Cashing in on its last year’s MaplePOS acquisition, Zomato has announced the launch of its new service called Zomato Base — which most likely seems yet another opportunity to bring in more revenues for the company. It is a cloud-based point-of-sale (POS) system for restaurants.
The service is actually built upon Zomato’s almost an year old MaplePOS acquisition. Maple POS (now Zomato Base) is a functional Android-based POS system that uses custom hardware for a more reliable and customisable product experience. It offers restaurants features such as menu and inventory management, and has a built-in payment solution to accept debit and credit card payments.
Initially, the new service will be adopted by The Beer Cafe, India’s largest beer chain, at all of its 35 outlets across 10 cities in India. It was piloted at The Beer Cafe outlet in Gurgaon earlier this year and has been tweaked over time to cater to the unique needs of each of the chain’s 35 outlets.
Pankaj Chaddhah, cofounder at Zomato, said,
Fine dining is one of the most complicated categories of restaurants in terms of managing their backends. In its initial version, the product was workable only for certain types. We have now added multiple modules so that the product will be widely applicable to all sorts of restaurants.
Zomato Base is Android-based Point Of Sale system that offers restaurants a host of features including menu, recipe and inventory management, a built-in payment solution that accepts debit and credit card payments, CRM, and real time analytics.
Other features of this new service includes menu management, inventory management, recipe management, customer relationship management, data analytics, electronic receipts, Offline transaction support, payment gateway integration, etc.
Zomato claims that the introduction of this new service will change the way restaurants go about their business. It is planning to rope in around 1,000 restaurants including major food chains by the end of this year.
Currently, other than The Beer Cafe, there are around 15 stand-alone restaurants that are using Zomato Base. With Base, the company aims to drive deeper engagement, greater business intelligence, and enable restaurants to offer more personalised experiences to their customers.
Rahul Singh, Founder and CEO, The Beer Cafe, said,
By seamlessly integrating operational solutions such as menu management and remote inventory management into a single system, Zomato Base will make our day-to-day functioning incredibly efficient. This platform is built to provide real time outlet-level analytics which would allow us to plan our supply chain better and provide benefits to our guests through effective promotion and profiling. The best part is, all of this can be done remotely and in real time, which is a huge convenience for a business owner on the move.
Pankaj Chaddah, Co-Founder, Zomato, further said,
Rahul is a pioneer for innovation in the restaurant industry, and we are most excited to have The Beer Cafe as the first restaurant to use Zomato Base as their sole POS system. They have been very supportive since the beginning, and have helped us shape Zomato Base into a product that we are very confident of.
Earlier, in February, Zomato had said it operationally broke even in six markets including India, United Arab Emirates, Lebanon, Qatar, Philippines and Indonesia.
