Paytm Partners With Zomato to Add Food Ordering to Its App

Paytm now lets you order food through its app. Paytm parent One97 Communications on Thursday announced its partnership with Zomato to enable food ordering through the Paytm app. Initially, the food ordering service is available for Delhi-NCR customers using the Paytm app on Android devices. The company, however, does have plans to make it available across India and through the Paytm iOS app as well. The new move comes weeks after Paytm waived off all additional charges on booking train tickets through its platform. Zomato also recently expanded its online ordering and food delivery service to an additional 30 cities in India.

After the initial start in the Delhi-NCR region, Paytm Food Ordering is projected to cover more than 80 thousand restaurants across 100 cities by the end of this month. The new development is also aimed to substantially raise food ordering penetration in India as Paytm already has a strong user base in tier-II and tier-III cities.

As an introductory offer, Paytm is giving up to Rs. 100 worth of cashback for customers ordering food through its app. There is a dedicated "Hungry" promocode to avail the cashback on food orders.

Paytm claims that the food and beverage segment is already amongst the largest payment categories for its platform both in terms of volume and number of transactions.

"Our association with Zomato is a valuable addition to our platform in bringing the convenience of ordering food online through our app," said Renu Satti, Senior Vice President - Paytm in a joint statement. "A vast majority of our customers are from the tier-II and tier-III cities, with this new addition we are confident of driving the growth of online food ordering further. It is also an important step towards enhancing the overall offerings to our customers. We will continue to invest our efforts in this direction."

Zomato expanded its online ordering and food delivery service to 30 additional cities in India last November and presently covers more than 80,000 restaurants across 100 cities. In December, the startup achieved a monthly order run rate of 28 million and has a last mile delivery fleet of 1.5 lakh partners across the country. Notably, Zomato already offers Paytm as a payment option.

"Paytm is the most popular digital payments platform, with extensive reach across the length and breadth of the country," said Mohit Gupta, CEO - Food Delivery, Zomato, in a joint press statement. "We are excited to be partnering with them to integrate our online food delivery service with their mobile app. This will allow us to reach a much larger user base and add to the overall experience of ordering from Zomato."

Paytm's venture into food ordering business could make competition tougher for Swiggy and Uber Eats that both are attracting a large number of customers in India. Cab aggregator platform Ola also recently integrated Foodpanda into its app to bring another major player back to the market. Foodpanda also in October last year expanded to 50 Indian cities - just a month after expanding its operations to 20 cities.

As we mentioned, Paytm recently waived off all additional charges, including transaction charges as well as the payment gateway and service charges, on train ticket bookings through its platform. The Travel vertical of Paytm sold more than 38 million tickets in the financial year 2017-2018.

Disclosure: Paytm's parent company One97 is an investor in Gadgets 360.