Zomato opens new vertical for fresh revenue stream

Eyeing a fresh revenue stream, restaurant search, discovery and ordering portal Zomato has launched Zomato Base, a cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) management product.

"It is basically a product that takes care of all the back-end operations till the final bill of food is given to the customer. POS technology available in India is outdated by a decade. There are very few cloud-based POS technology options available in the country," said Pankaj Chaddah, co-founder of Zomato.

According to Chaddah, Zomato Base is a powerful and easy-to-use Android-based POS system offering restaurants a host of features including menu, recipe and inventory management; a built-in payment solution that accepts debit and credit card payments; CRM; and real-time analytics, among others.

"Zomato Base was piloted at The Beer Cafe outlet in Gurgaon earlier this year and has been tweaked overtime to cater to the unique needs of each of the chain's 35 outlets across Delhi NCR, Bengaluru, Mumbai, Pune, Chandigarh, Amritsar, and Ludhiana," said Chaddah.

The Beer Cafe said the product would help it monitor and manage all its outlets across India. "By seamlessly integrating operational solutions such as menu management and remote inventory management into a single system, Zomato Base will make our day-to-day functioning efficient. This platform is built to provide real-time outlet-level analytics, which would allow us to plan our supply chain better and provide benefits to our guests through effective promotion and profiling," said Rahul Singh, founder & CEO, The Beer Cafe.

Chaddah said the company would rope in around 1,000 restaurants including major food chains by the end of this year. At present, other than The Beer Cafe, there are around 15 stand-alone restaurants that are using Zomato Base.

"There is no test deployment for this product. We are monetising this service from day zero. We hope this vertical would be profitable in the next two years," said Chaddah. "Zomato Base aims to drive deeper engagement, greater business intelligence, and enable restaurants to offer more personalised experiences to their customers."

In February, Zomato had said it operationally broke even in six markets including India, West Asia (United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Qatar) and Southeast Asia (the Philippines and Indonesia).

The company has till date raised $225 million from investors including Info Edge, Sequoia India, Vy Capital, and Temasek. According to the company, 22 per cent of its traffic and 35 per cent of revenue comes from India. Recently, it entered the transactions business and now serves around 15,000 orders a day at an average ticket price of Rs 575.