Amid an escalating face-off between restaurants and aggregators, online food-ordering platform Zomato on Saturday said it is open to making modifications to rectify "mistakes" and appealed to restaurant owners to stop the #LogOut campaign.
More than 1,200 restaurants in several major Indian cities have reportedly de-listed themselves from the dine-in programmes of services like Zomato over the "unsustainable" deep discounts offered by the aggregators, saying the table reservation services were hurting their business model.
In a series of tweets, Zomato founder Deepinder Goyal called for truce and sanity.
"I am sad that young entrepreneurs (much like me) in the restaurant industry are feeling the pressure to such an extent that they had to launch such a campaign. We set out to create a company which can create a massive impact on consumers, as well as business owners," he said in one of the tweets.
"Somewhere, we have made mistakes and things haven't gone as planned. This is a wake up call that we need to do 100x more for our restaurant partners than we have done before," he added.
Restaurants in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Goa, Pune, Gurgaon and Vadodara exited platforms, including Zomato, EazyDiner, Nearbuy, MagicPin and Gourmet Passport, under the #LogOut campaign, claiming that the "unsustainable" deep discounts offered by the aggregators and the table reservation services were hurting their business models.
"What's good for restaurants is good for Zomato. What's good for consumers is good for Zomato. Finding the right balance and product market fit is the restaurant industry's problem (and that includes us)," Goyal said in another tweet.
Penning his series of tweets as "thoughts on the restaurant industry's stand against deep discounting", he said: "Zomato Gold has been a major hit, but we understand that bargain hunters have also joined Zomato Gold and they are hurting some segments of the restaurant industry very badly."