Zomato Promises To Fix Its "Outdated App" Through "Never Seen Before" Personalization

In last few years, Zomato raced heartedly behind its dream to set its footholds in every nook and corner globally, but somehow it all went pear shaped. Now, instead of faffing around, it has admitted its mistake – that its manic focus on winning delivery, has make the basic USP of core product – search and discovery suffer a lot.

In a recent blog post, the company accepted the fact that its app has become outdated and a serious effort is needed to revamp it.

We have a confession to make. Over the last two years, we’ve been so busy with our international expansion and our manic focus on winning delivery, that we let the basic USP of our core product – search and discovery – suffer a fair bit. Our own app feels a bit outdated to us, and we’re now beefing up (no pun intended!) our engineering and product teams to get our app back to being one that’s delightfully enjoyable to use and explore.

Zomato has now decided to introduce personalisation into various aspects of its product, starting with the online food ordering product and will very soon bring personalisation to its main search and discovery product as well.

Earlier, restaurants in the online ordering flow used to appear based on factors such as popularity, and distance from your physical location, making the list static, and use to force one to scroll endlessly to find that one place to order food from.

In order to sort this out, Zomato has added a layer of personalisation on the basis of user’s search, browsing, and order history. This will help Zomato identify the most picked restaurants and put them on top of the stack when user will browse through the app.

“Your search, browsing, and order history on Zomato offer some very strong indicators, such as your cuisine preferences, how much you spend on orders on an average, and what you typically order at a given time of day,” the company explained in its blog post.

The algorithm also factors about how one has been using Zomato in general, and shows places one may not have ordered from yet, and one might like to try.

As per the company, this has improved its DAU ⇒ Checkout conversion on the Order app by a whopping 2.5%.

The company has reorganised the dishes on each menu page for a restaurant, and has put the ones a user is most likely to order at the top. For example, if there is pattern of someone consistently ordering non-vegetarian dishes, it pushes non-vegetarian dishes to the top of every menu page on all restaurants that person views, so there’s less scrolling to get to dishes they might want to order.

Also, it is utilising Recommandations tab to sort and pick dishes for users to ensure that they are able to build an entire meal for two from that one tab, without having to swipe at all.

It has now tried to put dishes it thinks the user is most likely to order in it. These dishes are picked on basis of past order history, other users’ order history, and corresponding order ratings received for those dishes.

As claimed by Zomato, both of these changes have made orders being placed 21% quicker.

It says,

Like we said earlier, these are just baby steps towards making Zomato more personal and loved. We are going to get smarter, and will make up for all the work that we didn’t do for you over the last couple odd years.

There’s still a lot more to come, and we can’t wait for you to see it.

1% done.

The most talked about Indian Unicorn has gone through a rough patch lately. Valuation slash down by HSBC, employee layoffs and revenue crunch – all of these have taken a heavy toll of this startup. It is currently competing in online food delivery market with platforms like Swiggy and Foodpanda. However, considers its online listing platform as a cutting edge over other portals.

Thus, the idea to re-engage its audience in a personalised manner can prove to be a winning attempt.