Zomato shuts down its online ordering services in four cities

Bringing up the business to a new level, the tech companies are trying their hands in the small towns. For this extension a lot of marketing and ads are being done to bring up the company into the eyes of the people of these towns. A large sum of money is being spent in making the infrastructure and appointing up of the new employs. But it seems that these small towns need some more time to get acquainted with these new technologies. 

Such is the case with Zomato. Zomato, a restaurant search and discovery service company, announced on Monday that they will be shutting their online ordering service in 4 cities. 

The company started its online ordering service in April 2005, which avows its customers to order food online from the restaurants using the aap. They extended their service to 14 different cities in India. 

But this food ordering service by Zomato will be shutting down its online ordering service in Lucknow, Kochi, Indore and Coimbatore, as these cities are still not ready for these services. 

Pankaj Chaddah, Co-Founder, Zomato, said, “We are shutting down the ordering business in Lucknow, Kochi, Indore, and Coimbatore. The size of the market is in these cities is small right now and is growing with time. We will re-launch when the time is right. In the meanwhile, we will continue to offer the best content (including scanned menus) to ensure that foodies are able to find and order great food.” 

According to the company the combined ordering volume in these four cities is less than 2% of the Zomato’s total ordering volume. In spite of the ample marketing and advertising there isn’t any significant increase in the ordering volumes in these cities. 

Later added by Pankaj Chaddah “The Small towns are still not ready for the online food ordering business, but once they are, Zomato will reconsider its strategy.” 

The food techs in India are slowly loosing up their pace. Last year, around 300 people which is nearly 10% of the work employs had to be fired by the Zomato. Similar is the case with many other food techs such as Gurgoan based food delivery platform Grofers , which has to shut down its branches in nine cities.  Grofers stated “not much uptake even after running massive marketing campaigns” as a major reason to close operations in the nine cities. Lately, the Food startups have either shut downed or have reduced their operations.