In three months of the launch of the subscription-based Gold membership programme, food discovery and delivery platform Zomato has claimed to have 150,000 Zomato Gold users in India.
Zomato Gold is a membership programme for premium dining out and social drinking experiences. The membership offer is currently available across Hyderabad, Pune, Delhi NCR, Mumbai and Bengaluru. There are over 2000 restaurants and bars currently listed under the programme.
The company states that 40 per cent of its total sales were referral driven and it has also found 3x increase in Zomato traffic on Gold vis-a-vis non-Gold restaurants.
The Gurugram-based company has priced gold membership at Rs 599 for three months period while annual plan costs Rs 1499. However, at the time of writing this article, Zomato Gold membership was sold out.
India is the third country after UAE (Dubai, Abu Dhabi) and Portugal (Lisbon and Porto) where it has introduced the Gold membership programme.
Zomato has been experimenting with various kinds of programmes to improvise its offerings and maintain a loyal customer base.
In April last year, Zomato had launched ‘Zomato Treats’, at a subscription fees of Rs 249. It lets subscribers to avail a free dessert with every meal they order across 16 cities in India.
The food discovery and order platform also announced a commission-free campaign for its restaurant partners in September last year.
Last year, the company also claimed to achieve profitability in all the 24 countries of the world where it operates.
Zomato has been following an aggressive growth path. Last month, Alibaba-owned entity Alipay pumped-in $200 million in the food tech major.
It is competing against its rival Swiggy in the food delivery space. Following the investment, its arch-rival Swiggy received $100 million in a Series F round from Naspers and Tencent-backed Meituan-Dianping.
Over the past couple of years, the food-tech space in India is currently on a rise. As per a report by RedSeer, India’s online food delivery market comprising of aggregators and cloud kitchens grew at 150 per cent last year.
Of late, food ordering and delivery verticals are getting competitive as Bengaluru-based Swiggy and Zomato are fighting aggressively to woo users as well as restaurant partners. Homegrown ride-hailing major Ola had also entered the food ordering space by acquiring Foodpanda.
The development was first reported by Moneycontrol.
