The world we’re living in is instant, a world that demands more imaginative solutions within a shorter timeline. What was a fantasy of 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 result-oriented practicality based on boosting your restaurant ROI step-by-step 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. Statista shows an overall market size of $130 million worldwide in 2020, with a steady growth projection in the next five years. Restaurants and eateries that deliver food on-demand are making the best use of such apps to reach more customers and, in turn, make tons of revenue.
Food Delivery App to Boost Your Restaurant ROI
Step 1. Key Elements to Develop an On-demand Food Delivery App
Before planning, you must understand the components quintessential to building 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 and delivery address are ready.
- 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 will browse through a wide range of eateries with menus after making an account on the platform. And after going through users’ reviews, they choose to place orders.
The primary objective of these apps is to connect customers with the restaurants nearby; apps like Zomato use this kind of 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 takes more work to list on such an app. And that’s where the other type comes into the scenario.
Logistics/Delivery Service Type:
Unlike the 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 is a great way to cost optimization for established restaurants in terms of cutting down the cost of additional human resources for delivery. Apps like Uber Eats work on this model.
Step 3. Key Features of Your Food Delivery App
The essential features of a food delivery mobile app are:
- Registration: A proper registration feature is needed to enable users to make their profiles, which is handy for the admin and delivery person.
- Profile Management: It’s vital for all stakeholders, including users, restaurants, and delivery people, as though this feature, all parties can experience a seamless service as far as placing, processing, and delivery are concerned.
- Easy Search Option: It’s a must-have feature for your app as no one prefers to spend hours searching in hunger. It will help users to search for food they intend to order easily within a short period.
- List for Easy Orders: If you’re looking for an extra hallmark that establishes your brand quickly in the market, choose this feature with a customized list of restaurants depending on moods, weather, and cuisine during your customers’ cravings.
- Order Tracking: Another must-have feature as customers need to see if the food has been dispatched or the approximate delivery time.
- Payment Gateway Integration: In this feature, you can even think of a food delivery app. CoD and online payment options will make your payment collection more accessible and safer, for which you need gateway integrations like PayPal, Stripe, and Razor Pay.
- 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 don’t want to miss out on this as you want to show offers at regular intervals without annoying your customers with repetitive notifications that trigger your customers to place an order.
Step 4. Tech Stack to Consider
Some of the best APIs that you need to think of if 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 need to improve in using updated software with agile technology. Moreover, an agency’s portfolio is more trustworthy than a freelancer’s.
Step 6. Costing
The analogy is simple; the more features you want, the more the cost will be. The easiest way to calculate the cost is to multiply the hourly cost by the total number of hours, giving you your overall cost 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 the market share.
Make a study of these two players in terms of parameters such as star ratings, market segment, ease of use, ease of setup, 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 dealing with this. However, things may turn in your favor if you have an idea that makes the competition irrelevant by proposing value innovation within the industry with a reduction in cost backed by a proper pricing model in your strategy canvas.
There are examples in the market where newer players have successfully changed the entire course of a competition by innovating new sets of values that your customers were never offered. So, there’s no point in hesitating to roll out your online food delivery app with recalculated risk-averse factors.
