Indian Restaurateur — The Swiggy Story
Swiggy — The customer’s choice for faster food delivery according to recent surveys by market analysts. The claim maybe partially true even while looking from the restaurant’s perspective. To look at what actually happens at the backend during a Swiggy order, let us categorize this article into the following headers,
Restaurant Listing and Marketing, Order Placement and Edits, Preparation Time and Pick-up, Delivery and Order Issues.
Restaurant Listing and Marketing
Restaurant Sign-Up
For restaurants to sign-up with Swiggy platform, the procedure is fairly simple but takes up a lot of time to be finally online on the platform. Swiggy representative comes for an intital discussion and discusses the commission percentage mainly with other inconsequential details. Swiggy commissions typically range from 18% to 30% for most outlets (lessser for National Chains and priority accounts).
The proposed swiggy commission for the specific restaurant typically depends on the expected AOV (Average order value) based on the cuisine and the CFT (Cost for Two) based on the menu prices. There is no standard proposal and the commission proposal differs on each case with an average commission for the city as a target in mind. This average commission for the city was in the range of 15% to 18% about a year back and is between 18% to 20% now. This is surely expected to move upto 25% to 28% within the next two years.
Once you sign-up the contracts, the photoshoot is scheduled and the menu is sent for cataloging. There is a general delay in photos getting updated and the skills and professionalism of the photographers used is not on par with the competition. Generally within 10-15 days a restaurant goes live on the platform maybe without photos to start with.
Restaurant Listing
The listing logic is personalised, based on the customer using the app and the cuisines from which he/she orders from regularly and that automatically shows up on the top. Also based on the previous order’s restaurant’s CFT a similar range of restaurants are pushed up on the listing. But, like Zomato, Swiggy’s listing logic is also a big black hole. The account managers have a knowledge of what the levers are but the actual listing ranks does not seem to have any specific pattern in them.
The CFT mentioned for the outlets is never accurate. In general, a restaurant’s cost for two should be 1 Starter (if any) + 1 Main Course + 1 Drink but it never seems to be the case for Swiggy. There are restaurants with the cheapest item in the menu to be Rs.250 but the cost for two shows up to Rs.200. I think they need to refresh the CFT for all restaurants PAN India based on some criteria on their online ordering menu.
Restaurant Marketing
Marketing options available for the restaurants are either Carousel on the top of the app or a promoted listing where your outlet always shows up on a specific listing rank for all customers. The ROI (Return on Investment) for the marketing options in swiggy is effective mostly for Restaurateurs who focus on mass market (high volumes and low margins). The marketing spaces are taken up most of the time by funded startups or national chains who can afford to splurge for the sake of branding.
The restaurants can run discounts on the entire menu or on a selected category (this option not being available in any other platform). In addition, they can offer a separate discount for a first time customer and also have an option to run time based discounts.
Order placement and edits
Order Creation
The biggest drawback of Swiggy from the restaurant’s end (and also from customer’s end in a way) is that they do not provide customer details to the restaurant! A lot of customers are unaware of this fact. The order shows up on the swiggy’s dashboard at the restaurant with just the items and quantities. The restaurant has an option to “Request a callback” from swiggy merchant support in case of any issues with the order.
In today’s world, “Data is King”, and swiggy withholds the basic customer information from the restaurant. The pretext / reason given by Swiggy for the same is that, they are an end to end service provider and with the customer they should be only point of contact as they have taken the responsibility for the order fullfillment.
Due to this, the restaurant also is not able to figure out the growth in swiggy platform in terms or new customers, nor are they able to perform any data analysis on repeat order rate for individual menu item.
Order Edits
In case there are any items in the order that are out of stock, the restaurant has an option to mark it out of stock before / after accepting the order and provide alternative items. The swiggy merchant support then calls the customer and then informs them of the same and gives the alternative item suggestions. But the delay in this process varies between 5 minutes to 30 minutes. The customer will surely get frustrated if they are getting a call after 30 minutes saying that the item is out of stock. Though the restaurant marked the item out of stock within 5 minutes, the order is delayed by a greater extent, the only reason being the restaurant does not have the customer’s phone number.
Order Preparation and Pickup
Preparation Time
Lately Swiggy has an option to set preparation for each order as and when we accept the order. But as of now this does not have a bearing on the time at which the rider arrives to pick-up the order. For example, in an order where the preparation has been set at 25 minutes, the rider reaches at 5 minutes and keeps asking the restaurant how much longer will it take, then after 15 minutes he would start getting impatient and say that restaurant is wasting his time and he will not be able to achieve the daily target. After 20 minutes he would start abusing the restaurant in some cases as well.
There are many instances where the opposite happens, the restaurant has the order ready in 15 minutes but the rider does not reach the restaurant for 30 minutes.
The restaurant has an option to click food prepared in the dashboard, but this change in order status is neither communicated to the rider, nor to the customer.
Swiggy needs to communicate the preparation time and food ready status to the customer to ensure some transparency and give clarity to the customer on whether the order is getting delayed from the restaurant’s end or Swiggy Rider’s end.
Pick-Up
The rider needs to match the order items and the items in the packed order and confirm the same in his app before picking up the order. Also he needs to take a photo of the bill before picking up the order. In more than 95% of the cases, they are focused on maximising the order count, that they do not check if all items have been packed. And in almost 100% of the cases they do not click the photograph of the bill. Given that both these processes are not followed, swiggy either needs to come up with a better process or atleast remove these redundant steps in the order pickup process for the swiggy rider.
Delivery and Order Issues
On orders where a customer raises a complaint, swiggy support passes on the issues / feedback a day later to the restaurant and the restaurant has no way of apologising or sending a replacement order to the customer at that very hour. Lets say a customer complains to Swiggy that Dal Makhani tasted stale, swiggy will in most cases go ahead and refund the order to the customer, no questions asked. This surely makes the customer happy, but there are a lot of cases where the restaurant would like to investigate the issue (by getting back the order item) or send a replacement (in case of wrong / missed items). But in most of the cases the restaurant is given a call back on the next day with such feedbacks and they are not at a position to do anything about it.
The customer / merchant support has two language options of either Hindi / English, but the English support executives are also not so fluent to have a conversation in English and Hindi support executives have a strong accent of other languages that it is difficult to have a pleasant conversation. This adds on to the bad merchant / customer experience at the end of the day.
All these are my personal opinions shared by my fellow restaurateurs. The figures mentioned above are as close to the actual as possible and assumptions (if any) are mentioned. With so many articles telling the lighter side of Swiggy, I felt that someone needs to voice out the other side of the story. Despite all the above mentioned facts, I believe that Swiggy is taking more initiatives, improving the metrics when compared to the competition and is in comfortable position to capture the major market share (Already have done so in many areas).
You can also go through my earlier article on Zomato by following This link.
PS : This is to everyone — I still see a majority of the population using the word “delivery boy” instead of “delivery executive”. I think each of us need to take the effort and make this change. They are the back bone of the food industry lately and making them feel respected is the very least all of us can do.
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