement initiative that lets employees move from one department to another to gain and renew skills at Zomato. As we’ve expanded to 500+ cities across India we also expanded our workforce by over 2000+ and this requires constant realignment to new departments and results in some redundancies with the scaling of technology,” Zomato spokesperson had said. The online food ordering market in India is likely to grow at over 16 percent annually to touch $17.02 billion by 2023, according to a study by business consultancy firm Market Research Future. The growth in online food ordering market has been attributed to the rising number of women among the working population in most of the metro cities. Bengaluru gets the highest number of online orders as compared to other cities with 20 percent of the market share acquired by the southern city, the report said. It is followed by Mumbai, Pune, Delhi and Hyderabad with a share of 18 percent, 17 percent, 15 percent and 12 percent, respectively, while other cities accounted for 18 percent of the market share. With agency inputs