Food Delivery App Development. How to Develop an App of That Type and How Much Does It Cost
Table of Contents
Food delivery has become an actual service in recent years. It became especially popular during the lockdown. Previously, people had a fairly simple choice: dine at a restaurant or order food delivery? Do you cook dinner yourself or choose ready-made dishes from the menu of your favorite cafe? But with the onset of pandemic restrictions, visiting restaurants and cafes have become limited, but the need for delicious food has only increased because today it is one of the most affordable pleasures. Therefore, it is not surprising that the development of on-demand food delivery applications has become one of the most popular services among IT agencies. Today, in general, it is difficult to imagine a cafe or restaurant that does not provide delivery of its products to consumers. And to organize the delivery process itself from the chef's knife to the buyer's table, a convenient and simple solution is required. Such a solution is the development of food delivery applications.
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What Is Food Delivery App
First of all, a food delivery app is a link between the three components of the transaction: the restaurant, the courier, and the customer. Accordingly, any delivery application must meet the basic needs and goals of all three links in this chain. It should provide the client with access to the restaurant menu, online ordering, online payment for the order, delivery tracking. On the other hand, for the administration of a catering establishment, the application is an opportunity to control incoming orders, monitor their implementation and delivery. And for the courier, the application is the main tool for optimizing logistics and completing their work on time.
How Does On-Demand Food Delivery App Work
Let's start with the basic principles of how such an application works. And they must combine the needs of both the restaurant itself and its visitors. In addition, the functionality of the application during development should be thought out in such a way that courier services can easily use it to organize logistics.
On Client's Side
If we talk about the functionality of the food delivery application from the point of view of the client, then it must meet the following requirements:
Simple and intuitive interface to make the ordering process as easy as possible.
- Fast work without delays and long loading.
- Informativeness: the application must contain informative textual and visual content about available dishes, their composition, prices, cooking, and delivery times.
- The ability to customize the dish or express individual wishes for cooking.
- Ease of choosing payment and delivery methods.
- Payment security.
On Restaurant's Side
From a restaurant's point of view, an app is not just one way to communicate with a customer. For a restaurant, a delivery app is an opportunity to solve several problems at once:
- Communicate with customers and process food delivery orders.
- Supervise staff and order fulfillment.
- Collect statistics and analytics in the form of convenient and logical reports.
- Interact with delivery services and control their work.
On Courier's Side
From the position of a courier service, the application allows you to organize the work as a whole. Real-time updating of information, quick access to delivery orders, the ability to obtain information about the address and delivery time, and compile reports for the day or a certain period are important for him.
On-Demand Food Delivery App Development Features
What are the special features of developing food delivery applications? Let's look at them in more detail.
Feature #1
Fast and easy way to order food. The easier it is to place an order, the better for the customer. A person does not want to waste time choosing. At any time, the user should be able to order food, and not go to the establishment, wait until everything is cooked. Therefore, a mobile food delivery application is a great opportunity to make an order quickly and easily. When a developer starts working on the food delivery app development, it is the start point he should adhere to.
Feature #2
ROI. This is an indicator of the profitability of an investment, or, more simply, the payback ratio. Developing a food delivery app is an investment that will increase your ROI. After all, a person will not go to an institution on the other side of the city but will be able to order food home if a courier brings him. Expanding the audience, increasing the bill, properly optimizing the operation of the enterprise (delivery of several orders at once, blanks, and so on) - all this has a positive effect on ROI and increases profits.
Feature #3
Business expansion. The introduction of new technologies helps to significantly expand the business. First, the number of customers increases, the order in the institution becomes more accessible, simpler, and clearer. In parallel, an assessment of the state of the business is carried out, reviews are collected, and adjustments are made to the needs of customers. All these changes have a positive effect on the development of the company and the business is expanding.
On-Demand Food Delivery App: the Best Technologies to Use
Considering that most often food delivery applications are used by the end customer from mobile devices, it is very important to choose development technologies that will ensure fast and efficient completion of all tasks to adapt the project to mobile devices. At the same time, restaurant owners often want the application to be integrated with their web-based business management software. The combination of these factors is the choice of the best technologies for development.
Flutter
With the ability to develop cross-platform applications with high performance, Flutter is now considered the best option for developing food delivery applications that need to be brought to market in record time.
Node JS
In terms of application development, Node JS is one of the best frameworks because it allows you to implement cross-platform solutions and is suitable for both front-end and server-side (back-end) development.
Food Delivery App Development: Team and Process
Now it’s worth telling in more detail how to select the optimal development team and what stages you have to go through before your food delivery application enters the market.
Project Manager
The project manager is the link between all team members. The distribution and setting of tasks, monitoring their implementation, reporting to the customer - all this is the work of the PM.
IT Architecture Specialist
The development of any product begins with its architecture. It is the IT architect who becomes the first link through which the project passes from its idea to a full-fledged product.
