Zomato adds variable cash-on-delivery fees on select food orders
Zomato has begun charging select cash-on-delivery customers an additional ₹5 to ₹21 per order, nudging users toward digital payments. The move follows a pan-India platform-fee increase as food-delivery competition intensifies.
What happened
Zomato has begun levying variable cash-on-delivery fees on select Indian food-delivery orders, encouraging online payment. The new charge follows a pan-India
Key facts
- ₹5
- ₹13
- ₹21
- ₹14.90 per order
- ₹12.50 per order
- ₹17.58 per order
- ₹14.99 per order
- 10%-11% commission
- $24 Mn
- 240 employees
- ₹92 Cr
- ₹25 Cr
- ₹20,211 Cr
- 182% YoY
- 3.7X YoY
Why this matters
Zomato’s pricing move highlights how delivery platforms are using payment behavior and fee architecture as strategic assets, increasing the value of fintech, loyalty, and digital-payment partnerships.
What to watch
- Management commentary on COD share, digital-payment mix, cancellation rates, and contribution-margin impact.
- App-store reviews, social-media complaints, and reported checkout conversion changes following the fee rollout.
- Whether the fee expands nationally or appears across a larger share of restaurants, cities, and customer cohorts.
- Any matching COD surcharge, payment incentive, or platform-fee action from Swiggy.
- Changes in order growth among lower-income, non-metro, and high-COD user segments.
- Regulatory or consumer-protection scrutiny of fee disclosure and checkout transparency.
- Expand variable COD fees to more cohorts, locations, peak periods, or lower-value orders if conversion impact remains contained.
- Use targeted in-app UPI/card incentives, prepayment defaults, and messaging around faster delivery or easier refunds to accelerate digital-payment adoption.
- Refine customer-level risk pricing using cancellation history, order value, address reliability, and cash-payment frequency.
- Monitor checkout abandonment and selectively offset friction through loyalty benefits, coupons, or free-delivery thresholds.
- Continue broader monetization through platform-fee and delivery-fee optimization as competitive discounting pressures persist.