It’s hard to find time to visit your favorite restaurants, especially when there is a global pandemic going on. In such situations, technology is rescuing people’s foody desires by enabling online food delivery to be powered by food delivery apps. On-demand food delivery apps have been making our lives hassle-free and convenient for a while now. These apps allow users to order food from their homes via the app and get it delivered to their doorstep very quickly. These apps offer a wide variety of restaurants to the customers, allowing them to order food, whilst also providing additional exposure to the restaurants. For this reason, the food delivery mobile apps have changed the game for the eat and dining sector. If you are looking for a partner to develop your food delivery app, then here are tips and recommendations you should be aware of before developing the food app.

Reasons to Develop Food Delivery App

Undoubtedly, food delivery mobile apps have made our lives more convenient and easy. According to a survey by Jackpot, there are basically 3 main reasons to how this phenomenon can bring fortunes for the food and beverage industry.

Food apps are more practical

Some people don’t have time to go to a restaurant

Some don’t know how to cook

Around 61% of users think that they would love to order food from a restaurant.

By 2022, the online delivery industry will rise up to $55 billion .

Due to online food delivery services, many small, as well as large-scale restaurants have increased their revenue by 25%.

In 2019, the payments made online are around $210 billion.

How to Generate Revenue with Online Food Delivery Business?

There are various ways through which you can generally manage and generate profits by the online food delivery business.

Commission

Taking commission from restaurants is one of the ways by which you can generate profit for your online food delivery business. You can ask for a commission for each order that your partnered restaurant receives from users.

Delivery Charge

There are some restaurants that do not deliver food to home. Through the on-demand food delivery app, you can deliver food at the user’s doorstep. You can set delivery charges on the basis of distance.

Surge Pricing

Big players like UberEats make the prices higher whenever the demand is high. It restricts menu options and at the time of order placement, they add an extra charge. Due to this, the per-order delivery amount increases.


One of the best ways to generate a high amount of revenue is advertising. By asking some restaurants to get featured at the top of the list, or you offer premium video placements of some restaurants on your service to generate extra revenue. Alternatively you can also use Google AdSense on the platform to earn advertising revenue.

Challenges While Offering Online Food Delivery Services

Although the online food delivery business is always in trend, there are some challenges. So before entering into the market of online food delivery, you must know about all the challenges that you may face.

Increased Competition

The competition in the food delivery industry is increasing as many e-commerce giants and individual restaurants are entering into this business. Names like Uber and Amazon are already in this competition with services like UberEats and Amazon Restaurant.

Customer Loyalty

One of the most important factors to be successful in any online platform is to maintain customer loyalty. Customers are always attracted towards discounts and offers. Your online food delivery business can easily gain customer loyalty with this phenomenon. It has been evident that companies that do not focus on maintaining customer loyalty have faced bitter consequences, often resulting in losing a large share of the market.

Searching Partner Restaurants

Not putting a considerable focus on these factors can turn out to be a roadblock for your business. You should collaborate with restaurants of various scales. Instead of always going with bigger brands, you also shall tie-up with the small start-up restaurant who are new in the market and are looking for promotion.

Choosing the Features of MVP

One of the most difficult tasks while developing the app is to decide which features to include and which to exclude for your on-demand food delivery mobile app minimum viable product (MVP). It is always recommended to test the app idea before launching a fully-functional version. By building an MVP, you can easily test your idea without spending a huge amount of money.

Reliable UX/UI

Since the screens and the user flow of all the apps, i.e. user, admin, delivery executive, and restaurant are different from each other, it is difficult to maintain a uniform UX/UI for every app. Therefore, it is recommended to have a clearly defined strategy for your food delivery mobile app design.

Two Categories of Food Delivery Apps

There are two types of food app platforms in the market, “Aggregators” and “New Delivery”.

Restaurant Aggregators

Launched roughly around 30 years ago, aggregator models follow the traditional methods of delivering food. By means of logging in to the site or the app, buyers can quickly examine menus, prices, and user feedback. The aggregators make money via many pricing models such as delivery charges, price surcharge, restaurant promotion.

With their asset-mild version, aggregators publish profits before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) margins of 40-50%. Even though investment keeps pouring in (delivery hero and Foodpanda, as an instance, both attracted €100 million in new funding in 2015), most of the consolidation in this subcategory has already passed off.

4 players—transport hero, Foodpanda, GrubHub, and Just Eat—have executed a worldwide scale. On a national level, there are normally two or three competitors that dominate, driven by their capacity to construct a supporting infrastructure.

Brand’s Own Mobile App

A mid-large scale restaurant can build their own delivery app. Unlike restaurant aggregators, these apps are personalised for their own restaurant and will provide the customers with a seamless buying experience. People have a tendency to buy more stuff while buying online and this can make a difference for your business. A report states that online food delivery orders placed through mobile apps are $4 higher compared to the orders placed within the restaurant.

