A Zomato user slammed the company for deleting his account. However, the company shared evidence of him approaching restaurants to write favourable reviews.
Zomato, India's largest restaurant search and discovery service, was accused by a user of corruption on Thursday. Serving Indian customers since 2008, the company received flak for passing off paid reviews as organic ones by verified users on its platform. Zomato, however, had denied this accusation.
Prateek Dham, the user based in New Delhi, took to Facebook to accuse Zomato of a "(corrupt) 'algorithm' to rate restaurants". He revealed that Zomato had deleted his account 5-6 months ago and claims that it has happened to many users before as well.
In his post on Facebook, he alleged that Zomato did a lot of things to generate revenue, one of the things being paid reviews for restaurants, which implied that these were not unbiased reviews.
He explains it in chronological order:
"1. A new restaurant (is about to open up or) opens up in a locality. Either it approaches Zomato, or Zomato approaches it for enlisting on the portal.
2. Zomato’s Area Sales/Marketing Manager pays the restaurant a visit. Asks the owner/manager if they’d want a good rating & reviews for the restaurant since it drives business in return. Most of us do refer to Zomato to look for the ‘best restaurants’ in a particular area, so it makes sense for a restaurant to be there.
3. If the restaurant owner is financially well-off, he gives in to Zomato’s monopoly and pays up to get “good ratings.”
4. Now, Zomato’s “verified reviewers” (you know the ones with blue & white stars on their DPs) come into picture here. Zomato invites these guys to do review under the pretext of “Zomato Meetups” or whatever godforsaken name. These guys eat to their heart’s content for free, and subsequently reward the restaurant with high ratings and positive reviews.
5. Also, by the way, Zomato’s uses its own (corrupt) “algorithm” to rate restaurants. The ratings are not simply calculated as “No. of Ratings divided by No. of Users,” Zomato provides its own ratings to most restaurants (based on the deal it strikes with them.)
6. Now, thanks to Zomato’s “rating” and credibility thanks to the reviews by Zomato Verified Reviewers, the restaurant starts attracting customers and business becomes good. Until, after a while, Zomato pays them a visit again."
Dham then says that the company deleted his account because he was doing reviews independently. "Why did they delete my account? Because I was doing reviews independently, and not as a Zomato Verified Reviewer," he wrote in his post.
"Restaurants would directly invite me over for free meals (thanks to my good following on Zomato & Instagram) and I would in turn honestly review their restaurants on the Zomato app. Zomato obviously gets a whiff of it."
He further claimed that since his reviewing didn't reap any monetary benefits for Zomato, the company deleted his account instantly.
dna contacted Zomato and the company said the Prateek used to be an active user of Zomato and accepted that they deleted his account.
The company sent a screenshot to dna revealing the message Prateek had sent a restaurant where he is seen asking for money to give them a favourable review.
Zomato's spokesperson said, "This post is clearly telling the restaurant that he will write a positive review for the place. So the review was going to be biased. On that note, we cannot trust any of his reviews, and cannot let our vast community of users read or trust any of his reviews as well. Keeping that in mind, we decided to delete Prateek’s profile."
Zomato said that the company had sent an email informing him why they were deleting his account.
"Deleting a profile is something we don’t love doing, especially when we know a considerable amount of effort has gone into building it. But when we know that someone is resorting to unfair means, we will do everything to maintain the sanctity of the platform we have worked hard to build over the last 8 years."
Zomato has given a detailed explanation to each of Prateek's accusations in a blog post on their website written by co-founder Pankaj Chaddah.
Prateek had further said that he had over 6000 followers and had given over 250 reviews. "It felt as if I had lost a huge part of the work I had accumulated over the last 2 years. I was an absolute Zomato lover as well as an evangelist; probably that was another reason why kept mum about this," he wrote in his post.
In response to this, Zomato said in its statement. "Anyone is welcome to review restaurants independently. It doesn’t matter whether one is a Verified reviewer or not. The problem arises when one starts offering positive reviews on Zomato as a service – which was the case here. We got to know of it because restaurants Prateek wrote to sent us screengrabs of his conversations with them, which we have attached above as proof."
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