Designers
Thoughtful UX / UI design is the basis of the popularity of the application. For food delivery, this rule is especially relevant, so the work of designers for its development is very important.
Developers
Developers are those who translate all ideas and sketches into program code. That says it all.
QA Engineers
Any finished application needs debugging. And the task of QA is to check its performance, functionality, identify shortcomings and weaknesses in order to eliminate them before release.
The Stages of Food Delivery App Development
If you are going to order the development of a food delivery application, you will have to go through the following stages from an idea to its implementation.
Research and Discovery
An initial analysis of the market, the target audience, its needs, and desires is the first stage in development.
Product Concept
The results of the first stage result in the creation of the application concept. What services will it provide, what will it focus on, and what can be left out of it?
Design and Build
Directly developing design concepts and writing application code is the next step.
Launch Preparations
Before releasing an application, you need to do more than just test it for functionality. In some cases, preparatory work includes marketing services, promotion, and notification of customers about the application itself.
Maintenance and Growth
An already launched application needs support. You may need to change something in it over time, expand functionality or improve existing options.
Food Delivery App Development Costs on DoorDash and Uber Eats Examples
Ubereats, DoorDash — are the most popular apps for food delivery in the world. Uber Eats App is used by more than 66 millions of users (US market shares 30%), DoorDash - 20 millions of users (US market shares 57%). DoorDash, Ubereats Apps have similar functionality and the whole functionality can be divided into 4 parts: application for users, application for restaurants, application for couriers, application for administrators.
User
panel
- Registration, user authorization;
- User profile management (adding, changing, deleting of the data);
- View of the goods cards, goods categories;
- Search for dishes, restaurants;
- Browse of available restaurants in the city, city’s area with geo-binding;
- Order formation;
- Order history;
- Rating of the restaurant, courier;
- Replenish of the application balance;
- Usage of promo codes;
- Receiving news;
- Support service
Restaurant
panel
- Registration, restaurant authorization;
- Restaurant profile management (adding, changing, deleting of the data);
- Adding of the menu information;
- Pricing, discounts, promotions;
- Adding of restaurant staff and passing the order to the courier;
- Order management, view order history;
- Analytics;
- Financial management;
- Support service
Courier
panel
- Courier registration, authorization;
- Courier profile management (adding, changing, deleting of the data);
- Booking (accept/reject) the order delivery request;
- Browse of the order delivery requests with geo-binding;
- Order card, delivery history;
- Delivery route from the restaurant to the user;
- Support service;
- Courier activity statistics;
- Courier finance
Admin
panel
- Access, access levels;
- Management, validation of users, goods, restaurants, delivery services;
- Promotion of offers and discounts through advertising;
- Management of orders, transactions;
- History of orders, messages;
- Mailing messages;
- Support service
Such food delivery applications as DoorDash, Ubereats will be developed within 3-4 months. To create this, the RexSoft team needed 1200 - 1500 hours and a team of 6 specialists.
- PM - 80 hours
- ІТ-architect - 40 hours
- Designer- 150 hours
- Front-end development - 360 hours
- Back-end development - 800 hours
- QA - 80 hours
The development of the food delivery application from scratch such as DoorDash, Ubereats will cost you about $40 000. We offer different models of cooperation so you can hire our part-time experts to strengthen your internal development team.
How to Reduce Costs for Food Delivery App Development
Of course, every business owner wants to reduce the cost of developing applications. We perfectly understand this desire, and we offer you a couple of tips on how to put it into practice.
Hiring Offshore Pros
Hiring offshore specialists can be a great idea. With equal abilities and experience with locales, they will require three times lower rates. Especially if you compare American developers with representatives of the Ukrainian IT segment.
Applying for a Dedicated Development Team
The work of a dedicated team is always more efficient and cheaper than paying for the services of individual specialists. Remember this.
Choosing Experts in Food Delivery App Development
If you hire developers who already have several similar projects in their assets, this saves you time and, accordingly, money.
Starting With MVP
Sometimes launching an MVP is an opportunity to make a name for yourself at a minimal cost. For example, you can offer your customers a service for ordering several dishes from a menu with a limited delivery region, and then expand the functionality of the application as profits come in.
FAQ
Do you offer food delivery application development services to restaurants only?
Talking in brief, the application for food delivery on-demand could be scaled for all businesses engaged in that area. For example, local stores and malls can also apply for an app like that. The same concerns fast food points, food trucks, and other HoReCa institutions.
Is it real to develop a food delivery app for both web and mobile devices?
Be sure, it is quite real. Besides, you can also apply for integration services for the integration of a food delivery app into your CRM.
Are there any limitations for the food delivery application development?
When you cooperate with a skilled dedicated team, you won't face any considerable limitations as pros can cope with them easily by providing custom solutions.
Bogdan Misiurenko
Business Development ManagerSkilled, experienced specialists from RexSoft are ready to answer any questions regarding the design and development of IT products.
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