The on-demand food delivery apps like UberEats, Deliveroo, Postmates, Swiggy, Zomato, and some others are a great examples of services that have the potential to live up to the expectations of the current generation. In this post, we will share the delivery model and other requirements for a food delivery app.
Food Delivery Startup Models
- The Aggregator Model
This is based on the traditional system of food delivery. The startups that are based on the aggregator model act as a third party who manage the consumers and the restaurants in the vicinity. They allow customers to look for different cuisines and place orders for a quick, doorstep delivery.
- Delivery Platform with Logistic
This model supports the partnered restaurants with logistics. The advantage of this model is that it can extend its services to mini restaurants, food joints, and home delivery services to deliver food. This model rules out the need to maintain delivery personnel, vehicles, or managing deliveries for a restaurant.
On-Demand Food Delivery App Features
There are a number of common features that determine the performance and success of on-demand food delivery apps.
- An Exceptional List of Food
The more menus, cuisines, restaurants, ingredients and nutritional information, calories, delivery times, and restaurant addresses your application has, the more users will be interested and engaged in your application. This information helps the consumers to decide what they would like to order.
- Online Payments
Cashless payments have always acted as a plus point in the on-demand businesses. A matter of fact is that sometimes people order food because they are cashless and applications provide them with multiple online payment options. Online payment integration helps your food delivery app to be handy, convenient and ready to use. It allows your customers to believe that they can order food without worrying about having enough cash in their wallets.
- Delivery Time
Your business can reach great heights if you have a strategy to work out the delivery options. Postmates and Instacart are the best in terms of delivery and in fact UberEats too, as they only charge Re1 for every delivery and deliver as fast as possible. They allow customers to track their orders via real-time tracking option. If you want your business to get users then your application should offer something that other applications do not.
- Review & Ratings
It is very important to listen to your customers. Every app these days, be it Swiggy, Uber, or Postmates, they offer their customers an opportunity to give feedback about the service. Uber has an algorithm for the ratings that drivers and riders give to each other. If you like the service of a driver, you are most likely to get that driver assigned to you again. If a driver rates you low then you will not get Uber discount offers. Therefore, you can utilize the reviews and rating in order to motivate restaurants owners and customers.
Creating a Food Delivery App
A good food delivery app has different versions according to different user groups. The consumers who would be ordering food on your app, the app for the delivery person, and an application for the restaurant partners.
Food Delivery App for Consumers
- Registration
The first interaction that the customer has with your business is when he registers on your businesses application. You should really think about the registration form fields. You can also provide social media sign-ups. This will help your customer retain any custom settings that he makes. Some of the most basic functions that a consumer must be able to perform here include the ability to create a username, password and link at least one card as a payment option for online payments.
- Looking for a Restaurant
This is what customers are going to do while they spend most of their time using your application. They are going to look for various options like what to order, where to order it from and if this part of your application is confusing, you will have high bounce rates. This means that the following two features are very important for your application:
- Finding restaurants in the desired area
- Key information about the restaurant including the restaurant’s cuisine, prices, deals, discounts, and reviews.
- Placing an Order
Now your customer has decided what he wants to eat and has selected items to place the order. Here, the customer must be able to customize his chosen items along with the option of adding and removing the food items from the cart. We recommend a feature to allow the consumers to either get the order delivered to a specified location or pick up.
- Paying for the Order
This might be the best part for you and your partner restaurants but not for the customers. The most important aspect here is to implement as much safety as possible. Additionally, provide quick execution of transactions. Also, provide more payment options to customers in order to cater to a larger audience. You can also have promotional offers here as a plus point.
- Setting the Location & Tracking the Order
After paying for food, a customer wants his food delivered with best packaging and no leakage issues. Customers expect a shorter delivery time no matter how fast the delivery is. The consumer is looking forward to their favorite meal, whether they are relaxing at home, busy at work or are sunbathing at the local park.
Food Delivery App for Delivery Person
- Registration & Profile Creation
Delivery personnel is required to fill in a registration form on their side of the application. The registration process can be done through a mobile number, email address or a social media account along with addition of some critical information. At this stage, it is important to provide an option of password recovery as well.
- Managing the Orders
Once the registration is done, your delivery person should have access to all the relevant data i.e. size of the order, pickup and drop locations, and any other specifications. The app must allow the delivery person to approve or disapprove the delivery requests.
- Updating the Status
Here, delivery personnel has to update their status so that the waiting customers could be notified about the status of their order. Delivery personnel can update three possible statuses –
- Approved/Disapproved
- Order Picked
- Order Completed/Delivered
To learn more in detail about the business model of a delivery app, here is an informative article Postmates Business Model.
