Did you know that the food delivery market is worth $151 billion globally? That means it’s a highly profitable and lucrative industry. If you’re an entrepreneur, you should consider entering the food delivery industry.
Building an app is no simple task. Thankfully, this Idea Maker guide is here to help you through the steps involved in creating a food delivery app much like Uber Eats. Keep reading to learn more.
If you’d like to enter the mobile app market, but food delivery isn’t your desired niche, you may enjoy our guide to developing an app like Instagram.
Table of Contents
What Is a Food Delivery App?
Food delivery apps like Uber Eats combine food delivery services with online meal ordering and location-based technologies. They allow you to select local restaurants, view their menu, and order your desired meals straight to your door.
From a technical perspective, apps like Uber Eats are based on several intelligent technologies. These include MySQL, Postgres, and for cross-platform applications, React Native. Moreover, if a food ordering app includes driver tracking to see how close your meal is, there will be an element of geo-location tracking and possibly Google Maps integration.
What Makes Uber Eats So Popular?
With over 81 million users, Uber Eats is one of the US’s most popular food delivery apps. It boasts several features that make it so prominent. Understanding what makes an app like Uber Eats so popular is critical in developing your own food delivery mobile app.
Reliable Pool of Drivers
Uber Eats shares a driver pool with its parent app Uber. This means there are many drivers available to deliver food to customers, as Uber drivers can select both food delivery and taxi jobs within their dedicated app. As a result, the Uber Eats delivery system is based on the same reliable platform as the regular Uber app.
Drivers are prompted by job requests based on their proximity to the customer and the restaurant they are ordering from. This enables wait times to be reduced, meaning customers get their food swiftly. What’s more, Uber also offers surge pricing during challenging weather conditions, allowing customers to receive orders rain or shine.
You can learn more about Uber’s delivery system in Idea Maker’s guide to developing an app like Uber.
Intuitive UI
One of the greatest draws to Uber Eats is its intuitive UI. It enables users to search for their favorite restaurants and filter by particular cuisines and food types. This makes finding and ordering meals a simple process.
A smooth and accessible user interface is key in food delivery app development. An intuitive frontend helps create a positive user experience and keeps people coming back for more. At Idea Maker, we use Vue for frontend app development projects, and we recommend you do too.
Large Selection of Cuisines
There are over 500,000 restaurants partnered with Uber Eats in the US, giving customers a wide variety of choices. Without such a large selection of different foods and cuisines, it’s likely the app would not be as successful. When creating your own food delivery platform, it’s essential that you partner with a high number of restaurants to give your customers plenty of options.
What’s more, when purchasing their food, users can pay cashless using a large selection of payment options. This helps customers feel secure when ordering food on the Uber Eats delivery app. It also makes the payment process more accessible, as they don’t have to worry about having cash.
How to Make a Food Delivery App
Now that you understand what makes the Uber Eats app so popular, it’s time to take a look at how to build your own food delivery business.
Define Target Audience
The first step in developing a food delivery app is determining your target audience. Understanding your users’ demographics and needs will aid you in including relevant features on your platform. This should be accompanied by analyzing the key consumer base of the sector in which you wish to do business.
After you’ve decided who your target audience is, you’ll be better informed about your platform’s requirements. This will assist you in achieving the greatest exposure for your food ordering app. For example, if you want to focus on Indian cuisine, you could include a filter that sorts food by spice level.
Establish Features
Next, you need to determine which features to include in your mobile app design. The following are just a few suggestions you may wish to consider.
Push Notifications
Ensuring your food delivery app sends users push notifications at appropriate times is an essential part of creating an excellent user experience. For example, when a user’s food is on its way, notifying users of the progress of their order helps them stay informed and prepare for delivery. You can also inform them about new deals and restaurants.
Restaurant Filters
As previously discussed, including filtering options is vital. Allowing users to filter by their favorite cuisine and meal types helps them swiftly find their next meal. This is an important part of creating a smooth user experience.
Order Progress Tracking
Many food ordering apps allow users to track the progress of their orders, including when the restaurant receives their order, when it’s being prepared, estimated delivery time, and the delivery driver’s location. Often, a map feature is implemented for precise tracking.
