A year after its launch, Zomato is bidding goodbye to its ordering rewards program, Piggybank. In an email to users, the company announced that Piggybank would be closed on August 12. Zomato was launched on July 10, 2018.
“We thank you for being an inseparable part of the Piggybank journey, which will come to a close on August 12th. You can keep using your balance coins till then to get 10% OFF from select partner restaurants. After that, your remaining coin balance will expire,” the company’s email to users stated.
Zomato confirmed to TNM that it has decided to discontinue Piggybank.
"A massive upgrade to our loyalty program is in the works. We have therefore decided to discontinue Piggybank. Subscribers will be able to use their Z coins till 12th August,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.
Piggybank worked in such a way that each time a Zomato customer placed an order with a Piggybank partner, 10% of the order value would get deposited in a Piggybank account which can be used by the customer to pay partly while making the payment for their next order on Zomato. This is limited to 10% of the value of the order, and the remaining 90% was paid. Piggybank was only accessible by select users, and referrals by those users.
The company also donated Rs 1 for every order it received from Zomato Piggybank customers to Akshaya Patra Foundation. According to Zomato’s email, Piggybank subscribers helped donate Rs 2 crore and had total savings of Rs 38 crore.
As of September 2018, Zomato said it over one million subscribers to Piggybank, while 30% of subscribers were coming through referrals. It also announced that over 2 million orders were placed using Z coins.
The company’s initial plan was to convert it into a paid subscription program at Rs 299 per year. However, this doesn’t seem to have materialised.
Apart from Piggybank, Zomato also runs its very popular paid membership program Zomato Gold, which allows users to avail 1+1 on food and 2+2 on drinks across its partner restaurants. Launched in 2017 in India, Zomato said that Gold had 800,000 paying customers as of February 2019 in India. It is currently available in seven countries with Australia being the latest entrant.
With inputs from Shilpa S. Ranipeta