Insights
Most owners try to negotiate the rate. The bigger savings usually sit around it.
You can rarely negotiate the headline Swiggy or Zomato commission down by much, but you can change what you pay in practice. Commission is charged on a base you influence: packaging adds to it and discounts you fund come off it. Platform-funded offers cut your discount bill without touching that base. And on the accounts we manage, the gap between a healthy and an unhealthy take-home has come from ad load and discounting, not from the commission rate. Fix those first, then ask for a rate review with your order numbers in hand.
Swiggy shows its fee with the GST on it already included, while Zomato shows the fee and the GST on separate lines. Read raw, Swiggy looks several points more expensive. Once both are put on the same footing, the real platform take on each settles at around a quarter of order value. Do this comparison before you decide which platform to push, or which one to argue with.
On Zomato the service fee is charged on the commissionable value: item total, plus packaging, minus the discounts you fund yourself, before customer GST. A high packaging charge raises the base on every order. Discounts the platform funds do not lower it. Set packaging charges deliberately and know which of your offers are funded by you and which by the platform.
Keep ad spend at or under roughly a tenth of the delivery revenue the platforms bring in, and hold restaurant-funded discounts to a similar ceiling. On accounts we have taken over, ads were funding more than half of all orders and take-home had slid into the low fifties. Bringing the ad and discount load back under the cap is worth more than a point or two off the commission.
Both platforms run campaigns where they pay for part or all of the customer discount. Those orders cost you less than an offer you fund yourself, and they do not reduce your commission base. Getting into the right campaigns is a conversation with your account manager, and it goes better when you can show steady volume, a good rating and low cancellations.
Commission is set by contract and city, and it is reviewed with the platform account team. Ask when your order volume has grown, and bring monthly orders, growth, rating and cancellation rate. A small, consistent outlet asking without data rarely gets far.
Add commission, the GST on it, payment charges, ads and discounts, and look at the share of gross order value that reaches your bank. A healthy delivery channel sits in the mid-fifties to low-sixties percent. Track it every month on both platforms. It is the only number that tells you whether the changes above are working.
This is the kind of work we run end to end as a Swiggy and Zomato agency for Mumbai restaurants.
FAQ
The rate itself moves a little at most, through a review with your account manager once your volume has grown. The larger savings come from the base it is charged on, platform-funded offers instead of your own, and keeping ads and discounts under about a tenth of platform revenue each.
A 30-minute call is enough to know whether we can help. If we can't, we'll say so.