My Zomato Order Story

Features that caught my eye

4 min readJun 25, 2023

Wow! I was pleasantly surprised to see Zomato’s new feature. It showed me restaurants nearby along with their discount coupons on the map where I was tracking my order.

Fig. 1: Zomato tempting me with offers for repeat purchases before even receiving the current order

Opinion: This seems like an attempt to increase the visibility of nearby restaurants which in my case happened to be smaller, lesser-known eateries.

The journey that led me here was as interesting as this feature.

Let’s revisit…

The Limited Zomato Gold Membership

The story starts when I was finally eligible for Zomato Gold!!

Fig. 2: Finally part of the “cool kids” gang 😎

Fact: Zomato’s loyalty programme Gold is exclusive to a small set of users at any point in time.
Opinion: The price of the scheme is dynamic, which is probably dependent on the user’s propensity to purchase. This might be inferred from the user’s app activity data like # of app launches, time spent on the app, device model, location, etc.

It was time to make my first purchase as a Gold member.

Home Screen Cards

The home screen was quite different from that of Swiggy. The cards were larger, containing plenty of information and a carousel to see multiple images of the dishes served by that restaurant.

Fig.3: Cards so large they couldn’t even fit two at a time!

Opinion: Was it replicating Instagram’s home page scrolling experience? A UX all of us are familiar with?
It looked good but required additional scrolling to explore more restaurants, unlike Swiggy, where card sizes are small thus increasing the number of restaurants shown on the screen at a time.

Order For Your Loved Ones

After a bit of scrolling, I found what I was looking for and added it to my cart. On the checkout page, I noticed a feature called “Ordering for your loved ones?” which reminded me of my friend who introduced me to Zomato Gold.

Hence I went back to add their favorite ice cream from Polar Bear, a popular ice cream chain.

Multiple Carts

But wait, did I just replace my previous cart? What was that restaurant I initially added? I had chosen that restaurant randomly from the suggested ones. How do I find it again?

In hopelessness, I tapped on the floating cart bar at the bottom and stumbled upon a new feature… “Your Carts”. To my surprise, I saw 2 carts — Polar Bear and the one which I thought I had lost.

Fact: Zomato allows you to add items from multiple restaurants, even across different cities, and saves these carts till you checkout. Checkout has to be done independently for each of the carts.
Opinion: This feature is a great tool when it comes to ordering from multiple restaurants. We can parallelly add items from different places. This is better than the traditional way of sequentially adding items from one restaurant, checking out from the same place, and moving on to the next restaurant.