Online food delivery firms like Postmates, GrubHub, Swiggy have got more than $100 million dollars in funding. What these improvements denote? There is no stopping the growth of the on-demand food delivery business. Although online food delivery business is uncertain, it is still the choice of many entrepreneurs mainly because of its less ownership model.
With the rapid expansion in developing countries and heavy competition in food delivery business has called for something new in this business. Easily, the app is the only factor that can be easily leveraged to make a difference between the adversaries.
First of all, online food delivery business has two models.
-The aggregator model
-In house delivery
The aggregator model
This is the real less ownership model. Here as an entrepreneur, your main investment is to develop a customer app, restaurant app, admin app, and delivery partner app. The main work is to persuade the restaurants to list in your app.
An interested person with vehicles can enroll as a delivery partner with you. Once the customer has ordered from the app, it is reverted to the respective restaurant. After some time, a delivery partner is assigned to it. He picks the finished order and delivers it to the customer.
Here, for every order, you get a percentage as commission. This is the working model of Swiggy, UberEats, etc.
In-house delivery model
This model is suitable for those who own a restaurant. A customer app in the name of your restaurant should be there. Contrary to the aggregator model, here you employ delivery fleets. The food ordering and delivery process is similar to the aggregator model. The main advantage of this model is that you need not pay any commission to anyone.
Needless to say, in both models, there are many common features.
In what areas of the app a developer make a mark among the competitors
GPS tracking
GPS is an important part of an on-demand app. Here real-time information has to be sent to the customer app, driver app, and the admin. Below are some of the technologies that can be used for GPS tracking.
To find the customer’s location
-Core Location Framework (for iOS)
-Google Places API (for Android)
To provide a route to the delivery agent
-MapKit (for iOS)
-Google Maps API (for Android)
UI/UX design
Adobe XD, Axure RP, Sketch, etc are some of the top tools for UI/UX design. These tools are compatible with both iOS and Android.
User experience and app design are one of the important factors which influence the user and helps in customer retention and expand customer base. So, as a developer, there is a lot of scope of improving the business via UI/UX.
Try to integrate analytics with UX. The analytics data can be used to gauge the behavior of the user. Nowadays measuring gesture usage is important since many smartphones have removed the home button. The gesture by adults, teenagers, and children is different. So, optimize the app by measuring the gesture UX.
Make the navigation bar as seamless as possible. Sometimes the navigation bar may be unresponsive and this can take a serious toll on the user base.
Do A/B retention test to find the reason for the user’s retention in your app. This helps you to optimize the app.
Integrated payment gateway
Payment gateway system is the place where the users want it to be safe and secure. There are many secure payment integrations available in the market but only a few of them are reliable and credible.
-PayPal Payments Pro
-Braintree
-Stripe
-Skrill
-Square’s API
To expand the customer base, more payment options like e-wallet and digital payments should be made available.
Search and Navigation
When you take a restaurant, there will be a lot of cuisines and each cuisine have a lot of different foods. So, in a food delivery app, you have to bring all those menus in it. The user should be able to easily navigate through the menu and order foods without any hassles. All the details about the menu should be there in a database. An API is used to source the data from the DB whenever required.
Fortunately, there are APIs which helps to easily search and navigate in a mobile app. These APIs belong to food giant GrubHub and the good thing is that it is open source.
-GrubHub API
-Foursquare API
GrubHub API can support more than 10,000 restaurants in it.
Ratings & Reviews
The success of on-demand based business is because of the instant feedback system in place. Users can rate and review the service which provided scope for the service provider to improve the quality of service. New users also used reviews to decide whether the service is good or bad.
The developer should make available the review and rating feature for each restaurant and every delivery person. A threshold is fixed for the restaurant and delivery agent. If their rating drops below the threshold, their service will be suspended. Such a system is followed in UberEats and Zomato.
Wrapping up
Above are some of the cutting edge technologies a developer can use to develop an online food delivery app for a small startup equal to the giants like GrubHub and Postmates.
Moreover, if you are an entry level entrepreneur in the food delivery business then, it is better to load the app with all the above-mentioned features. Doing this will surely place you in the top among the adversaries.
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