Zomato Adds Point of Sale Soup to its Search Entree

April 8, 2016         By: Steven Anderson

A restaurant search app like Zomato can come in handy on a lot of fronts. It can help users find good places to eat nearby, or even in places they wouldn’t ordinarily go.

It’s valuable whether traveling, or just looking for places you’ve never seen before near you.

Zomato recently added a little something extra to its restaurant search that will make it as useful for restaurants as it is for their patrons: a point of sale system.

Known as Zomato Base, the point of sale system is Android-based, and offers up several different options, including recipe information, inventory functions, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, as well as a mobile payment system that will take both debit and credit cards.

The first restaurant chain to try Zomato Base will be India’s The Beer Cafe, a chain which has 35 locations throughout the region.

It won’t be the last, though, as Zomato has been working to add multiple modules to make it suitable for use in several different breeds of restaurant.

Zomato is actually looking to bring the platform to a “fine dining restaurant” soon, a development which Zomato’s co-founder, Pankaj Chaddhah, calls “…one of the most complicated…” forms of management around.

There’s generally something to be said for versatility. When a platform can accomplish more than one function, it prevents the need to go looking elsewhere to solve various problems.

Here, it’s good to see that the same app that lets users find a restaurant can also be used to pay for the meal.

Plus, the restaurants involved can get the necessary infrastructure to accept those payments and carry out other functions besides.

That means there’s less need to have two or more solutions in place to address every step in the process, and that makes it easier to teach new staff how to carry out normal operations.

Less onboarding cost, faster responses, and better service add up to reason for patrons to come back.

With restaurants eager to make the experience smoother for its users—and thus encourage return visits—consolidating processes should go a long way toward reaching that goal.