Image for representational purposes only | Photo Credit: Getty Images The National Restaurant Association of India has issued an advisory cautioning its members over deep discounting and payment gateway tools offered by aggregator platforms for dine-in operations. The advisory comes when food delivery giants including Zomato and Swiggy are aggressively focusing on expanding their dine-in customer base. NRAI urged restaurants to use aggregator payment platforms only if the payment gateway services are unbundled from the other services that it offers; and makes financial sense as a payment gateway independently compared to other payment gateways. In its advisory, NRAI asserted that aggregators use deep discounting as a tool to attract customers, including the restaurant’s regular customers, to their platforms. The customers are then incentivised to participate through aggressive cashback and discounts, which eventually move the restaurants’ existing customers to their platforms. “We are fine with aggregator platforms charging restaurants a reasonable fixed fee for securing reservations. However, we believe it is not ideal to pay a high commission or percentage of sales for dine-in reservations, nor …