Source Restaurants
Once you’ve designed your food delivery app, you should contact local restaurants and ask them to partner with you. Agree upon a commission for all orders received via your app. Uber Eats, for example, take an arguably large cut of 30%.
If you’re focusing on a niche market, ensure there are enough restaurants in your area that provide the cuisine. Otherwise, you may face a shortage of food options. Out of the available restaurants, not all will want to partner, so it’s vital to choose a market with many choices.
Source Drivers
After finding restaurants willing to partner with your food delivery business, you’ll need to source drivers. You could hire a fleet of drivers as employees, but this would be costly. There are two other options that are more cost-effective.
First, you could partner with existing taxi drivers and have them deliver food when their business is quiet. Second, you could follow a similar food delivery model to Uber Eats and temporarily hire drivers per delivery. This is the most cost-effective option and helps avoid many regulations attributed to taxi drivers.
Finally, you must research employment regulations in your industry before hiring anyone. Otherwise, you could find yourself in hot water.
Hire Expert Development Company
Next, it’s time to develop your food delivery mobile application. If you don’t have the technical know-how to create such a complex application, you should hire an experienced app development company, like Idea Maker.
You can learn more about hiring the best developers through Idea Maker’s comprehensive guide. Otherwise, here are a few things to bear in mind.
Portfolio and Testimonials
First, you should look at a development firm’s portfolio. This will provide you with an indication of the quality of their work and whether they are the correct fit for your food delivery app development. It also demonstrates how well they can handle intricate features necessary for an Uber Eats-like app.
Customer testimonials can help you assess the quality of customer service at an agency. Working with a developer who has poor communication skills is likely to result in a development that doesn’t meet your expectations. Reading through Clutch.io is an excellent way to gain verified and trusted feedback about a developer.
Cross-Platform Capabilities
When developing a food delivery service, it should be available to the broadest range of people possible. This means developing an app for both iOS and Android users. As a result, you should hire an app development company that offers cross-platform capabilities.
What’s more, as cross-platform apps run on one uniform codebase, it’s much easier for developers to spot and rectify errors. This means not only do cross-platform apps open your food delivery service up to more customers, but it also allows for swift bug fixes, ensuring a smooth user experience.
Post-Release Support Options
After your food delivery application is created, it will undoubtedly encounter bugs and require maintenance. As a consequence, you must ensure that you hire a development firm with a post-release support option. Many firms, like Idea Maker, provide package support at reduced rates, allowing you to relax knowing that your app is maintained cost-effectively.
Although a development firm may provide post-development support as a service, many of them fall short when the time comes. Examine the quality of a developer’s previous applications to see if they offer post-release assistance. If the apps are reliable and appear well-maintained, the company will probably provide outstanding support choices.
Deploy to Restaurants and Drivers
After development, you should then deploy your app to restaurants and drivers before customers. This will ensure the app is fully ready to receive and satisfy orders. It is an excellent idea to develop a second or third restaurant app specifically built for your partners.
Alternatively, you could follow a model like Uber; wherein there’s a driver portal accessible through the regular app. This saves time and money on developing an additional app while allowing drivers and restaurants to enjoy the outstanding UI of the customer-side app. Once your food delivery app is in the hands of restaurants and delivery drivers, you can then deploy it to mobile users.
Collect Feedback
You should pay attention to how active users use your food delivery service and ask them for comments. You may contact individuals directly using email or urge them to fill out surveys while using the app. Before gathering feedback, it’s a good idea to establish a large sample size so that you can represent the demographic of your entire user base.
After you’ve collected user feedback, have your software development team make the required modifications. This will make users feel appreciated, improve user experience, and stay engaged as a result.
Maintain and Enhance App
Finally, after developing, deploying, and collecting feedback for your food delivery app, you should work hard to keep it maintained. This means you will need to continue working closely with your app development team to identify and fix bugs and update the app regularly.
Summary
After reading this article, you can develop your own food delivery app like Uber Eats. This article covered the following:
- What is a food delivery app?
- What makes Uber Eats so popular?
- How to make a food delivery app
Make a Food Delivery App with Idea Maker
If you’re interested in food delivery app development but lack the technical knowledge to build one for yourself, consider Idea Maker. We have a professional team of dedicated experts ready to create a cross-platform app to your exact requirements. Schedule a free consultation with us today to learn more.
