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How to create a food delivery app like UberEats or Deliveroo with Appy Pie’s App Builder?

January 17, 2018 By Appy Pie -- 0 Comments

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App Builder Appy Pie, January 17: In a world as busy as it is today, it is convenience and speed that is of prime importance for any kind of consumer, in any business category. An ideal service today needs to offer freedom of choice to the consumer, adaptability to fit into the tight schedule of the consumer, great ease of use and a measure of thoughtfulness. The on-demand food delivery apps of the day like UberEats, Deliveroo, Postmates, Swiggy, Zomato and quite a few others are great example of services that have the potential to live up to all this and more! It is this potential and promise that makes them a lucrative investment for entrepreneurs, a challenging task for the developers and an amazing service for the premium consumer today. In this post, we are going to talk about the basics of developing a food delivery app, the features it must have, the cost it may incur, the case of UberEats, the challenges & the ways to overcome them, and some business tips to get you started.

The millennials are bringing dining out into a dining in setup where they prefer the food to come to them, instead of them going to eat out. They are looking for restaurants to deliver to them at the tap of a screen and in such a scenario, food delivery apps are in great demand. The modern day food delivery apps like UberEats, Postmates, Deliveroo, GrubHub, FoodPanda, JustEat, Zomato, DoorDash, Swiggy and so many more offer a wide range of restaurants, cuisines, and payment options to choose from, making their lives easier. It is services or apps like these that have the potential to changing the face of the food delivery industry as more and more consumers are getting accustomed to hunting for deals in apps of the one stop shop variety!

In the current food delivery scenario, there are two major food delivery start-up models that are dominating the current market.

1. The Aggregator Model

This model is based on the traditional system of food delivery. These startups that are based on the aggregator model act as the third party who manage the consumers and the restaurants in the vicinity. They provide a platform for the consumers to browse through a great number of cuisines and restaurants. As a third party the food delivery app aggregators provide support for ordering and offer exposure to the restaurants. The consumer can explore the menus, reviews, ratings, and prices only after registering on the app, and then place their order. After the confirmation of the order, the information is passed on to the restaurant by the aggregator and then the food is sent out for delivery. The dispatch and delivery of the food here is taken care of entirely by the restaurant itself. Apps like Zomato fall under this category.

2. Food Delivery Platform With Logistic Support

This model differs from the aggregator model as it supports the partnering restaurants with complete logistics support. This model can extend its services quite profitably to small restaurants, food joints, and home delivery services to deliver food in a seamless manner. This model offers a lot of ease and support to start-ups in the food industry who do not have the resources or the bandwidth to have their own delivery system in place. From a restaurant’s point of view, this model brings a horde of benefits. Adapting this model rules out the need to maintain delivery personnel, vehicles, or managing and making the deliveries. This model is preferred by the restaurants for the ease and support it offers to them hence a lucrative business model for a food delivery start-up. This is the chosen model for highly profitable food delivery apps like UberEats and Swiggy.

Features of a perfect on-demand food delivery app.

So what is it that is needed to build a food delivery app like UberEats? There are a number of common features that determine the future performance and success of the app.

1. Access to Data

Data is the real king here as it is the one thing that attracts themost users. The more menus, cuisines, restaurants, ingredients, nutritional content, calories, delivery times, restaurant addresses they have, the more interested and engaged a user is going to be. It is this information that helps the consumers make their mind up about what they would like to order. In this day and age of technical revolution, all this information and other details can be accessed through API used in the mobile apps.

2. Online Payment Integration

It is not enough to be able to sit at home and place your orders, it is only natural that your users would want to make their payments online too! Whether it is UberEats or Zomato, all the leading players in this market provide this feature where users would not have to worry about having enough cash in their wallets. For an app that is truly popular among the users, it is important that you incorporate as many payment options as possible. Some fo the most preferred mediums are Stripe, Visa Checkout, Paypal, or even Square. These mediums allow the users to use debit or credit cards to complete their payment without a hitch.

3. Delivery Time

This is a world of instant gratification and in this fast paced world most users are looking for quick deliveries with maximum efficiency. It is therefore wise to have a feature displaying an estimated delivery time for the benefit of the user. This goes a long way in managing the expectations of a consumer and effectively reduces the consumers’ anxiety levels. While UberEats gives an estimate of the delivery time Postmates is known to be pretty accurate in the prediction of the time taken. This might seem like an impossible accomplishment, but in the age of machine learning, it isn’t too farfetched. All possible contributory parameters are taken into account and the delivery times are calculated automatically whenever an order is placed on your app.

4. Tracking

Even though this feature was popularized by the leading taxi app Uber but comes in really handy for the food delivery apps. GPS is being used extensively by the leading food delivery apps like Postmates and restaurant apps like Pizza Hut and Caviar to offer only the best experience to the consumers. The way GPS works here is that first it identifies the user’s location and once the user’s location is verified, there is a two way tracking and GPS functioning where the consumer can track the progress and movement of the delivery personnel and the delivery personnel would be able to see the way to the consumers’ location. Some of the great APIs for this feature include MapKit, Google Maps or Waze’s Navigation. Uber uses Google Maps on all the platforms.

5. Review & Ratings

The food delivery apps integrate the freelance drivers or delivery personnel who are filtered quite stringently, but they still need to be monitored from time to time to ensure that they are doing a good job and not doing anything that would malign the company’s reputation. The best and most efficient way to accomplish this is through a consumer review and ratings system. Apps like Postmates, DoorDash, UberEats offer their consumers an opportunity to provide a rating for the delivery personnel based on their experience. It is on the basis of these ratings that the apps decide whether they would continue with the delivery personnel in question.

The way a food delivery app function is completely different from your Instagram or WhatsApp. The best solution for a good food delivery app entails creating three different versions of the app according to the three different user groups on your app – the consumers who would be ordering on your app, the delivery personnel you would be hiring, and the managers from your restaurant partners.