How to Build a Food Delivery App?

Working long hours is the current trend of the society since the pandemic which have affected our personal lives at a deep level, long hours include work, home chores, etc. After a long day, you still can’t go out to your favourite restaurant, but you can get your favourite dish delivered to your doorstep in a few minutes by a food delivery app. The demand for online food delivery app development has increased immensely over the last couple of years. The app store and the google play store is brimming with such apps, but only a few have made it big in terms of user base and revenue generation. 

Food delivery app development is the buzzword of the current on-demand industry. Restaurants have only one way to boost their sales and revenues in this pandemic; food delivery. The rapidly rising genre has some challenges to overcome over its way to success. These apps have revived a number of standalone restaurants, catering services, and food marketplaces. The entrepreneurs find this genre quite intriguing and have been investing actively in more effective online food delivery app development. The global food delivery app market stands at a valuation of 120 billion US dollars as of the year 2021 and has been projected to cross the mark of 300 billion dollars by the year 2027. If you have a unique idea about developing a food delivery app, we know how to get you started. 

How Does the Food Delivery Apps Work?

When a user clicks the button order now on any meal delivery apps and proceeds to payment, there are a lot of processes happening backstage. The working of an app depends on the type, whether it’s an app or only a standalone restaurant, or a cloud kitchen, or a meal kit delivery station. 

For instance, in a cloud kitchen app like Zomato, users get a list of restaurants that are registered on the platform to choose from. After the user has selected the dishes from their favourite restaurant, they proceed to payment. The app provides them with a lot of options for payments; the user can choose from credit card, debit card, net banking, and much more. When the payment is successfully completed, the app displays a confirmation to the user. 

Simultaneously, the app notifies the restaurant of their version of the app. While the restaurant prepares your order, it sends a notification to the nearby available delivery partners on their version of the app. The delivery partner then reaches the restaurant and waits for the order to get ready for pick-up. Once the restaurant is ready with the order, they notify the users and hand over the food to the delivery partner. Once the delivery partner reaches the user’s location, users are notified, and in case of any delay or any issue, the users have the option to call the restaurant and the delivery partner as well. 

After the food is handed over to the user, the app notifies the restaurant of the same. Once the status of the order changed from on the way to delivered, the users now can rate the food, restaurant, and delivery partner. In case of any issue, most of these food delivery apps deliver online chat support that is available 24×7. 

Types of Food Delivery App Development 

Today we have cuisines available from all over the world, and to deliver them to your doorstep, there are multiple types of food delivery app available in the market. There are mostly two types of meal delivery apps popular in the market used by; standalone restaurants and cloud restaurants.

App for Standalone Restaurants

These apps are designed to cater for the needs of only one restaurant. Users can place their orders and get the food delivered to their homes within the mentioned time limit. The working of these apps is similar to the apps for cloud restaurants. These restaurants have a limitation as some of them only cater to a limited geographical area. However, there are some restaurants that possess a chain of restaurants across the city or country; this type of app can easily fit their business needs. 

Cloud Restaurants App 

Cloud Restaurants food delivery apps are known for being fast and diversified in terms of cuisine. These companies don’t have a restaurant of them instead, they tie-ups with a lot of restaurants over a geographical area and manage their orders from a centralized platform. Any restaurant can choose to join this massive network. In simple terms, it is a marketplace of restaurants online. 

Recommended Read : 9 Best Online Food Delivery Mobile Apps of 2021

Food Delivery App Development Timeline

Delivery of any item requires a lot of effort, and so does the development of such apps. Since there are a lot of meal delivery apps already in existence in the market, you will have to come up with a different concept that users find interesting. The market is all about grabbing the attention of your target audience. Mirror the expectations of your users in the form of features and functionality in your app. You will definitely need a food delivery app development company to guide you through the process and deliver you a flawlessly engineered product. Let’s start with the development timeline of any meal delivery service application. 

Understand the Market’s Opinion 

Regardless of the app type and the platform you will be launching the app on, the most important factor in your project’s future is the market. Every success or failure will be either directly or indirectly related to the market; in order to understand the market and use it to your advantage, conduct a deep market analysis. Understand your competitors and their various business strategy. While you are on the task, add the target audience’s expectations from such a new app into that list. What the audience thinks about your app or what they from a new app is the most important factor for the project. 

You can either hire a full-fledged marketing company who will do the research for you, or you can just deliver the task to your in-house team. The problem with the latter option is; in-house teams are often not trained to dig deep in the market, and you might come with a report with fewer insights. In order to solve these problems, you can think about the third option, which involves purchasing a full-length market research report from various marketing websites. These reports are customized as per the genre. 

Plan Your Way Ahead 

The market can be a mine for intelligent insights that can boost the completion rate of your food delivery app development process. Dig into the report and find out the most relevant points that affect your project in a positive way. Get the details about the strategies of the prevailing competitors and compare their strategies, find out the negative points that you can turn into positive. Plan everything with precision to get the most effective and result-oriented project. List out all the features you want for your app. Before proceeding to this step, you should take a look at the user’s expectations from a new app and include the same to attract more popularity. 

Features to be Considered 

Features are the most important parts of any application; the food industry is no different than any other genre in the global market. Integrate a list of attractive features that awe the customers but at the same time delivers a great performance. These apps often have three panels of features; one for the user, one for the restaurants, and one for the delivery partner. Remember, all these sections have some common features such as onboarding, account, push notifications, search, etc. Here are some of the main features that should be considered in the food delivery app development process.