However, the custom restaurant delivery app development requires heavy investment and time. If you’re interested in how much it costs to develop a restaurant app, read the blog post further.

Why You Must Invest in Food Delivery App Development?

Nowadays, people are very busy with their schedule and don’t get time to dine in a restaurant. Even if we look at the market, the online food delivery industry is growing at a rapid pace, with a variety of apps that deliver food to the doorstep of the customer.

Also, millennials love exploring a variety of foods and restaurants. They also enjoy quick food delivery and the food delivery mobile apps do the same. Thus, investing in online food delivery mobile apps, you can easily generate a huge amount of profit for your business. For more, you can check the statistics mentioned below to understand the current state of the online food delivery market..

In 2019 , the revenue of the food delivery industry has reached US$107,438 million .

With each passing year, the food delivery industry is growing by 9.9% . At this growth, it is expected that by 2023, the food delivery market will be at around US$156,819 million .

Currently, the restaurant-to-Customer Delivery sector is at US$53,652 million, but by 2023, it will be at US$74,643million .

How the Online Food Delivery Apps Brings Fortune to the Restaurants?

On-demand food delivery apps like UberEats and FoodPanda have significantly enhanced the sales figures for restaurants. These apps provide customer convenience and due to this, they are globally used. Following this trend, many start-ups are also planning to launch their own food delivery app in the market. Here are some advantages that support why you should develop a food app for your business.

Customer Convenience

The food delivery apps are easy to use and offer convenience to the users while they order food. Due to this, more and more customers are using food delivery apps to get food delivered at their doorstep. The interactive UI/UX with smooth search options and categorised restaurants & menus makes it easy for the users to buy food.

Customer Support

Food delivery applications offer 24/7 customer support to solve all the queries and complaints of the customers. Customer support is one of the most important features of any on-demand app and it makes the app more trustable as users can get answers to all their complaints and queries within a few minutes.

Easy Payments

The food delivery apps are integrated with various payment gateways like Credit/Debit Card, eWallets like Google Pay or PayPal. Making the transactions cashless encourages customers to use food delivery apps.

Reward Points

Deliveroo and Just Eat food delivery applications offer loyalty rewards and points to potential customers. This attracts and encourages more users to use the food delivery app for ordering food. Customers can use these loyalty points or credits for future orders.

Food Delivery App Market

If we look at the current scenario of the online food delivery market, it is expected that the online food delivery market will rise by around 79% in the coming years. This rapid growth is a sign of how fast people are opting for online services, and it is clear that very soon online demand will surpass the offline services. Currently, the worldwide market for online food delivery is at around €83 billion.

Must-Have Features of On-Demand Food Delivery App

Now like other on-demand delivery apps, the admin panel and user panel are the basic features of a food delivery mobile app. But since a delivery executive is required to deliver the food, you need to develop a driver panel also. It may sound a little bit typical to develop, but it is important to read the blog until the end to understand the must-have features for this type of app.

The User App

The most important feature of the admin panel is to have a bird eye view over the entire operation. But there are other features also which makes your app more flexible for the user.

Sign Up/Login

This is the most basic feature of every app, it helps the user create a new account and login with the existing one. Providing features of logging in with social media credentials will make the sign up process more seamless for the user.

Managing Profile

Users can add personal details like email, name, mobile number or adding a new address or editing the old address by using the mobile app.

Nearby Restaurant List

The app should provide a list of nearby restaurants and cafes with discount offers. It will help the user to order food with less delivery time and save bucks at the same time.

Exploring Restaurants

Providing a categorised list of restaurants and a search bar in the app will help the users to search for their favorite cafes and restaurants to order food of their choice.

Order Food

After exploring their favorite nearby restaurants, users can order their favorite food from the restaurant.

View Cart

Users can view the items they have selected to order in the cart and if they want, they can add more or remove selected items directly from the cart. They can also add items in the cart for future use.

Multiple Payment Options

The app must provide various payment options like paying through credit/debit card, eWallet apps like Google Pay, Paytm along with Cash On Delivery.

Real-Time Status

Users should be able to track the status of their order and expected ETA. The map feature should also incorporate the real-time delivery guy’s location.

Premium Membership

Users should also be able to buy premium monthly or yearly membership to avail additional features, discounts, and offers from the app.

Scheduling Order

The app will be more flexible if it will allow users to schedule orders for a particular time and place.

Reorder

This feature makes the app more easy to use by allowing users to reorder any previously ordered item just by a few taps.

Push Notifications

Whenever a new offer, deal or update arrives in the app, users should get notified via SMS, email or in-app notification.

