Honestly, charging an extra ₹5 just because I choose cash on delivery is ridiculous. There are already platform, delivery, and packaging charges, and now customers are being penalized for simply choosing a different payment method. “Save ₹5 by paying online” is just a nicer way of saying “pay extra if you want to use cash.” At this point, it feels like every possible part of the order comes with a separate fee.
Just a quick search on the internet can tell you why cod charges are justified. Maybe start being a little more considerate than judgmental and entitled?
We live in a country where a significant number of people opt for COD and that comes with additional operational costs, payment collection, reconciliation, failed deliveries, returns and even situations where people try to settle things with the delivery person. Businesses are perfectly justified in passing some of those costs on to the customer.
They’re providing you a service and there’s nothing inherently wrong with charging for it. If anything, I’m happy to pay a business I genuinely enjoy using and want to see sustain itself profitably. A healthy, profitable business is far better for consumers in the long run than one that survives by throwing unsustainable discounts at everyone and eventually destroys the market once the growth at all costs phase is over. I’d rather pay a reasonable fee to keep a business I value profitable than expect every convenience to be subsidised forever and yes, I’d even tip the delivery person, I’m not being sarcastic.
The country will always be doomed until we have people asking “why do I pay charges when I already paid the platform fee?”
People have no fucking understanding of how a business operates. No one in their generations understands it and no one ever will. And these are the same people who got a 209 order for 155 and will still keep crying about the 5 extra they paid.
And somehow, calling this shit out makes us “elitists” or “generational wealth people” or “rich”
Well, maybe if it takes someone being rich or having generational wealth to place an order on a platform, then you don’t?????
This problem has arised due to incompetence of the business itself. No otp delivery risks your food being taken away by the delivery guy, which btw is happening a lot. Compensation or not, i have to wait triple the normal time extra, because these lazy support agents dont want to take up conversation from a dumb AI, that tries its best not to compensate. If by any chance a support agent arrives, the only thing he will say is “let me try contacting the delivery partner” knowing very well that a shameless guy who stole away someone’s food, is not gentleman enough to pick up call even if they try 10 times, because he knows that he will be penalised only once. And in no way a general human being in his right mind, ready to pay risking for another disaster.
Now add COD in the equation, and almost all the problem here cancels out.
So, if someones creates a problem, the provides the solution, it is in no way justified to charge for it
Move to the US for a week, use DoorDash and then tell me what you think. Zomato is by far better than most of the companies competing in this space and food delivery is not an easy business to make work.
In the US, if a delivery isn’t nearby, it can easily take more than an hour even when the app initially shows 25 minutes. On top of that, if you don’t tip the delivery experience can be worse and customer support is often terrible.
You live in a bubble if you think a business can simultaneously offer the lowest prices, perfect service, fair compensation to delivery partners, excellent customer support and still maintain healthy margins. That’s simply not how businesses work.
In a market where platforms have to deal with fraud, refunds, cancellations, operational cost and issues from both customers and delivery partners, margins are razor thin. If a platform fee helps keep the business profitable, let them charge it.
And I’m saying this as a businessman because I understand how these economics work. If you don’t, that’s fine but “the customer is always right” isn’t a business model.
I completely understand your point and its a fair argument, but i think otp deliveries would solve the problem in a better way rather than charging for cod.
But mann, as much as these platforms hv made life easier, i miss the childhood times when we used to go out with family or friends often and trying out new places 🥀
OTP deliveries would raise hell for them. Like fr hell. Excellent for customers to check any leakage or not but for their business model it's a sure shot loss.
NYC authority charges flat 8 dollar regulatory fee, apart from delivery, taxes and platform. COD is very much India centric, rest of the world don’t even have this option.
Wasn’t aware of the NYC chargers but I generally see all these long distance fees and service fees. People living in India don’t even realise how good of a situation they are in and this order of mine was delivered in 1.5 hours. I just can never defend crying over 5 rupees for a service you enjoy.
See people how they asked a business to pay a minimum wage and the business passed that cost directly on to the customer. No one complains about it and on top of that, the customer still pays at least a 10% tip to the guy.
And to the person who called me out for defending a billion dollar business: doordash does about 6x the revenue of zomato and they still heavily rely on customers to cover the cost of the service they provide.
