The world we’re living is an instant world; a world that demands smarter solutions within a shorter timeline. What used to be a fantasy of the fairy tales is now a reality with food on-demand apps—you wish it, and there it is. And this all is happening through a technology-driven app to meet the market demand. This article will delve into the brief understanding of making your fantasy a result-oriented practicality on the basis of boosting your restaurant ROI through a step-by-step manner to build your food-on-demand app. Packed with trend study to overall costing including the limitations of developing such an app are all a part of this insightful article that is hyper-relevant to your segment. Scroll down to find more!
The online food delivery market is floating on a growth trajectory with Statista showing an overall market size of $130 million worldwide in 2020 with a steady growth projection in the next 5 years. Restaurants and eateries that deliver food on-demand are making the best use of such apps in terms of reaching more customers, and in turn, making tons of revenue.
If you want a piece of the pie, continue reading further to discover the essential elements to build such an app with incredible results.
7 Hassle-free Ways to Build an On-demand Food Delivery App to Boost Your Restaurant ROI
Step 1. Key Elements to Develop an On-demand Food Delivery App
Before even planning, you need to understand the overall components that are quintessential to build a food delivery app. And these are:
- Customer-side App: To order food from local eateries.
- Restaurant-side App: To process the users’ orders.
- Courier-side App: To get notifications when the order is ready and the delivery address.
- Admin Panel: To manage the overall platform and can ban restaurants or users in critical cases.
Step 2. Types of Food Delivery Apps
The existing food delivery apps are of two types:
The Aggregator Model: Also known as the third-party app, in this model, customers after making an account on the platform will browse through a wide range of eateries with menus. And after going through users’ review, they make their choice to place orders.
The basic objective of these apps is to connect customers with the restaurants nearby; apps like Zomato use this kind of an app. In this model, the delivery is taken care of by the restaurants and that’s why ideal for big eateries. However, for small and newer restaurants, it’s harder to list on such an app. And that’s where the other type comes into the scenario.
Logistics/Delivery Service Type: Unlike aggregator model, this type of app will have an integrated logistics platform for restaurants which cuts down the cost of handling another platform for delivery and a great way to cost optimization for established restaurants in terms of cutting down cost of additional manpower for delivery. Apps like UberEats work on this model.
Step 3. Key Features for Your Food Delivery App
The most essential features of a food delivery app are:
- Registration: A proper registration feature is needed to enable users to make their profiles that comes handy for admin and delivery person.
- Profile Management: It’s important for all stake holders including users, restaurants, and delivery people as through this feature all parties can experience a seamless service as far as placing, processing and delivery is concerned.
- Easy Search Option: It’s a must have feature for your app as no one prefers to spend hours searching in hunger. This will help users to search for food they intend to order easily within a short span of time.
- List for Easy Orders: If you’re looking for an extra hallmark that establishes your brand quickly in the market, go for this feature that will have a customised list of restaurants depending on moods, weather, cuisine during your customers’ cravings.
- Order Tracking: Another must have feature as customers need to see if the food has been dispatched or approximate time of delivery.
- Payment Gateway Integration: Without this feature you actually can’t even think of a food delivery app. CoD and on-line payment options will make your payment collection easier and safer for which you need gateway integrations like PayPal, Stripe, Razor Pay to name a few.
- Ratings and Reviews: Users intend to find out the quality of the food before placing an order is a psychological preference to have in your app as this establishes more credibility of the restaurants on the list.
- Push Notifications: You probably don’t want to miss on this as you want to show offers in regular intervals without annoying your customers with repetitive notifications that triggers your customers to place an order.
Step 4. Tech Stack to Consider
Some of the best APIs that you need to think of, if at all you’re sincere about making your on-demand food delivery app are:
Restaurant listing
- Grubhub API
- FourSquare API
Payment gateway
- Square API
- Braintree
- Stripe
- PayPal
Find user location
- Core Location Framework
- Google Places API
- Google Maps
Push notifications
- Amazon SNS
- Urban Airship
- Firebase Cloud Messaging
Step 5. Selecting the Right Development Company
The right approach to this would be to consider an agency that understands your objective and needs accordingly over freelancers as the latter will always lack at using updated software with agile technology. Moreover, the portfolio of an agency is more trustworthy than that of a freelancer.
Step 6. Costing
The analogy is simple; the more the features you want the more the cost will be. The easiest way to calculate cost is to multiply hourly cost by total number of hours; this will give you your overall costing in building your on-demand food delivery app.
Step 7. Competitive Analysis
Let’s take a comparative market analysis by considering two dominant players in the Indian food delivery segment; Zomato and Swiggy which hold nearly 95% of market share.
Make a study of these two players in terms of parameters such as star ratings, market segment, ease of use, ease of set up, ease of admin, quality of support, user reviews etc.
Conclusion
The online food delivery segment is already saturated because of its low entry barrier. You will have a hard time to deal with this. However, things may turn in your favour if you have an idea that makes the competition irrelevant by proposing value innovation within the industry with reduction in cost backed by proper pricing model in your strategy canvas.
There are examples in the market where newer players had successfully changed the entire course of competition by innovating new sets of value that your customers were never offered before. So, there’s no point in hesitating to roll out your own online food delivery app with precalculated risk averse factors.
Best wishes for making your awesome food delivery app to rock the market.
If you find this article helpful, And want to start online food delivery app? Please get in touch with PM IT Solution food delivery app development company to boost your restaurant ROI
