OK Being Last Mover: Eternal On Separate Apps For Budget-Friendly Food Delivery
To address the demand for lower-cost options, Eternal has already modified its service terms for its loyalty programme members.
Unlike rivals Swiggy Ltd. or Rapido, Zomato parent Eternal Ltd. has stated it has no immediate plans to launch a separate application dedicated to budget-conscious consumers.
The company, in a letter to its shareholders, has said that its strategy is to integrate value offerings directly into the existing Zomato app.
The letter was referring to Swiggy's separate food delivery app, 'Toing', and Rapido's food delivery pilot 'Ownly'. While the former operates in select locations in the largely student-heavy demographic of Pune, the latter is live across select pin codes in Bengaluru. Both apps market themselves as an option for the budget conscious.
Toing functions as a separate arm of the company, while Ownly operates as a separate entity. Meanwhile, Eternal's rationale on a single app for food delivery centres on maintaining a streamlined operational structure.
"Launching another food delivery aggregation app to differentiate between target audiences has to be a carefully thought-out decision, since it significantly increases organisational complexity," the company said on Thursday.
"We will wait and watch, and are okay being the last mover if, over time, it becomes clear that introducing a new app is the right long-term approach for targeting budget-conscious customers," co-founder Deepinder Goyal wrote in the letter.
To address the demand for lower-cost options, Eternal has already modified its service terms for its loyalty programme members. The company has recently reduced the minimum order value required for free delivery on the platform to Rs 99 for Zomato Gold users, down from the previous threshold of Rs 199. This move, it says, is intended to handle budget-driven use cases within the established Zomato ecosystem.
