Zomato To Discontinue Online Grocery Delivery From Sept 17

Bengaluru: Zomato announced on Sunday it will shut down its grocery delivery service from September 17 because of lapses in order fulfilment, leading to poor customer experience.

“At Zomato, we believe in delivering best in class services to our customers and largest growth opportunities to our merchant partners. We don’t believe that the current model is the best way to deliver these to our customers and merchant partners. Hence, we intend to stop our pilot grocery delivery service effective 17 September 2021. Store catalogues are very dynamic and inventory levels change frequently. This has led to gaps in order fulfilment, leading to poor customer experience,” the online food aggregator platform stated in an email to its grocery partners.

The company feels its investments in Grofers, which claims to make grocery deliveries in 10 minutes, will generate better shareholder value.

“Have no plans to run any form of grocery delivery on our platform. Grofers has found high-quality product-market fit in 10-minute grocery & we believe our investment in the company will generate better outcomes for our shareholders than in-house grocery effort,” Zomato informed.

Zomato had started grocery delivery service in a few selected markets in July this year, promising to deliver orders within 45 minutes.

“We have realized that it is extremely difficult to pull off such a delivery promise with high fulfilment rates consistently, in a marketplace model (like ours),” the company added.

Zomato earlier invested Rs 745 crore for a minority stake in Grofers.