Chapter – 1

1.1 Introduction

Zomato is an Indian restaurant aggregator and food delivery start up founded in 2008. It
was started by Deepinder Goyal and Pankaj Chaddah. It provides information, menus and
user-reviews of restaurants, and also has food delivery options from partner restaurants in
selected cities. As of 2016, the service is available in 24 countries. Zomato started under the
name, Foodiebay initially. Later In November 2010, it was renamed Zomato. By 2011,
Zomato expanded to other cities across the country in Delhi NCR, Mumbai, Bangalore,
Chennai, Pune and Kolkata. Subsequently in 2012, the company expanded operations
internationally in several countries like the United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Qatar, the
United Kingdom, the Philippines, and South Africa. In 2013, Zomato was launched in New
Zealand, Turkey, Brazil and Indonesia, with its website and apps available in Turkish,
Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian and English languages. Further in April 2014, The
acquisition of Seattle-based food portal Urbanspoon marked the firm's entry into the United
States, Canada and Australia, and brought it into direct competition with Yelp, Zagat and
opentable. With its cloud kitchen, the company aimed to help restaurants to expand their
presence without incurring any fixed costs. Later in September 2017, Zomato claimed that
the company had "turned profitable" in the 24 countries operated in and announced that
the "zero commission model" to be introduced for partner restaurants. Towards the end of
2017 Zomato stopped accepting updates from its active users by not utilising moderators to
verify and make updates. Restaurant information was not updated. Users of the app
reported issues with new features to pay for orders.

Zomato narrowed down its losses by 34% to ₹389 Cr for the financial year 2016–17, from
₹590.1 Cr crore in the previous year 2015-16.

In September 2019, Zomato fired the highest number (541 people) of employees almost
10% of workforce working on back end activities like customer service, merchant and
delivery partner support functions

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1.2 Objectives
To analyze the online marketing of Zomato, an Indian restaurant aggregator and

food delivery platform.

To highlight the various aspects and processes of Zomato and its market capital.

Statistics of profit and loss of Zomato and its balance sheet through financial years.

To offer certain suggestion and recommendation.

1.3 Scope

As Zomato is a growing online food delivery industry and it has shown remarkable
effects on the market, its case study is needed to be emphasized to provide information to
startups.
Its statistics in the previous years has been given in full details so as to give a clearer
idea about online food delivery market.

1.4 Methods

The various products and services of Zomato have been shown here in the paper.
The history of the company Zomato along with its purposes has been presented in the
paper. The data collected is both from primary and secondary data like magazines,
newspaper, various other media which resolves around the products and services of
Zomato. The data collected explains detail about the online food delivery platform Zomato
and its services.

1.5 Limitations

The data regarding the Company was insufficient, sufficient data was unavailable.

The data regarding the Company’s balance sheet and profit may be inadequate.

Delay and fluctuation in sales data.

Varying market conditions.

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Chapter – 2

Discussion

Vision of Zomato

To expand to more 50 countries.

Milestones of Zomato

Number of listed restaurants: in 2008 it was 4000 restaurants which increase to

94000 in 2013 and currently 384,100 in Q1 of 2015.

Monthly visitors of Zomato increases to 35 million in 2014 which was 11 million in

2013 and 0.015 million in 2008.

Yearly revenue of Zomato in 2008 was 0.06 crores which increased to 11.3 crores in

2013.

Spread in 21 countries worldwide.

Success Factor of Zomato

First mover advantage.

Strong content platform.

Efficient employees.

Good rating mechanism and social platform.

Funding from experienced source.

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Strategy of Zomato:

Zomato works with keen interest on various strategies to achieve their goal. It includes:

Financial strategy: To increase their fund and revenue.

Marketing strategy: To tap their customers from across the globe.

Growth strategy: To grow continuously and increase their customers and page

traffic.

Globalization strategy: To expand themselves across the whole globe as a leading

service provider.

Marketing Strategy of Zomato

Featured and user friendly website.

Global mobile app.

Focusing on digital marketing channels for potential customers.

Acquire the competitors: To be the largest resource in food supply market, Zomato

bought urbanspoon for $52 million to enter US, Canada and Australia.

Simpler review and rating system.

Integrating other tools in their marketing strategy has given them wonderful hike in

their business.

Sales promotion: Coupons and price-offs.

Direct Marketing: Phone call and direct mail.

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Investments of Zomato

In August 2010, Zomato got its first round of funding of $1million from Info Edge, India. And
in September 2011, got its second round of funding of $3.5million from the same financier.
Next year Zomato upraised its third round of another $2.5 million from the same investor
and again in early 2013, Info Edge funded fourth round worth $10 million which gives them
a 57.9% stake in Zomato.
Seeing the future and growth of Zomato, Sequoia Capital and Info Edge, India in November
2013 funded Zomato with $37 million. Info Edge now owned 50.1% of Zomato on an
investment of INR 143 crores. The total funding raised by Zomato till November 2013 stands
at $53.5 million.
In November 2014, Zomato came up with a fresh round of funding of $60 million at a post-
money valuation of ~US$660 million. This round of funding was jointly headed by Info Edge
India Limited and VY Capital, with involvement from Sequoia Capital. This made a total
funding of over US$113 million for Zomato.
Recently in a fresh round of funding in April 2015, Info Edge, India has invested an amount
of Rs 155 crore in Zomato.
Info Edge said in a statement “Being Info Edge’s fair share of Zomato’s recent fund raises of
USD 50 million”. Upon completion of the allotment of shares, Info Edge’s aggregate
investment in Zomato will be about Rs 484 crore.
As the website was launched, it became popular soon and expanded rapidly, covering many
important regions of India including Kolkata, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Pune by the year
2010. Apart from being a service provider within India, Zomato.com now has branched to
overseas in the regions of Philippines, New Zealand, Qatar, South Africa, Sri Lanka, the
United Arab Emirates and the UK as well.
The website covers a list of over 1, 20,000 restaurants across all these regions catering to
more than 15 million customers worldwide. With its headquarter in New
Delhi, Zomato.com is providing career opportunity to over 350 employees all across the
globe.

