Did you know that the global market size of the online food delivery segment was projected to reach 130.2 billion USD by 2023? In addition, this figure is expected to reach 223.7 billion USD by 2027. These predictions perfectly portray the huge potential of food delivery apps in today’s times. In this blog, we will be diving deep into knowing how to build a food delivery app like Uber Eats.
After the remarkable success of Uber as a taxi app, it extended its circle to launch a separate food delivery app in 2014. Although the Uber app itself was offering food delivery services at the start, later on, due to the massive demand, it decided to launch a separate food delivery app called Uber Eats.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, food delivery businesses got massive demand. In mid-2021, the delivery orders in the US increased by 142%. As a result startups and enterprises started developing different strategies to outshine the food delivery marketplace. Alongside some other companies, Uber Eats stood dominant in the arena of providing food delivery services.
These days, running a successful food delivery business is crucial due to market saturation. However, you can always run a business successfully if you implement proven strategies that would minimize the risk factors. Before moving on to any core concept, first, we should have an idea of some key elements that make a food delivery app successful.
What Makes Food Delivery Apps Successful?
You must believe that behind every successful business there is a proper business model, targets, and a vision. Similarly, running a successful food delivery services app involves several key elements. Here are a few of them to discuss.
The food delivery business model revolves around three key elements. The customers, restaurants, and courier service providers. These three pillars collectively make a food delivery app successful if strategized the right way.
Related Post – Most Popular Food Delivery App
1. The Consumers
The consumer is where it all starts and ends. You need to make sure that you are offering full-fledged transparency to the consumers. The main motive is to retain every customer who orders the food from your app once. There are several customer acquisition approaches that you can make to achieve customer retention.
Your app should have:
- A simple and quick user login. There should also be an option to log in via social media apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. Some users find it more reliable to log in via social media handles.
- A smooth and clean UI so that users can easily navigate through the app and place their orders right away.
- Allow a common payment gateway system to pay through multiple payment methods like Stripe, Paytm, Venmo, PayPal, GPAY, Braintree, etc.
- An order tracking system that would allow customers to track their orders easily.
- A communication system or chat integration so that the customer could talk to the restaurant and the rider as well.
- An option to save the food items so that the customer can order in the future without roaming around.
- The ability to show nearby restaurants.
2. The Restaurants
In the spectrum of food delivery apps, a restaurant acts as a middleman. The whole scenario of food delivery revolves around the restaurant. There should be a lenient policy set by restaurants that would provide ease to both the consumer and the courier services provider.
Your app should have:
- A welcoming sign-up page that is open to all restaurants to register after agreeing on the terms and conditions and offering their food items. This should also include gathering their business information like the brand name, address, working hours, contact information, etc.
- Rewards or claiming features like coupons or promo codes.
- A proper order tracking system for restaurants to track ongoing, incoming, or upcoming orders.
- An integrated content management system for restaurants to post their menus offers different deals or any other special discounts.
- An active connection with the nearest courier services provider is available to deliver the food quickly. Later on, there should be an order tracking system to track orders for restaurants as well.
3. Courier Service Providers
In a delivery business, fulfillment is what all the business depends upon. You need to make sure that the customer receives their order safely and on time. Here, only the restaurant and the courier service provider are responsible for customer retention. If they both provide quality services and a seamless ordering experience, the customer is likely to order again. Here are some of the key points you should follow to run a successful food delivery app.
Your app should have:
- A sign-up page that would allow courier partners to join the app and start providing their services right away.
- A proper order management system that would enable the courier partners to see the orders in real-time. There should be all the order details like pickup location, delivery address, order size, customer contact information, etc.
- A time-tracking feature that would enable the delivery partner to see the time to get the order ready, distance, delivery time, etc.
- The order’s check and balance for the delivery partner to track all the completed orders.
