Swiggy Goes The Zomato Way With Membership Programme SUPER

Soon after entering the Unicorn club with $210 Mn in fresh funding, food delivery company Swiggy has now launched its membership programme — Swiggy SUPER — which gives users unlimited free deliveries across all restaurants, irrespective of the distance or time of day.

Further, the membership aims to make ordering food online more affordable and accessible by offering benefits such as no surge fee and quicker issue resolution of issues through a dedicated customer care team.

Available to select customers across seven cities, the company is offering one-month and three-month subscription plans, with the current fee ranging from INR 99-INR 149 for a one-month plan.

Anuj Rathi, VP of product at Swiggy, said, “With a very large restaurant partner network and an industry best delivery time, Swiggy has become an integral part of the food ordering experiences of Indian consumers. SUPER is the result of understanding some of their biggest pain points when it comes to food delivery and making it more convenient, affordable and simple. In the coming months, we will continue to bring more value through SUPER by adding more benefits and growing the existing offerings on this service.”

Going further, the company plans to add more benefits to this membership, including exclusive offers from its restaurant and payment partners.

Swiggy Services: Focus On Customers

At the time when the industry is abuzz with the reports that Swiggy is all set to capture a larger share of the delivery pie by extending its services across the entire hyperlocal delivery market.

Inc42 had reported that Swiggy is launching a concierge-like service and will enable buying and delivery of products from any store in the city, including pharmacies, electronics, groceries, and even flower and gift shops. It will also feature a customer-to-customer pick-up and drop service.

The foodtech company started with a cloud kitchen and also introduced a new supply chain, while aggressively working to hike up its market share in the food delivery segment.

Over the last several months, it has launched a slew of new services such as Access, long-distance deliveries, and Capital Assist, to help restaurants serve consumers in new and better ways.

Swiggy Scheduled enables users to plan and order their meals for lunch, dinner, breakfast, or party menus in advance. With this service, users can select from slots of 30 minutes to place orders a minimum of two hours and a maximum of 48 hours in advance. They won’t be charged any delivery and cancellation fees until the order becomes live.

With continued product diversifications and over 35,000 restaurant partners spread across 17 citie, Swiggy posted a record increase of 500% in its revenues in FY17 and saw order volumes nearly double since its previous funding in May 2017.

As of now, Swiggy claims its average delivery time of under 35 minutes is an industry benchmark.

Zomato Membership, Treats

With a 45% year-on-year growth on a revenue of $74 Mn in FY 18, Zomato is aggressively focussing on its Zomato Gold service, where it partners with restaurants to offer deals like 2+2 on drinks and 1+1 on food and has partnered with 2,000 restaurants.

The Gold subscription, launched in November last year, and priced at INR 1,899 for a year, has over 150K subscribers.

Zomato’s food delivery services now available in 21 cities in India and its premium subscription program Zomato Gold already has over 400K paid subscribers and over 2500 partner restaurants in India.

Zomato also recently launched Zomato Piggybank – a reward points program with which all its online ordering users. The company claimed that Zomato Piggybank crossed over 200K member sign-ups within 48 hours of its launch.

The unicorn recorded $11 Mn operating burn in FY18, in comparison to $15 Mn in FY17.

Globally, Zomato is present in 24 countries and claims to serve more than 50 Mn users every month.

The company claims that every month, over 19 Mn users in India use Zomato to make informed food choices.

According to a study by Netscribes Research, the online food delivery segment in India is expected to expand by 34%-36% between 2015 and 2020. Besides, the country’s hyperlocal market is poised to touch $345 Mn by 2029.

With the two biggest Indian food delivery players — Swiggy and Zomato — coming on par with their respective unicorn statuses and membership programmes, the food war is set to heat up further.