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Top1. Introduction
E-commerce platforms are serving various goods and services in almost every corner of the country within a reasonable time at very competitive prices. These e-commerce businesses have obtained a very positive response from the consumers and are still improving. A successful demonstration can be seen in the online food delivery platforms (Gupta et al., 2016), here the time taken from ordering, to the food preparation, to its doorstep delivery is improving at an unbelievable pace. Despite stretching the delivery services, with the ever-improving technology and analytics, it will definitely improve. Nowadays these food delivery applications are one of the most popular applications in metropolitan cities and serving as hunger saviors, they are attracting millennials, young students, and professionals (Rathore et al., 2018). These businesses have invested a lot of capital in advertisements, discounts, and offers, to promote themselves, increase the market share, and improve their reach among masses. One of the key exciting features on these services is that consumers can order various dishes from many such restaurants and enjoy the food at their comfortable place without investing extra time to visit the place and wait for the order to be prepared. Additionally, they have enough freedom to explore menu for an eternity before placing an order without any curb to quench the hunger anytime (Nagpal et al., 2020). Few added attractions like quick order, excessive discounts, no limitation on order value, and acceptance of numerous payment options including credit card, debit card, net banking, digital wallets, and cash on delivery are cherry on top in its acceptance. As usual, these applications are competing with each other in terms of process, discount offers, delivery, food quality, a wider range of vendors, and customer service points of view.
The various social media platforms have become an important channel in collaboration and sharing opinions, thoughts, and experiences (Jansen et al., 2009). The internet revolution has brought a lot of changes in people's life via social media, it's very common nowadays to share the eating and check-in events of various restaurants on social media. These kinds of posts along with its sentiments are very useful for food delivery services (Yeo et al., 2017). These posts are accessible to other people in the network and it engages users to share more and more and build a platform to know more about the products and services of various e-commerce platforms. This social impact can be observed in all the business segments, but e-commerce business has its profound effect and it helps companies to know better about their customers and their products to make appropriate business decisions and act accordingly (Hong et al., 2016). At the same time, it helps users to know about the quality of particular goods and services, its post-sale customer services, and the reputation of the e-commerce portals by the experiences and opinions shared by other users, which ultimately boosts the trust and intention to buy in the customers. So, e-commerce businesses have jumped into online advertisement and promotion of their products and services for maintaining a good social profile to represent themselves on various social media platforms (Vernier et al., 2018).
This research is mainly focused to identify the influence of social media and its analytics on food delivery applications and comparing the customer service and marketing strategy of four most popular food delivery applications namely, Zomato, Swiggy, Ubereats, and Foodpanda. The highlights of this research are mentioned as follows.
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This research proposes an effective framework for social media analytics that is capable of handling high-velocity data streams, distributed data processing, and task scheduling. It ensures the high availability of the system.
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It highlights the influence of social media analytics on online food delivery systems.
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Sentiment analysis is the base of this research, so this research went through multi-directional sentiment analysis to gain the polarity of opinions in multi-directional space rather just on an overall basis.
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It highlights the sentiment and brand reputation of four most popular online food delivery applications namely, Zomato, Swiggy, Ubereats, and Foodpanda in India.
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It highlights the brand reputation of online food delivery applications and demonstrates the decision-making processes for task prioritization.