Likely, you’ve already realized how important it is to value these three elements when building a successful food delivery app like Uber Eats. There are several other strategies that you may require to implement. It also depends upon the region where you are going to launch your business in.
Step-by-step Guide to Building an App Like Uber Eats
If you are planning to build a food delivery app like Uber Eats, this might turn out to be the best decision you have ever made. Here are a few steps that you should follow when planning to build an app like Uber Eats.
1. Analyze Current Market Trends
To launch a successful startup business, you need to research and analyze the current market trends. In the present times of the digital realm, people prefer living up-to-date with the technology they are using. Similarly, as the trends evolve, people rush towards adopting newer trends just to cherish newer experiences. As a result, business owners strive to provide up-to-date experiences to people. This increases the chances of uplifting the potential of that business.
Therefore, you should research what trends are happening in the delivery services market. Analyze them and brainstorm newer ideas about how to excel in the food delivery marketplace. Due to several platforms already available in the market, no doubt, it is quite difficult to stand out. Believing that there is always a space for newbies in every field of life, nothing is impossible to do. Facing strong competition doesn’t mean you cannot succeed at it.
2. Create A Unique Selling Proposition
As there is a lot of saturation in the market, you can likely be another competitor there. But standing out among others is where all the success lies. Introducing a unique selling proposition to your product is the only way to stand out in a saturated market. Now, how to do that? We’ve got you!
Uber Eats has some interesting features that you can get an idea from and have something similar in your app. Have a go-through of every feature of the Uber Eats app and determine if you can distinctly introduce any feature. Get inspiration from any of the features of the Uber Eats app and come up with something similar to it. There is nothing bad in following an app’s idea and making a different approach yourself. It should not be similar to the app you are getting the idea from but there should be a different approach.
Having a unique selling proposition that helps the user in any way will help you build customer loyalty. A successful online business has repetitive visitors or buyers. This online digital arena is so fast and dynamic that it won’t let you generate massive revenues on behalf of new visitors every time. You need to compel customers to your product as there are a lot of other service providers as well. Any of the other service providers are likely to win customers from you if they provide them with a unique selling proposition.
3. Broaden Your Network in the Industry
Expanding your network is one of the core factors of running a successful online business. The network of a businessman plays a vital role in its success. As business is all about contracting with newer or prior companies and meeting different people, you need to build a strong connection within the industry.
To run a food delivery business like Uber Eats you need to have a strong connection with the restaurants. As you will be collaborating with food businesses in the future, of course, it will help you a lot. Stepping into a business where you’ll need to partner up with other businesses without having any network won’t be a good approach. It will be the waste of time and money.
4. Go with an MVP First
In app development, a minimal viable product is a perfect approach to launching a startup. An MVP is an incomplete app with minimum functionality that is designed to test whether users find the app interesting or useful when they use it. In an MVP, you give an app a pre-completion look and add all the basic features to it. The app is then introduced to potential customers and their feedback is collected. The app users then leave feedback or a suggestion then notice and value the final product.
The basic purpose of launching an MVP is to check the market demand. Consider if you spend a couple of months and thousands of dollars in making an app and figure out that the app idea isn’t that useful for people. How big a loss would be? So, launching an MVP is a great way to analyze what the potential customer wants. You should not be rushing to launch your app. Have some patience and step into the market with a minimum viable product. Otherwise, it might be a total waste of money and time if the app idea doesn’t facilitate the users much.
5. Choose and Strategize Your Revenue Model
About to run an online food delivery business and haven’t decided on the revenue model? That’s a big miss. However, everyone thinks of the revenue model for the delivery business they are planning to run. There are different models of providing delivery services and generating revenues.
As a food delivery services provider, you can generate revenue by charging restaurants and customers as well. You can either charge the restaurant on a commission base or the customer for the delivery services. There is another model of making money which is paid advertising. Restaurants are ever ready to pay for their food items to be featured in the delivery apps. So that the chances of getting orders increase.
