The Rise of the Deal-Seeker


The past week has seen the unfurling of the debate between the NRAI and Zomato over the deals and benefits of Zomato Gold. The debate has reached such a crescendo that the #logout campaign has started. There are certain pro's of the business models and where there are pro's there are bound to be cons of the business model. And No this post is not about what is happening.....

As my interest's lie in Productizing and Business cases, There are two sides to this story and here are a few interesting perspectives:

  • Zomato gold is open to anyone who has the app installed.
  • Zomato gold comes at a extra-premium to the app user; of say Rs 400 - Rs 1800 based on the location you are at. 
  • I am not sure as to how much a hotel has to pay Zomato for being on the gold list, this is what I have got off the web "Restaurants also enjoy additional visibility across the Zomato Platform with the Gold tag and Gold filter"
  • The Zomato enterprise in all their wisdom, have pivoted from their earlier business model of discovery have now turned aggregator and have scaled bigger heights(and yes bigger investments). 
  • After the success of Zomato gold, there is a new offering Zomato Infinity Dining (all that you can eat) 



However as the zomato product has taken off and has around~11 Lakh subscribers in around 500 cities covered, It has resulted in the rise of the new Resistance.

And as is the case in most battles, Generals win the war, Soldiers die! Restaurant's end up being the soldiers by offering free food by-virtue of being associated with the app, while aggregator's end up acquiring customer-data. It is on the basis of this data, app's end up creating their next pivot "Cloud-Kitchens".

I call The "Deal-Seekers" the new resistance. It is about these folks that I now type about:

- By virtue of psychology, nothing gives a "high" than something which comes "Free". The India psyche plays/lives/cherishes of free... (An article for later). The "Discount culture" is now deeply embedded in the eating-out generation.
- Where there is free, there comes different ways of seeking out deals.

- The "Deal-Seekers" or "The Resistance" are the "Ethical Hackers" who churn out many ingenious ways of working around the product and its offering/working, often in ways that the Product Managers of Zomato would never have thought about.
- A perspective that I have to offer is something that the NRAI also mentions in their post... "In the zeal of getting all-you-can-eat deals, free-deals, consumers are hopping from one place to another, they are not bothered about loyalty to a hotel, thereby there is no incentive to the hotel to up their quality so that customers keep coming back" So are the money-paying app users to be blamed??? Is the force of loyalty-apathy responsible for the loggerhead that Zomata and NRAI are at??? Is it worth for either of Zomato and NRAI to actually fault the money paying public for their unique-jugaad-ability??? Let me see what views you my readers have to offer.
- In the age of lack of stickiness, are consumers(read the resistance) taking the empire for a ride?

This Post actually starts here...........

P.S This post could have also read "Ways to ethically-hack Zomato".....

I will go on to list some "Ethical Hacks" that I've encountered, I'm sure there are going to many more hacks, I detail this out in the hope that the Product Managers look into these aspects for Infinity, pass this information around themselves and get themselves suitable Acceptance-criteria that will not hurt either Zomato or NRAI. And release better versions of innovation.

  1. Zomato gold costs Rs X per year, input your location as Y while registering, make sure that the location is of a geographical location where there is a deal on currently, by doing this you will get Zomato Gold @ greater than 50% discount!, then lo Voila! you now have Zomato gold for less. Now use this in a city like Bangalore and get the deals
  2. 4 folks get Zomato gold, 8 of them go to a hotel, order stuff and get 1+1 free, and then split the bill among themselves. However this might be a thing of the past, Zomato Gold has some curbs in place from the past week.
  3. As per the above new rule "Going forward we are going to restrict the number of unlocks to a max of two per table. This will be applicable from September 15,", Same eight people will now go and sit in two tables and the deal will work as usual.
  4. 2 folks go to restaurant order#1   2+2  free drinks, then pay the bill, go to restaurant #2, order starters 1+1 free, go to restaurant #3 order 1+1 food, go to restaurant#4 order desert 1+1, full meal, one person free(boyfriend eats out - girlfriend eats for free). To solve this from the past week, there will be limit's placed on Zomato Gold usage by a single user to one unlock per day. This will ensure that customers complete their dining experience at a single restaurant. Workaround#1, drink 2+2 and then go to a roadside/cheap vendor, eat street food at 1/4 the price and go back home. Workaround#2, boyfriend buys zomato gold, girlfriend buys zomato gold, they finish their date night in two separate restaurant's and still one eats for free.
  5. 1 person purchases zomato gold, 2 other people log in using the Person#1 id, simultaneous use of same zomato gold to utilize deals in different hotels.
  6. Get upto 50% off max of 5 times, log into the zomato app as a new user by using different mobile phone numbers use a different number every time.
  7. Get zomato gold membership for free via points accumulated points in other app's, pay 50% off max of 5 times and then discard the app.
  8. Apart from the listed above there are many versions of unverified hack's, clearly most of them, I hope are covered as part of some System Text case or the other, say for e.g. clear cache, force stop the app, change date of phone to reflect older date, do not update the zomato app after initial use, intercept the API calls send out different authenticated content, etc etc


Well that's it for now, thanks a lot for reading. Let me know in case you know any other cases of ethical hacking the zomato gold app... ;-)

I would love to hear your views. Please leave a comment in the comment box below so that I can learn from your experience.
If you liked the article...please share with your network!, In case you would like me to speak/train/coach about this stuff, do get LinkedIn with me.

Regards,
Manuswath

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