Whether you are thinking of starting your online grocery business or want to create an online presence of your traditional grocery store, building your on-demand grocery app just like Bigbasket or Grofers is the phenomenal decision to make your online business successful!

While more than one in five adults prefers ordering food through an app once in a month and that is equivalent to 18 million people out of 23 million, managing your grocery store without an app is a horrible mistake in today’s tech-world.

The emergence of technology has not only made the life of retailers far easier but also offer great comfort to the shoppers to order groceries with an app. It is true that online grocery sales only represent 2.8% sales of all U.S eCommerce sales, but still, grocery apps are falling under one of the fastest-growing categories.

The forecast from eMarket reveals that the grocers are more comfortable in ordering groceries online, and the usage of grocery application will grow from 18 Million users in 2018 to 30 Million users in 2022.

Are you still in a dilemma whether it is worth investing in grocery app development?

Dive Insight.

Why Your Grocery Business Needs a Mobile Application?

Those were the days of the past when buyers prefer visiting traditional grocery stores or market in the local area to buy essential household items. However, initially, the local shopping trends have been successfully replaced by the Supermarket stores, and now, the increasing number of mobile applications are proudly taking place.

With 2.7 million active smartphone users across the world, it won’t be shocking to say that the mobile app industry is thriving without showing any sign of slowing down in future forecast. While smartphones are useful for accessing everything right from texting to calling, online grocery shopping apps are also a good fit for smartphones.

The evolution of online grocery stores is a real blessing for customers. Imagine how relaxing it would be to have a variety of fresh fruits, vegetables, milk, and all other necessary items delivered at your doorsteps with a few touches on your mobile screen?

As customers are feeling more comfortable shopping for groceries with an app; therefore, more and more businesses are taking advantage of it. , it won’t be wrong to say that grocery shopping apps are playing multiple roles.

Let’s discuss, HOW?

1. Grocery Apps Can Minimize Your Shopping Time

Visiting a store without your grocery list and flocking here and there to collect your necessary item, and then waiting in a long billing queue is not only time consuming but also the most annoying thing that you never want to face today.

Did you know, a survey has revealed that buyers usually visit 1.6 times a week and spend around 43 minutes on each visit. If we calculate it annually, on average, a buyer spends about 60 hours on grocery shopping per year. However, your app can tailor their shopping experience and allow them to add more than a half of those hours to their life.

2. Add The Convenience To Track Their Order

The more comfort and convince you are providing to the customers, the better impact you will see on your sales.

The forecast from OuterBox survey report submitted by Justin Smith, CEO, reveals that 79% of smartphone users prefer to purchase from mobile applications.

With grocery mobile apps, customers can track the real-time location of the order, therefore get the estimate when they can receive the delivery of the product.

3. Understand Customer Behaviour

Many of you must be wondering why we are discussing this economic topic in a business grocery app, but it is crucial to understand!

Keeping in mind today’s business models, it has become highly crucial for entrepreneurs to collect valuable data to understand whether customers like or dislike their services.

Delivering the services after analysing customer behaviour can double your business sales. A customer behaviour survey can include anything from what time they prefer to shop, what payment mode they use, what items customers like to buy the most, and much more.

4. Streamline Product Categorization

The easy categorization of the products can delight your customers and enables you to achieve new heights in your business. Well listed products can allow your customers to browse and choose from the thousands of products. With a few taps on the mobile application, they can add it to their cart and enjoy smooth shopping experience.

With the online grocery app, a business owner can easily manage the grocery business and simplify the overall shopping process for the customers.

Being a startup or an entrepreneur of the grocery store, if you have finally made a mind to grow your business with the application, then it is best to opt to create on-demand grocery delivery app with flutter.

Because the growth of the grocery business is undoubtedly a booming market in the future, therefore, developing an application with the best programming language and framework has become a need of the hour. And, when it comes to developing on-demand grocery delivery app design with the ultimate UI design, nothing can beat the extensive features of the flutter.

Why is Flutter An Ideal Choice For Developing Grocery App?

