3 Factors You Cannot Avoid When Developing an On Demand Food Delivery App

There was a time when families dedicated one day in a month to visit a nearby restaurant and relish their favourite cuisines. Time gradually changed and after the onset of telephones, phone ordering became a norm. Pizzas and popular restaurant chains took orders via telephones and delivered food with the help of their in-house associates. Time changed again and as telephones became smaller, the entire way we ordered food changed.

This is the age of on-demand services and food delivery is no exception. With the help of apps and the internet, we can now order food from not just one but any restaurant in our vicinity. From pizzas to Lebanese, it’s all a tap away. Over the last few years, on-demand food delivery has grown tremendously and with the rise of working professionals, it is anticipated to grow even further.

Statistics reveal that this industry will grow at an annual rate of 7.5% to reach a value of over $164mn by the year 2024. This is not just exciting from a customer perspective but business angles too.

If you’re someone intending to cash in on this market potential and earn revenue, this is the right to venture into a food delivery app development. Despite the competition, customers are consistently looking for better customer service, offers and restaurant selections. So, if you’re looking to startup, here are some crucial factors you need to incorporate in your app to get an edge.

3 Factors You Cannot Avoid When Developing an On-demand Food Delivery App

An Elegant App Interface

Let’s be honest, your amazing talent pool of delivery agents would be of no use if your app interface is pathetic. Your app’s UI is the first impression your customers have about your app and your company. The app should be intuitive, easily navigable, offer personalized recommendations and do more.

However, to get your customers ordering, your app has to feature the following options:

Food Photos

The eyes taste the food before the tongue does. If you notice, on-demand apps mostly push customers into decision paralysis, where they’re unsure what to order from so many choices. At such times, a tempting photo does the trick. So, ensure all the photos in your app are professionally taken by restaurants and submitted to you. If the photos are attractive, you could keep the cash register ringing.

Menu Variety

One of the major reasons people order food is because they can’t prepare certain dishes at home. The human mind craves variety and if your app only serves the conventional delicacies, it is bound to fail.

You should include food delicacies from around the world and tie-up with restaurants that can pull this off. From healthy selections to food items that would send customers on a guilt trip, have them all open for ordering. Here, your app should be able to present them in the most captivating ways possible, too!

Search Option

Sometimes, people know what they order. Or they crave for a very specific delicacy. Your app should be able to serve them as well. Integrating a search bar would help them quickly order their preferred food from their preferred restaurant.

GPS Tracker

Now, GPS serves two purposes here. It allows the app to know your location and recommend restaurants in your vicinity. It also allows customers to know their delivery status. One of the reasons why on-demand food delivery apps worked in the market is because they could track their food in real-time.

Multiple Addresses

It’s not always necessary that as a customer, you would get food delivered only to your place. There could be instances, where you want to surprise your friends and family with their favourite food at their place, order food to a workplace for your friend, deliver food to your parents in a different city and more.

When the scenarios are diverse, the app should also be developed to handle such diversity. That’s why they should have the functionality where customers can save more than one address of delivery. They should be able to manually enter an address and save their preferences.

During checkout, the app should also confirm the address of delivery before placing the order. Here, they could choose if the order is to their address or a different one. Apart from offering convenience, this feature also helps in customer retention.

Delivery Validation

Appetite is universal and it’s something that has to be satisfied immediately. That’s why it’s a wise decision to incorporate a feature that would offer customers a glimpse of the exact delivery time of their order from a particular restaurant.

When a user adds food to their cart, the app should immediately retrieve information about the nearby delivery agents available, the estimated preparation time from the restaurant, the pickup time and the estimated time of arrival.

These pieces of information will further allow customers to take a call on the restaurant they’ve chosen on whether they wish to continue with their order or prefer a much nearby restaurant with a faster delivery time.

Why this is crucial is to avoid any complaints about late deliveries. As customers have a clear idea of when their order would arrive, it’s more like getting an acknowledgement or confirmation from them before the order is placed.

Bonus – Cloud Kitchen

Cloud kitchens are becoming the new norm in the food business. If you intend to start a restaurant app development company, you cannot overlook collaborating with cloud kitchens. For the uninitiated, cloud kitchen is a rising concept, where an establishment has only a kitchen set up. These food joints do not offer dine-in services and are exclusively for delivery. From small home-cooks to dedicated cloud kitchens run by popular chains, they are further elevating the palate experience of users ordering from a food delivery app.

Your app should also have a separate tab to list all the cloud kitchens in the vicinity to give your customers a different assortment of delicacies. These are perfect for working professionals, who cannot afford fancy food every single day.

Collaborate with cloud kitchens and get them on board and you would only see an increase in customer retention.

How to Get Started?

So, now that you know the crucial features that would elevate customer experience, it’s time to get them developed. As you know, mobile app development is a tedious task. Tons of factors go into the development of a stable app and we’re not even mentioning the mobile app development cost. We’re talking about the technicalities involved.

In such cases, it’s recommended that you get your app developed from industry veterans like us. We’ve been in this business for years and we completely understand the market and its requirements. We are an Ionic app development company, meaning the apps we develop are not just solid but scalable as well. We foresee your business’ future and work towards it.

That’s why you should get started with us today to make this decade count for your food delivery app ambitions.