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Social media Strategy

Zomato uses different platforms to engage their customers with them.

Facebook

There is a huge engagement of customers on Facebook. Zomato has more than 600k strong
Facebook community.

Twitter

Twitter is a place where Zomato is sparkling. It has more than 114 k followers there. Used as
a conversation platform with the customers, Zomato is doing a great job in engaging their
customers on their page. They answers all the queries raised over the platform by the
customers.

Blog

Sharing and updating with all the latest updates is a key point for any organization. Zomato
uses their blog as their mouthpiece to share all the latest updates.

Pinterest

The platform shares the food experience with great content to attract their customers. The
company needs to do a lot of job to make its followers on this platform which will certainly
work in their promotion.

Instagram

This platform lets the user share the foodie photographs just by sharing it using the tag #
Zomato. The image automatically gets shared on the microsite.

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Success Story

The key factor for Zomato success is its marketing strategy and in-depth knowledge of their

competitors. Zomato aims to be a place where the foodies hangout. The company has

spread in 20 countries with its headquarter in New Delhi, India providing service to over 35

million values customers per month. The list of registered restaurants on the website has

increased to 384,100 till March 2015.

Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest are the 3 main platforms which made the base for the

success of Zomato with a deep presence among their customers. Other than that, Zomato

has extensively invested a lot over SMO’s, SEO’s and has worked a lot to improve its UI and

make it more user interactive. Side by side with a goal to branch globally, they also invest

much on TV ads to bombinate Zomato.

Pankaj Chaddah, the co-founder of Zomato agreed, “ads on the mobile app have changed

the revenue game for them”. More than 50% of their total traffic comes from their mobile

apps. “Using location-based services to target ads around a consumer’s physical location

helps make this decision easier” said Chaddah.

Sanjeev Bikchandani, co-founder of Info Edge and Zomato’s largest shareholder said, “the

firm will focus on segments such as online food ordering, restaurant booking, subscription-

based services and billing inside of restaurants”.

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Chapter – 3

1.1 Findings

Zomato has acquired 12 startups globally. The company pursued other acquisitions
such as lunchtime.cz and obedovat.sk for a combined US$3.25 million. While in
September 2018, Zomato acquired Bengaluru-based food e-marketplace TongueStun
Food for about $18 million in a cash and stock deal.
On 4 June 2015, an Indian security researcher hacked the Zomato website and
gained access to information about 62.5 million users. Using the vulnerability, he
was able to access personal data of users such as telephone numbers, email
addresses and Instagram private photos using their Instagram access token. Zomato
fixed the issue within 48 hours of it becoming apparent.
In July 2019, Zomato received a Hindu customer's complaint that he was assigned a
non-Hindu delivery boy for his food order in Jabalpur and had asked Zomato to
provide a Hindu delivery boy. The customer alleged that Zomato had refused to
change the rider after which he asked to cancel the order. The customer then posted
this incident on social media site, Twitter after which Zomato responded to the
message stating: "Food doesn't have a religion. It is a religion.", as a twitter
response.
On 17 August 2019, more than 1,200 restaurants logged off from Zomato because of
their offer of discount programmes at dine-in restaurants. In Pune alone, more than
450 restaurants stopped serving to Zomato Gold beause of aggressive discounts and
loss of business. However, Zomato founder Goyal admitted mistake, became ready
to rectify it and called for sanity and truce. He also urged restaurants to stop #Logout
campaign.

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1.2 Suggestion

Zomato should target customers of metro and city area as there are more
restaurants in these suburbs.
Zomato should stay out of controversies for which it is getting its goodwill down and
as well its market.
Zomato should concentrate more on its food delivery personal and their welfare by
increasing pay scale and incentives.
It must open its own certified restaurants, at least one or two in every major cities in
order to increase its profit and readily available market.

1.3 Conclusion

As the online marketing industry is growing at a high pace like Amazon, Flipkart and many

others, Zomato has a great opportunity to build a robust food delivery empire online. It

needs to adopt different new strategy and innovative ideas in order to increase its demand

in the market. It has attracted new rivals like Swiggy and other online players with whom it

needs to go on with the market and help our country in building a developed economy. In

this project every single detail regarding Zomato and its business in India and abroad with

proper details statistically. I excuse for any error in the information of the project. Thank

You.

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Bibliography

Magazine
 Times of India

 India Today

 Business India

Website
 www.zomato.com

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