Rahul Kabra found that his order which cost him Rs 689 could have been bought for Rs 512. (File)
Ordering food online has become an activity that over the latter half of the past decade has become almost hassle-free with the emergence of several food delivery apps. However, because of convenience what gets overlooked is whether the consumer is paying the right price for the service provided at the click of a button.
Recently, a Zomato customer drew attention to this after he caught sight of a price discrepancy in his bill and decided to share it on LinkedIn, following which the food delivery platform gave clarification on this.
The customer, named Rahul Kabra, compared the food prices of the online and offline bills.
He found that his order, consisting of Vegetarian Black Pepper Sauce, Vegetable Fried Rice, and Mushroom Momos, which on Zomato cost him Rs 689, after applying a discount of Rs 75, could have been purchased for Rs. 512 (including Central GST and State GST) offline.
In his LinkedIn post, Rahul Kabra mentioned, "cost escalation 34.76 per cent per order at INR 178 = (690-512)/512" and asked, "assuming Zomato brings visibility and more orders to the food service provider, should it charge such high price?"
"I must say me being a normal value-driven Indian customer, at the end of the day will always make a price to benefit comparative analysis as an end result of any higher pricing," he added.
After the post garnered more than 11,000 reactions and 1,700 comments, Zomato replied to the post and said, "Hi Rahul, Zomato being an intermediary platform between a customer and a restaurant, does not have any control over the prices implemented by the restaurant partners on our platform. That said, we have conveyed your feedback to the restaurant partner and have requested them to look into this."
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)