With the latest release of Flutter version (v1.12.13+Hhotfix.7) on 27th Jan 2020, once again Google has stolen the stage by providing the latest Flutter SDK to the developers and empowers them to create a highly creative and engaging application. Google Flutter is a highly influential, and extensible framework that helps you design a ready-made grocery app with advanced features.

Secondly, while flutter is a smooth and effortless cross-platform mobile app platform, therefore you don’t need to hire mobile app developers for creating an iOS and Android app individually. With the one codebase, you can have developed your grocery app for both platforms.

Some More That Comes With Flutter…

Fast, simple and easy to customize UI design of the application.

It is an open-source language, operates on the Dart programming language for cross-platform development.

It’s free to use and provide its widgets

The architecture of flutter is based on one of the popular react programming language React Native.

How to Develop An On-Demand Grocery App With Flutter?

In this highly digitized era, where everything is found online, the majority of grocery business owners are gradually deciding to move from the traditional way of shopping to online store for various reasons. Whether you want to skyrocket your sales or want to get ready for the future market- on-demand grocery delivery application development is something that many people are getting their hands on to quench the growing needs of the customers.

However, you must be in a dilemma about how to build a grocery app with flutter and how to get started with the app? If this is your concern, then here we have a step-by-step process that helps you get started with the grocery app like Bigbasket.

Quick highlights of the grocery app development process:

Get An Idea To Develop Grocery Application Choose What Type of Application You Need For Your Business? What Features You Need to Integrate? How much will it cost you to develop?

Let’s discuss each point in detail….

1. Get an Idea of Grocery App Development

It is true that Flutter is the language that enables you to customize the design in a way you want your application to be. Still, the success of your mobile app all depends on the concept you adopt for the application development.

While hundreds of grocery applications are already empowering customers to buy their essential household items, how to build a grocery app with flutter to stand apart in the industry?

Before getting started with the development process, understand what exactly you need from an application, to whom you want to target, what goals you want to achieve and what budget you have for the application development…

Do market analysis to find an answer to these basic questions:

Is there any existing grocery app in the market?

Get inspired by the competitors.

Who are your potential audience and their geography?

What features do you need to integrate?

Do your competitors’ provide product and services better than yours?

Sketch the basic idea of grocery app development to simplify the app creation process and able to attract more users to your app.

2. What Type of Grocery App Do You want?

There are multiple grocery app development models that cater to different functions and benefits to the business. Here I have categorized some of the trending application models:

1. Aggregator Business Model

If you are planning to start your grocery business as a third party where all the local grocery stores and customers come at the common platform to buy and sell their products, then Aggregator grocery apps are the perfect solution for you.

Flutter is an open-source platform where customizing the elements of the app is quite easy with less use of coding; therefore, developers prefer to create aggregator apps with the clean and straightforward UI to enhance the customer experience.

By leveraging the features of flutter, developers can quickly enlist all the local grocery stores on the aggregator and allow the customer to choose from the extensive section of the product. Buyers can flawlessly add items to their cart and check out by making payment through different payment options.

Once the order is done and confirmed by the store, you can track the real-time delivery status of the order. In this case, stores are solely responsible for managing their order, not the app maker.

2. Virtual Grocery Store of Your Supermarket

It is more or less like a single grocery store where you can manage everything online from adding new stock to managing delivery orders, collecting money to resolving customer queries. App owners have to take care of everything without any involvement of the third party.

Virtual grocery store apps are ideal for those who want to launch their grocery brand with their product line. The flutter mobile app development companies approximately cost it $10,000 — $60,000, and it can go above that depending on the features and structure you want for your app.

So which type of grocery app best suits your business needs?

On one spectrum, aggregator apps can free you up from the responsibilities and minimize the risk level and help you develop a brand by enlisting other local stores at your platform. Whereas, a single store app will allow you to spread your brand name with your quality products and services.

No matter whatever grocery app development concept you choose, flutter mobile app development company can deliver you a perfect solution by keeping in mind your specific needs and budget.

Take Away: Single store grocery apps are best from the store management point of view, but they intake massive investment.

