On New Year’s Eve, food delivery platforms Swiggy and Zomato, had a celebration of their own by clocking a record number of orders per minute.
Both the apps crossed a total of 2 million orders, each, as of 9 pm on Friday, with Swiggy clocking a personal best of 9,000 orders per minute and Zomato also clocking a personal best of 7,100 orders per minute.
Also Read | Your Swiggy, Zomato orders may be costlier this year; food aggregators to collect 5% GST beginning January 1
On December 31, 2020, Swiggy had received 5,000 orders per minute, and last night they beat their own record to receive 9,000 orders per minute.
As of 7 pm on Friday, Zomato had 7,100 orders per minute, with its previous record being 4,000 orders per minute.
The pace of the orders put stress on the UPI payment platforms, with many users complaining of failed payments. Zomato founder and CEO Deepinder Goyal said the UPI success rate was drastically down across all apps, at 40 per cent from the average of 70 per cent, which negatively affected the number of orders per minute.
The total cost of all the orders received on Zomato was Rs 91 crores.
Swiggy revealed that biryani was the most-ordered food item.
"We are a biryani loving nation and it shows. no wonder 1229 biryanis were marked 'delivered' in a minute!” Swiggy said.
Reminiscing about Swiggy's first New Year’s Eve as a three-month-old platform in 2014, cofounder Sriharsha Majety took to Twitter to share that they had only 1 order every 3 minutes.
Both platforms' instant grocery delivery services — Instamart from Swiggy and Zomato-backed Blinkit — also received a record number of orders.
Swiggy shared that Indians ordered items for breakfast on New Year's Eve. Instamart saw orders of 15,458 cartons of egg, 35,177 bags of tomatoes, 27,574 bags of onions and 7822 bread packets.
Blinkit saw huge demand for nachos, sodas, ice packs, lemons, popcorn, and condoms.
From January 1, 2022, food delivery on Zomato and Swiggy is to get more expensive, with the platforms having to collect and deposit tax at a 5 per cent rate.
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