Zomato might now be a $30 billion company, but it seems to keep coming up with features like a fledgling new startup.
Zomato has added an option for users to get change in their digital wallets if they choose to pay with cash and don’t have exact change. The balance will be added to their digital wallets, and can be used to make future orders on Zomato.
“For cash on delivery orders, finding exact change can sometimes be inconvenient,” Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal wrote on X. “Starting today, our customers can pay delivery partners in cash, and ask for the balance amount to be added instantly to their Zomato Money account. This balance can be used towards future delivery orders or dining out,” he added.
Goyal credited grocery delivery company BigBasket for the idea. “Thank you Big Basket for the inspiration for this solution,” he wrote. Goyal also said that the push to develop the feature had come from the company’s delivery partners, three of whom work as product managers at Zomato to help create delivery partner-centric features.
India’s e-commerce space has been evolving for more than a decade, but it’s surprising that this feature to receive balance in a digital wallet isn’t more common. A significant fraction of orders on all e-commerce platforms are through cash, and both customers and delivery partners often have to scramble to find exact change. The solution, incidentally, helps Zomato’s bottom-line too — having amounts credited to its wallet would increase the likelihood of customers making another order on its platform, as opposed to a cash transaction which is over once the order is delivered. All Zomato had to do was handle the calculation of cash it needs to receive from its delivery partners, and it’s gone ahead and done that to implement this new feature.
But this cash on delivery feature isn’t the only interesting product feature that Zomato has implemented in recent times. When Zomato discovered that it didn’t have weather data for Indian cities to determine surge prices for rain, it went ahead and installed 650 weather stations across Indian cities to be able to generate it. Zomato has experimented with other interesting initiatives, including Intracity Legends, which delivered food from one city to another, and a veg-only fleet, which had been long-standing demand of its users. While not all these features will succeed, the fact that Zomato is able to rapidly develop and deploy these features — even when it’s a fairly large company with over 8,000 employees — shows that it might be one of the best-run tech companies in India.