Business model of ofoodies.com / bookurtable.com

Well, first of all, this is not a professional business plan report, so if, you as a reader, find the format wrong, I am sorry, I don't follow formats. Also, this is my opinion, and the facts mentioned here are what I have found out myself and not through any inside person.

Anyways, moving on with the post, I would like to share the business model of the sites such as ofoodies.com, bookurtable.com etc from my perspective. As per my knowledge, the oldest of such sites started in India at around 2008.

First, let me tell you what these sites are for. They provide means of booking a table online in a restaurant with which they are affiliated. They cover multiple cities mainly Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore etc. Well, in our daily lives, we still don't use online table booking so profusely as we do online ticket booking for travel or movies etc. The later system consists of a Visa Payment gateway, which is basically a means by which the website can direct the customer to their banking or credit accounts for payment of the services i.e. ticket booking. Now, imagine if you would have to do the same when you book a table in restaurant. Obviously, you would back out, and instead call up the restaurant to book the table for free. So, as expected the online table booking system of the sites mentioned above doesn't comprise of the Visa Payment Gateway. So, you can book the tables for free here. 

Now, we will look at how these sites work. A customer who is looking for a table in a restaurant will search for that restaurant or the location where he wants to eat, in the site, goes to the "Book Table" option present in that restaurant page, fills in few details such as Phone number, Name, Number of guests, time, etc and then clicks the confirm or submit button. On receiving a valid phone number, a verification code is sent out to the customer, which he needs to enter to validate the booking. This is done to prevent random requests and pranks. The customer gets a unique booking code, which he needs to supply to the restaurant when he/she reaches there or the customer just needs to mention that he/she has a booking from that site. This is done to track the number of bookings through the site and hence, is the major source of revenue for the website other than Ads.The next steps that take place are at the back end of the website. There is some sort of a call center set up where the people are monitoring new requests for table booking. The person concerned receives the request and contacts the restaurant to book a table there for the customer. So, basically, instead of you calling up the restaurant, the back end persons of the website call up the restaurants. Once they know that the table is available, they let the customer know that your booking is confirmed through a SMS and also by a phone call. Some sites prefer to provide the customer phone number to the restaurant and some don't. 

Now, here is my opinion about this model. Well, first of all, the system is more of a problem than a solution. Any customer would prefer to directly call up the restaurant and book a table, rather than waiting for someone to call on his/her behalf especially when you already have the phone number of the restaurants so easily available. The site acts more like a personal secretary than a business. Another big flaw is that it is not real time. The status that you see in these sites are not showing the actual status of the time slots in the restaurant. Consider a site such as bookmyshow.com, they show a real time snap shot of the seat bookings at their site, before cutting off the access one hour prior to the show timings. So basically, even if you try to book a table at the preferred time slot, there is always a possibility that you don't get the table reserved at all. There is yet another possibility though. The restaurants might provide only few tables out of the total tables there for online table booking. If that is the case, then the website fails already because at the peak hours, the restaurant will not hold up a table just because the table is supposed to be filled up through online booking. The next problem is that the charges for the restaurants are too high. They ask for up to 30% or even 40% of the total bill that the restaurant have charged to the customer. It is a ridiculously high amount. The charges are high  because for now the number of bookings are quite less through these websites, and thus to reach a break even point quickly, they need this charge structure. So, in a nut shell, it is neither customer friendly nor restaurant oriented. This site works better as an information and advertisement site rather than a booking site. There are sites such as burrp.com, zomato.com which do a much better job in collecting the information of the restaurants and showing it to the customers. So, when you are a online booking site, you must be an "ONLINE" booking site and not a call center. 

Well, this was the case with India. When I look outside India, the models are quite innovative. There is a site named opentable.com, which started way back in 1999, during the dot com bubble stage, and has gone through many transformations to finally reach where it is now. It caters to around 20,000 restaurants across continents. It has been enrolled into NASDAQ recently. The model that opentable.com follows is completely different. It is an actual real time online table booking system and not a call center. One can easily find out the business model of opentable in the internet. It was not always successful, it had to see some very hard times, especially after the dot com bubble. 

On an ending note, I would say that people/companies in India are so busy in implementing things that they forget about innovations and synergies. Right now at this place, I can think of so many new ideas which could have made the business models of the sites mentioned much more customer friendly and restaurant oriented. Its time that India moves on from being the "CALL-CENTER" hub of the planet.
UPDATE: As pointed out in the comments below. Bookurtable is indeed real-time. I don't know why I am still hesitant about using it though. It lacks something may be. So, I apologize for assuming that it is not real time.