3. What Can Features Make Your Grocery App a Winner?

While developing an eCommerce application for your grocery store, there are multiple factors that you need to consider to make it successful. With the help of mobile app development service providing company, you can integrate all such features that can enhance the user experience and engage them with your app till longer. Let’s get started with the features that help you develop a grocery app just like big sharks of the market, ie. Bigbasket, Grofers, and so on:

Streamlined Product Categories: Imagine how complex it would be to select your favourite items in the basket full of random products? But Flutter provides you with the flexibility to customize browsing categories and menu items to allow customers to browse items based on the types and make a final purchase without any hassle.

Homepage Banner: It is one of the simplest and smartest strategies to update your customer about your offers, discounts and the latest release of the product. Once the user login your app, make sure you have a home page banner to highlight the latest products or hot selling products on it.

Real-Time Order Tracking : Let your customers track the status of your order and provide real-time estimation about the product delivery.

: Let your customers track the status of your order and provide real-time estimation about the product delivery. Easy & Secure Payment Option : Add the feature to accept payment through multiple options including credit card, debit card, Google Pay, PayPal to ensure seamless checkout.

: Add the feature to accept payment through multiple options including credit card, debit card, Google Pay, PayPal to ensure seamless checkout. Live Chats: Chatbots are the mindful addition to your app that enables your customers to get immediate solution to their problems and provide quick assistance, especially to the first time buyers.

Chatbots are the mindful addition to your app that enables your customers to get immediate solution to their problems and provide quick assistance, especially to the first time buyers. Add To Cart: Once the customer finds their product, allow them to add it to the cart quickly and enables them to keep browsing other items without making checkout. So in the end, they finally go to the cart and purchase the final products.

Once the customer finds their product, allow them to add it to the cart quickly and enables them to keep browsing other items without making checkout. So in the end, they finally go to the cart and purchase the final products. Order History: In case, customers want to repeat the purchase, add the facility to review the order history.

In case, customers want to repeat the purchase, add the facility to review the order history. Flutter App Development: With the help of this programming language, you can design beautiful UI that uplift the user experience and encourage them to make a final purchase.

4. How Much Does It Cost To Develop Flutter Grocery App?

When you hire mobile app developer, approximately it will cost you somewhere $15,000 to $50,000; however, with flutter, it can drastically reduce you half of the price.

Flutter is an open-source and free to use the platform; therefore, the development of an app is simple and faster that ultimately reduce the cost of app development. Let me explain to you how:

The development cost of any application majorly includes UI/UX design, front end, back end development, production, and quality assurance along with the choice of programming language. Also, these are the factors that drastically affect the cost of app development. If the process of app development is more in-depth, complex, and hard to implement, the cost of the app development continues to increase. So, in short, the longer the development process, the higher the cost of app development.

That’s where flutter wins the game by providing developers with an advanced UI toolkit that took half the time to develop an app and cost you half the price as compared to other options.

If you are wondering that how does the cost of an app development concluded, then let me segregate each segment and explain you in detail:

1. Developer’s Expenses for Android/iOS App- Hourly/Monthly cost

Cost of the app development is calculated either on hourly or monthly basis. If you consider the developer for Android app development, the cost of per hour is somewhere $25–49/hr, ($4000 — $7800 for monthly) whereas for iOS apps, it will be $25–49, ($4000 — $7800 for monthly).

2. Design & UI Development Cost

Since design and development is the backbone of your app, therefore, this segment covers the cost of various licenses, staff to implement the development process and testing developers to deliver the app without any bugs. A rough estimate for such app is to take at least one full time designer and one associate designer for a month to finalize the designs and an estimated cost should be $4800 for the same.

3. Testing and Deployment Cost

There is no use for publishing an app with lots of bugs, therefore, an app development company always offers testing debugging during and after the development. An estimated cost for engaging in testing and debugging phase should be $2400 to make sure your app is thoroughly reviewed and distributed without any bug.

Ending Note

When it comes to the eCommerce app development, there are hundreds of options to choose from, but flutter seems to be a game-changer in the entire mobile app development industry. It not only reduces the overall hassle of developing an eCommerce app but also provides the features that help you stand first in the competition.

While this platform is cost-effective, feature-rich, and easy to use and lowering the development cost by 50%, therefore, grocery business owners would love to develop their business app with flutter.