Righting the wrongs

It came, it won, rose high and then it fell. The next step would have to be to get up and rectify the mistakes. And Zomato is doing exactly that.

Becoming a unicorn soon after entering the market and raising huge funds, Zomato had set out to mark its footprint across many countries, shifting focus from its main USP, search and discovery. As a result, things went haywire. It had to cut operating costs from $9 million to $1.7 million which included pulling out from nine countries like the US and the UK.

It now has feet-on-the-street (physical presence) in 14 counties, which were 23 last year. These countries are where Zomato had launched recently and were not market leaders.

However, the company has recognised the crux and in a recent blog post has accepted the fact that its app has become outdated and a serious effort is needed to revamp it.

The blog post read, “We have a confession to make. Over the last two years, we’ve been so busy with our international expansion and our manic focus on winning delivery, that we let the basic USP of our core product – search and discovery – suffer a fair bit. Our own app feels a bit outdated to us, and we’re now beefing up (no pun intended!) our engineering and product teams to get our app back to being one that’s delightfully enjoyable to use and explore.”

The app revamping mainly focuses on improving the user experience by personalising various aspects of the product. The improved app has personalised online food ordering product and main search and discovery product as well.

This means that now there is an added layer of personalisation on the basis of user’s search, browsing, and order history. This will help Zomato identify the most picked restaurants and put them on top of the stack when user will browse through the app.

Earlier, restaurants in the online ordering flow used to appear based on factors such as popularity, and distance from your physical location, making the list static and use to force one to scroll endlessly to find that one place to order food from.

The blog post read, “Your search, browsing, and order history on Zomato offer some very strong indicators, such as your cuisine preferences, how much you spend on orders on an average, and what you typically order at a given time of day.”

It also shows user traits like how one has been using Zomato in general and show places one may not have ordered from yet but might like to try.

This move has already had its effect with increasing in a whopping 2.5 percent conversion rate.

The app now shows at the top the dishes on each menu page for a restaurant that the user is most likely to order. The ‘Recommendations’ tab has also been modified to sort and pick dishes for users ensuring that they are able to build an entire meal for two from that one tab, without having to swipe at all.

The dishes are now picked on the basis of past order history, other users’ order history and corresponding order ratings received for those dishes.

These steps, Zomato claims, have made orders being placed 21% quicker. The blog post said, “… these are just baby steps towards making Zomato more personal and loved. We are going to get smarter, and will make up for all the work that we didn’t do for you over the last couple odd years. There’s still a lot more to come, and we can’t wait for you to see it. 1% done…”

Zomato currently competes with online food delivery market platforms Swiggy and Foodpanda. However, considers its online listing platform as a cutting edge over other portals.