The entry of a new force into India’s food delivery market has reignited a debate: can a challenger genuinely disrupt the Zomato-Swiggy duopoly and push delivery costs lower for consumers?
With magicpin and Rapido joining hands, the stage is set for a potentially transformative shift in how food delivery networks operate, how restaurants participate, and how much consumers ultimately pay.
What The Magicpin-Rapido Partnership Is About?
Magicpin, currently the country’s third-largest food delivery player, is integrating its nationwide restaurant network with Rapido’s food-delivery platform, Ownly. This collaboration will allow Ownly, launched by Rapido in August, to scale quickly beyond Bengaluru.
Once onboarding is complete, Rapido’s Ownly platform will be plugged into more than 80,000 restaurants across India. At the same time, magicpin will gain access to Rapido’s delivery fleet in certain locations, strengthening its operational reach and enhancing last-mile execution.
Rapido’s management clarified that while the company primarily brings restaurants onto the platform through its own merchant teams, partners such as magicpin still play a meaningful supporting role.
The company said, “Rapido primarily on-boards restaurants directly through our merchant team, with only a very small share coming via partners like magicpin. We also work with magicpin and others in select cities as a logistics provider, where our captain fleet supports last-mile deliveries. Our focus remains on building reliable, affordable, full-stack discovery and delivery solutions for merchants, while ensuring a seamless experience for customers and captains.” This indicates that Rapido’s play is not merely aggregation, but building a deeper, integrated ecosystem aimed at both affordability and reliability.
Can This Actually Lower Delivery Costs?
One of the most powerful levers of this partnership lies in its ability to control two of the biggest cost drivers in food delivery: restaurant commissions and logistics. Rapido is reportedly charging restaurants far lower commissions compared to the rates typically associated with Zomato and Swiggy.
Lower commissions reduce pressure on restaurants to inflate menu prices, creating potential for more consumer-friendly pricing. Additionally, with magicpin’s restaurant base feeding into Ownly, efficient order density may further improve cost economics.
Magicpin’s Velocity platform adds another key advantage. According to the company’s product information, Velocity functions as a logistics aggregator connecting multiple delivery partners, including Rapido, Porter, and Ola into one system. This broader network gives Rapido access to a larger pool of riders, helping optimise routing, reduce idle time, and enhance overall delivery efficiency. Business-standard reporting on the deal highlights that Rapido will effectively leverage magicpin’s restaurant network while magicpin can plug into Rapido’s delivery fleet for select geographies. Together, these elements point toward a more scalable, flexible and cost-efficient logistics backbone compared to traditional single-fleet structures.
Will It End the Duopoly?
The path to breaking the Zomato-Swiggy dominance is far from easy. Food delivery remains a notoriously low-margin sector where maintaining balance between delivery costs, rider payouts, and customer incentives has proven challenging even for the biggest players.
The magicpin-Rapido alliance must also cultivate durable relationships with restaurants, many of whom are already stretched across multiple platforms. For consumers, trust and familiarity remain strong barriers, Zomato and Swiggy have built deep loyalty with speed, consistency and broad coverage, benchmarks that the new partnership will need to match or outperform.
On paper, the partnership brings together exactly the mix of assets needed to challenge established players such as a massive restaurant network, a growing delivery fleet, and a logistics platform purposely built for efficiency. Lower commissions and smarter logistics could translate into real price advantages for consumers. But whether this is enough to dismantle years of brand loyalty and operational dominance remains the big question.
-Manan Gangwar
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