User Panel Features

• Catalogue: Allow users to see the list of restaurants on the platform. 
• Filter/Sort: Allow users to sort and filter the list as per various parameters such as distance, ratings, etc. 
• Cart: Allow users to delete items from the cart and get a summary of their items ordered and the overall amount to pay. 
• Account History: Allow users to analyse all the previous orders from the platform; users can also directly re-order their previously ordered items easily from here. 
• Location: Allow users to track their order live on the in-built map. It also displays the estimated time of arrival at the user’s doorstep. 
• Payments: Allow users to pay for their orders with multiple payment options. 
• Offers/Promo: Allow users various types of discounts based on their order history. 
• Chat/Call: Allow users to get in touch with the delivery partner or the restaurant in case of any issue. 

Restaurant Panel Features 

• Dashboard: Allow the restaurant to control everything from one place. Restaurants have the real-time status of every order at a single place. 
• Accept/Decline Orders: Allow restaurants to decline or accept orders as per their feasibility. They can deny orders in case of unavailability of the items, etc. 
• Inventory: Allow restaurants to keep track of their inventory in real-time, which helps them in accepting or declining further orders. 
• Payment: Allow restaurants to receive payments from the users or to manage the commissions of the delivery partners. 

Delivery Partner Panel Features 

• Accept/Decline Order Request: Allow delivery partners to accept or decline an order delivery request. 
• Order Delivery: Allow delivery partners to mark the confirmation of delivery of an order. 
• Order History: Allow delivery partners to track the record of their past deliveries based on various parameters such as distance, earned per trip, etc. 
• Chat/Call: Allow delivery partners to get in touch with the users and the restaurants in case of any query. 

• Offline Payments: Sometimes, users pay in cash, and this feature allows delivery partners to record the offline payment. 
• Payment withdrawal: Allow delivery partners to withdraw their money into their bank accounts. 
• GPS tracking: Allow delivery partners to track the exact location of the restaurants and the customers where they have to deliver the orders. 

Tech Stack to be Considered 

Now, you have a list of important features that should be integrated into your app, but to power these features and various other functions, you would need a robust tech stack. Now, most of the companies in the market use various technologies that fit their business needs; you can also ask your food delivery app developer to integrate a tech stack that caters to your app’s business and operational needs. Here is a generic technological stack that is used by various top companies of the food delivery genre. 

For the purpose of application and database, they generally use Python, Node.js, HTML5, Java, MySQL, MongoDB, Google Drive, Ubuntu, Redis, Amazon S3, Amazon EC2, RabbitMQ, Flask, Debian, Google Compute Engine, Scala, Memcached, etc. Apart from the application building and database, there are also some of the utilities which can be fulfilled by Google Analytics, Postman, Twilio SendGrid, etc. 

For the purpose of DevOps and business tools, you can consider GitHub, Docker, Jenkins, Kubernetes, Vim, New Relic, Docker Compose, Ansible, Sentry, Amazon EC2 Container Service, Travis CI, Slack, HipChat, etc. For the purpose of API, you can use Google Places API, Foursquare API, Uber Eats API, GrubHub API, MapBox API, Google Matrix, Freshchat API, Onesignal API, Waze Navigational API, etc. 

Execution and Testing 

After you have gathered all the necessary elements of the development process, it’s time to proceed to the main event. Start with the designing part; it should be simple and elegant. Try not to be too flashy with the colours; it’s always better to stick with a colour pattern. You will need a developer team from a reputable food delivery app development company that matches your ideas and deliver the project of your expectations. An ideal development team generally consists of a project manager, QA, developers, testing engineers, and business analysts. 

The next and the most important step of the development process is testing. Remember to test your app thoroughly for any bugs and errors. It’s better to find and remove any bugs or errors in the testing process than to find out the errors after rolling out the product. An Iterative Method of testing has been proven to be the most effective in such types of app development. 

Factors Influencing the Cost of Development 

Food delivery app development cost depends on a number of factors as everyone follow a different development approach. An app has numerous functions and sections, and each one of them can affect the food delivery app development cost. The most important factor is the choice of a development partner. You can also choose a freelance development team, but the issue of quality and trust will always be there. On the other hand, with a full-fledged mobile app development company, you get reliability, trust, and a team of experienced developers. Here are some of the factors that affect food delivery app development costs. 

• Number of features integrated into the app 
• Number of platforms on which the app is launched 
• Development company 
• Location 
• Type of app 
• Launching of the app 
• Publishing fee of the Google Play/App store 

The Final Takeaway 

Food delivery apps are one of the most popular categories of the on-demand app development genre. The industry is projected to attach a lot of zeroes behind its overall valuation. Investing in a food delivery app in the current times is quite a good idea, provided that the concept should be intriguing to the users. If you are thinking of building a robust, scalable, and feature enriched food delivery app, then we have the perfect solution for you. 

Matellio is referred to as the top mobile app development company in the market. We have gained this reputation with vast professional experience and utmost dedication. Our team of highly trained experts and mobile app developers knows every in and out of the food delivery app development market. We have developed several robust food delivery apps that have received excellent feedback from the clients and their users. Stop waiting and book a 30-min free consultation call with our highly regarded experts. Fill the form now! 

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