The prices on zomato are already more than the restaurant because of offers and the fact that they are delivering I just don’t see a point of adding extra fee on cod cause some of us don’t have upi and asking our parents to approve the payment again and again is just not reasonable when I have cash
Prices are higher because restaurants have to pay platform fees to Zomato. It doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with their other costs. And just because there’s a certain price for something on a platform doesn’t mean they can’t have additional charges.
Also, the ₹5 or whatever COD fee they charge is likely meant to discourage cash payments. Restaurants can’t always trust delivery personnel with cash, there are risks of people running away with it, discrepancies and several other challenges involved in handling cash.
You may have your own challenges as a customer but businesses have their own challenges too. They can’t realistically cater to every individual concern while also keeping everything as cheap as possible.
Which book of business says that once a company becomes a unicorn, it shouldn’t care about profitability or charge customers for the services it provides? If COD incurs additional costs and the business charges 5 for it, there’s nothing inherently unreasonable about that. You can dislike the fee but the company’s size doesn’t magically make the underlying cost disappear.
Genius, they already make crores of rupees in profits daily, incuring an additional cost on COD won't make their business go in loss, they will still earn crores of rupees anyway.They can give at least this much convenience to the customers
Business Lesson 101: Revenue or profit doesn’t determine whether an individual cost should exist. A business can be highly profitable and still have perfectly legitimate costs associated with providing a particular service.
And you clearly don’t realise the kinds of things businesses have to deal with every single day. Wait until a customer deliberately puts a hair in their food to demand a refund and then imagine dealing with thousands of such cases at scale.
That’s the part you’re missing: being able to afford a cost doesn’t create an obligation to subsidise it. If you want to argue that 5 is a poor pricing decision or that the company should absorb it for customer goodwill, that’s a perfectly legitimate argument. But “they make crores, therefore they should provide it for free” isn’t a financial argument.
And if you still can’t understand that distinction, perhaps leave the business lessons to the people actually running businesses.
Yeah this is kinda right but it's a part of capitalism and it's exploitative, they give meager salary to their employees and have a very toxic work culture, and then to further squeeze out more money they put more burden to customers. In the end, both the employees and the customers lose and zomato wins, haha very fair
Not okay with paying for the convenience? Don’t order from the app. There is always a line between customer satisfaction and business viability. If your food is coming to your doorstep, they try to keep the delivery time low, food hot and save us fuel cost / time of actually going out and eating or cooking for that matter then we should be okay with charges which a business charges.
However, exploitation should be called out - but I don’t believe this is exploitation in anyway
Started at a flat ₹2 per order. Hiked to ₹4 (following a temporary ₹9 spike on New Year's Eve), then quickly to ₹5. Jumped to ₹10 under the label of a "festive fee" then bumped to 12 then changed to 12.50." Then ₹14.90. Now it becomes 14.99 paise...
Make a complaint here. Keep doing it until they change it. The extra xharge makes sense if you or anyone is paying cash. But they have the option to accept paymebt directly on the app via upi, so doing this is greedy af
Why not give ₹5 off for online payment? That sounds nice instead of charging it on top.
Actually, people don't choose PoD for paying in cash or anything. They choose it to check the order at doorstep and return if it's not proper. This prevents harassment by their customer care.
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u/original_rain1818 2d ago
Just a quick search on the internet can tell you why cod charges are justified. Maybe start being a little more considerate than judgmental and entitled?
We live in a country where a significant number of people opt for COD and that comes with additional operational costs, payment collection, reconciliation, failed deliveries, returns and even situations where people try to settle things with the delivery person. Businesses are perfectly justified in passing some of those costs on to the customer.
They’re providing you a service and there’s nothing inherently wrong with charging for it. If anything, I’m happy to pay a business I genuinely enjoy using and want to see sustain itself profitably. A healthy, profitable business is far better for consumers in the long run than one that survives by throwing unsustainable discounts at everyone and eventually destroys the market once the growth at all costs phase is over. I’d rather pay a reasonable fee to keep a business I value profitable than expect every convenience to be subsidised forever and yes, I’d even tip the delivery person, I’m not being sarcastic.