Advanced countries have customer loyalty programmes and you will find them with possibly every business, from your street-corner departmental stores to the casinos. The Indian market is still to fully evolve in this respect, though many such schemes are sporadically noticed. Online food order and delivery startup Zomato has come out with a new user loyalty and reward points scheme called ‘Zomato Piggybank’. Zomato CEO Deepinder Goyal has posted details of the scheme in the form of a blog. 

The way it works is every time a Zomato customer places an order, 10% of the order value gets deposited in a Piggybank account which can be used by the customer to partly pay while making the payment for his/her next order on Zomato. This is limited to 10% of the value of the order. The remaining 90% will have to be paid through the normal sources like credit/debit cards or other digital transfers.

Zomato has brought in a philanthropic angle also into this loyalty scheme by making a donation of Rs 1 for every order it receives from the Zomato Piggybank customers to Akshaya Patra Foundation - an NGO that is run by the ISKCON organisation. They arrange to deliver mid-day meals to millions of school children every day.

Goyal points out that hypothetically if all orders on Zomato get paid by using the Piggybank route, the Akshaya Patra Foundation may stand to receive Rs 1.24 crores each month through this donation. Obviously, that situation is a long time away since Zomato has opened up the membership to this Piggybank royalty programme to a limited number of people; based on their previous spend on the app and has also opened up a by-invitation membership. Eventually, it will become a paid membership with the annual fee being fixed at Rs 299.

The early birds are also being rewarded with 200 bonus points or Rs 200 on their Zomato Piggybank account.