On-Ground Market Research on POS Penetration and Aggregator Integration Among Restaurants in Pune: A Field Study

Author

Mayank Manohar Kamthe

Abstract

 Point-of-sale (POS) software and food-delivery aggregators have become central to how restaurants in urban India operate, yet most published work on their spread rests on surveys filled out after the fact rather than on direct, outlet-level field verification. This paper reports the findings of a two-month field study conducted across eleven micro-markets of Pune, in which 1,650 restaurants were visited in person to record the billing software in use, integration status with Zomato and/or Swiggy, and whether the outlet was a single unit or part of a chain. Petpooja emerged as the single largest POS brand among outlets that had adopted any structured billing system, though it held less than a third of that segment, and the wider market remained split across more than twenty competing products. Aggregator integration was found in roughly seven out of ten restaurants, but nearly a third of the outlets surveyed, mostly small, independently run establishments, had no presence on either platform. Single-owner restaurants outnumbered chains by a wide margin, though the smaller population of chains represented a disproportionate share of the largest adoption opportunities encountered. The paper discusses what these patterns suggest for POS vendors competing in fragmented, price-sensitive local markets, and for the broader literature on technology adoption among small food-service businesses in India.

Keywords

point-of-sale systems, restaurant technology, food-delivery aggregators, Zomato, Swiggy, POS adoption, field survey, Pune

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References

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