Rate and Review

By allowing users to give feedback on restaurant and delivery executives, users can share their experience within the app.

Help & Support

The feature of AI-powered virtual bots for support will help the user to resolve their queries quickly and easily. Users can also register complaints related to the quality of food or about the restaurant.

Essential Features of Food Delivery App Driver

Although the driver app does not have as many functions as the user app, there are some basic functionalities and features that the driver app must-have.

Registration

Before accessing the app, the driver must be able to register himself through social media or by providing various details like name, address, license number, vehicle registration number.

Accepting/Rejecting Order

Drivers should easily get the updates and details about all the current orders and they should also have the right to select or reject the order as per their convenience.

Order Status

The delivery executive should have one-tap selection options to update the order status.

In-App Navigation

The app must provide an in-app navigation feature so that the driver can easily deliver the order within less time.

Availability

The driver can select the time according to them for the service. They can mark themselves online and offline whenever they want.

Payment Integration

Apart from cash on delivery, the driver must have other payment also for receiving money from the user.

Feedback

Not only the user but the driver should also be able to give ratings and feedback to the restaurant and the buyer.

The Essential Features for Restaurant Module of Food Delivery App

Just like users and delivery executives, restaurants also have to go through the login and registration process. Moreover, they have to register some extra documentation for regulatory purposes.

Accept or Reject Orders

This is one of the most important features of the restaurant panel. Sometimes, the restaurant gets overloaded with order requests, in that case, the restaurant owner can cancel the order request. So the confirmation or declining feature for the restaurant panel makes the app more flexible.

Dashboard

After creating an account, the restaurant owners are directed to the user panel. From the dashboard, the owners can easily keep track of pending orders, completed orders, and canceled requests. The dashboard panel helps the owners to keep an eye on all the insights and details of their online business.

Managing Payments

The restaurant owners can transfer all the received payments into the bank through PayPal or Google Pay easily, as per their preference. They can also manage the refunds and daily revenue reports easily with the dashboard panel.

Account Management

The restaurant owner can set the restaurant logo, food details, price, minimum order value, and estimated order preparation time. They can also offer discounts and various promo codes for particular items.

The Essential Features for Food Delivery App Admin Panel

The admin panel is the place where you can manage most of your business operations. It is a web-based app to manage all processes like managing customers, live tracking of the driver, accepting new restaurants, setting prices, etc.

Registration

Similarly, like the user and driver, the admin also should be able to register before accessing the web-based admin portal.

Managing Audience

Only the admin can add a new user, driver or restaurant for service. The admin can also delete/block the inactive users.

Managing Orders

Admin can view all the details about the ongoing order and assign it to the driver who is nearest to both the restaurants and users. However, most of these processes should be automatic.

Offers and Discounts

In order to maintain the user loyalty, the admin has to provide time to time offers and discounts to the users. The panel should incorporate a separate mechanism for offers and discounts.

Push Notification

Admin should be able to send details about new updates, discounts and offers to users through email, SMS or Message alerts.

Financial Accounting

The admin should be able to decide the delivery fee, and they can also keep a track of all the profit and earnings using the in-built app analysis.

Real-Time Analytics

The admin manages the growth of the business by keeping a real-time analysis of all the orders and payment history.

What is the Best Technology Stack for Food Delivery App Development?

Choosing the right technology for your app is the most important aspect of the app development process. So for drafting a smooth and interactive app, you must choose the technology smartly.

Team Structure for Food Delivery App Development

Developing an app is straightforward if you have a team of talented and skilled developers who are experts in building food apps. If you need to transform your thoughts into reality, then you have to work with a pool of expert developers, designers, testers, and skilled managers. In case you need to expose your app to a wider audience, then you should build it for both the iOS and Android platforms.

How Much Does It Cost to Develop an On-Demand Food Delivery App?

Basically, there are various factors that affect the cost of app development. Whether it’s a food delivery app or any other app, the cost of development is affected by various factors like the platform, features to be included, and most importantly, the region of food delivery app development company. If you are going with cross-platform app development, then the cost will be quite high. But an app developed for a single platform will cost you less. Based on the region, the cost is also different, like:

In the US , the food delivery app development companies charge $50-200/hour.

In Europe, the food delivery app development companies charge $30-100/hour.

Conclusion

Food delivery isn’t a new concept. It has existed for more than half a decade. However, a very small portion of the globe has access to online food delivery services, and this is where the opportunity for a growing online food delivery market comes alive. This is backed further by the fact that more and more people are adopting smartphones and internet culture.

If you are looking for a food delivery app development company, we will be high in your shortlist. We have been working in the on-demand app segment for years, which has brought us great knowledge and experience in the sector. Here is the link to our recently developed mobile app for on-demand food and beverage business – https://www.nimbleappgenie.com/tawlety-table-booking-app/