By Abhimanyu Ghoshal
Uber is gearing up to launch its UberEats food delivery service in India sometime during this quarter, reports The Economic Times.
The company had previously announced its intentions to do so around the end of January, but hadnt specified a time frame. After trialing the service in Los Angeles back in 2014, it launched a standalone app in Toronto in December 2015.
UberEats is already available in nearly 80 cities worldwide; it plans to initially launch in one Indian city, and add five more by the end of the year.
Its likely that Mumbai will be first on the list, as the UberEats site already lists the city and redirects browsers with an Indian IP to the Mumbai landing page. Based on Ubers recent job postings, it looks like Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Pune, Chennai and Gurugram will follow.
When it goes live, UberEats will go up against the likes of local players like Swiggy, Zomato, and Googles new Areo service. However, itll have to figure out a way to curry favor with both restaurant partners and consumers: The Economic Times notes that Uber plans to charge restaurants commissions of between 25 and 30 percent on each order, while Swiggy takes a 15-20 percent cut.
Perhaps itll be able to gain an advantage by tapping customers in the smaller cities among the 29 that it operates in across in India (Swiggy is present in just eight cities). Itll be interesting to see if the company can turn the tide in the ongoing battle for supremacy in the food delivery space before the year is out.
Abhimanyu is an avid gamer, street food gourmet and design connoisseur.
This article was first published on The next web.
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