Should I be on Zomato or build direct bookings?
The honest trade-off
Aggregator commissions plus discount participation take a meaningful bite out of every order, and the platform, not you, owns the customer relationship. You do not get the phone number. You cannot message them next Tuesday. Switch off the listing and that demand simply disappears rather than following you home.
What you get in return is real. A new resident in Sector 50 who wants Thai food tonight opens Swiggy, not Google. Discovery at that exact moment is worth paying for, and no direct channel replicates it in your first year of trading.
So the question was never which one. It is what share of your revenue you are willing to leave dependent on a platform that can rewrite its rate card whenever it likes.
Building the direct channel properly
Every delivery bag gets a card with a WhatsApp number and a reason to use it, whether that is a dish missing from the aggregator or faster ordering at peak hours. WhatsApp is where Indian repeat ordering actually lives, and a broadcast list of past customers costs you almost nothing to run.
Put a working ordering or reservation flow on your own site, with Razorpay or a UPI link and no account creation. Make someone register before they can order butter chicken and they will go back to Swiggy. They will be right to.
Keep your Google Business Profile sharp, because the reserve and order links there send traffic wherever you nominate. Point them at your own system.
Give direct customers something the aggregator cannot match. Not a deeper discount, which starts a race you lose. Give them priority on Friday tables, a dish available only direct, or a loyalty balance that carries.
Judging the right mix
Work out contribution margin per order by channel, and fold in packaging, discount share and commission while you are at it, because plenty of kitchens are quietly startled to learn that their discounted aggregator orders at lunch make almost nothing while direct dinner orders carry the whole business. The numbers surprise people. Once you can see that clearly, you get to decide which slots stay on discount and which ones you pull.
A reasonable ambition is this. Shift your repeat customers direct over the course of a year, and leave the aggregator to do the acquiring it is genuinely good at, so that a platform you cannot control is no longer sitting on the majority of your revenue. Do not go dark in one move. Not if it currently drives most of your volume.
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Both, but stop treating them as the same channel. Zomato and Swiggy buy you discovery from people who have never heard of you, at a commission that makes some orders barely profitable. Direct ordering and reservations protect your margin, but they only work on customers who already know you exist. Use the aggregator to acquire. Then move the repeat business direct.
Platforms discourage it and terms shift, so avoid putting competing offers inside their app or on packaging they supply. A card in your own delivery bag, carrying your own WhatsApp number, is standard practice across the industry.
Not at first. Third-party logistics services handle delivery on a per-order basis and plug into most ordering platforms. Start with a small radius you can serve reliably, because one bad direct delivery undoes months of patient persuasion.
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