What is preventing direct-to-consumer brands from using Zomato/Swiggy for logistics: commission fees or scalability challenges?

While commissions and captive marketing charges of the market places are indeed prohibitive, there are other factors that lead to brands opting for direct access to their target customers.

As previously mentioned, aspirational brands value their representation at the customers door. They thrive on brand loyalty which is impossible to build in the absence of access to customer data. Temperature of the product, the look and feel of the package, delivery executives communication are some of the factors that contribute to the experience. Pidge is the only service that is able to do on-demand cold chain logistics.

Supply rigidity is another challenge. When the marketplaces state that the ‘restaurant is temporarily unavailable’, the reality is that the marketplaces are unable to fulfill the demand, the restaurant is absolutely available. I have had self deliveries from restaurants that were apparently ‘not delivering’ per the marketplaces.

At Pidge, we built a transparent pricing system. Our pricing is related to volume, distance and special handling requirements. Our intent is to give the control back to the businesses. A lot of other services say, "Let's empower the businesses." And then their business models are everything but that.