Rapido's food delivery service Ownly goes live across Bengaluru

After a six-month pilot, Ownly, the food delivery service of ride-hailing platform Rapido, is now live across all regions in Bengaluru. During the pilot phase, which kicked off in August last year, the service was available in select areas of the city, including Koramangala, HSR and BTM Layout.

 

In a virtual town hall organised by the National Restaurants Association of India (NRAI), Vivek Vashishta, head of new initiatives at Rapido, said while the company built its front-end technology along with logistics and customer service capabilities, the pilot phase, however, showed that early restaurant partners did not see immediate growth.

 

“There is a reason we did a pilot for six months. In these six months, our restaurants who signed up with us early did not see any growth. They did not see any growth because we have not started marketing yet and will be doing that soon. If you spend money, customers come, and we are committed to doing that,” he said.

 

Without giving a specific timeline, Vashishta added that the platform will look to expand in other cities in a short period.

 

It could not be verified how many orders were being made on a daily basis.

 

The newly launched platform operates on a zero-commission model and does not charge any fee from restaurants, but only a standard delivery fee based on distance from customers. However, for now, it is charging a flat delivery fee of Rs 30 per order.

 

The platform was set up in collaboration with NRAI, which claims to represent over 50,000 eateries, to solve a few pain points in the food delivery space, including high commissions, heavy discounting and the lack of access to customer data by restaurants.

 

As a result, Ownly, which aims to provide a third alternative to challenge the duopoly of Swiggy and Zomato, promises zero commission, no listing, onboarding or subscription fees to restaurants, while charging only an “honest delivery fee” from customers. The platform added that it will also not charge a visibility fee for restaurants and that the process will be “democratic”.

 

Recently, Zomato agreed to share customer data with restaurant partners after securing customer consent. According to industry sources, Swiggy was also likely to follow suit, but no development has yet happened on that front.

 

Going forward, Ownly will train its Rapido two-wheeler captains (Rapido refers to its drivers as “captains”) to bring down the cost of food delivery. Currently, the platform is using a specialised fleet to handle deliveries. On a daily basis, Rapido completes six million rides.