The next thing that comes after choosing the revenue model is its strategy of its. This means that you’ll have to figure out in what ways the restaurants will be paying you more. What are the possible value additions that you can do for that business so it pays you extra? You can promote the restaurants in different ways other than featuring their food items in the app. You can send push notifications to the active users of your app and surprise them with any offer.
6. Choose the Right Technology Stack
In application development, the selection of the right technical stack is a step closer to success. You will require to add different features to your app. Conversely, different technical stacks offer different approaches to building an app. Following are some of the most extensively used common technology stacks for mobile or web app development.
- Swift (iOS) and Kotlin (Android)
- PHP (back-end)
- MySQL (databases)
- Angular JS or React (web application development)
Choosing a technology stack is crucial because we may require to make changes in the future as well. We might need to improve or change the UI in the future so the framework should be able to offer changes without any hustle. Alongside that, you also need to make sure that the technology stack you’re using can provide a seamless app UX.
7. Hire Professional Developers
The one last thing that plays a vital role in the success of a food delivery app is the app development team. Your app can fall into scope creep if you don’t choose a qualified or skilled team of app developers. Have thorough research on how to find the right app development team. There are multiple platforms from which you can hire flutter app developers or you can outsource your app development project as well. Or you can also reach out to a reputable app development company like FlutterDesk.
Having more than 5 years of experience in app development, our app development team is skilled enough to cope with any of your app ideas. Give our portfolio a look and have a better idea of our work. Affordable prices, flexible working hours, quality assurance, and core competency are what make us unique from other app development companies.
So, take considerable time to find out a perfect team of developers who would own your project and make a complete and advanced end-product. It is better to spend some time finding the right resources rather than regretting later.
If you are owning a restaurant but not leveraging delivery services, you must be missing something really worthy. And if you own a restaurant and are planning to start food delivery services like Uber Eats, you need to follow the business model it has. No doubt, there are also some other metrics for developing a food delivery app like Uber Eats. Let us discuss the food delivery business models.
What are the Different Food Delivery Business Models?
Usually, there are two business models on which the food delivery businesses work. You can either provide a platform for people to order food or also provide order deliveries. Let’s discuss them in detail.
Order Placement Platforms
These platforms offer a variety of food items for customers to order. You partner up with as many restaurants as you can and present their food items inside the app. When a customer opens the app, it shows all the nearby restaurant menus, and the customer orders any item he/she wants.
It is up to the app that fetches all the food items that are available to be delivered within the area a person is in. Mind that the app doesn’t have the responsibility to deliver the food in the order placement platform. The restaurant itself deals with the deliveries and the platform gets a per-order commission of up to 20%.
Apps like Delivery Hero, Zomato, and Just Eat are order placement platforms.
Order Placement and Fulfilment Platforms
There comes another model of food businesses, order placement, and fulfillment platforms. In this model, the app offers the same functionality as the order-only platforms but offers delivery as well. So, when a customer visits your app and buys a food item, the delivery partner picks up the order when it’s ready and delivers it to your address.
The platform provides full logistics services to the restaurant. As the delivery boy delivers the order, the payment gets deducted from the customer’s account when he marks the delivery. In this way, the delivery partner earns a commission of up to 40% per order or the delivery partner can charge the customer for delivery as well.
Apps like GrubHub, Swiggy, Uber Eats, Deliveroo, and Doordash are some of the order and delivery platforms.
Revenue Model of Apps Like Uber Eats
In all the brainstorming of building an app like Uber Eats, a question might be ticking your mind: how do the delivery platforms make money? Well, no more curiosity because here are some possible sources of income that an app like Uber Eats can leverage.
1. Per Order Commission
Food delivery businesses often charge restaurants on a commission base. The restaurant agrees on a per-order percentage that they will pay to the app from which they got the order.
2. Delivery Charges
Food delivery apps normally charge their customers for order delivery. The delivery charges depend upon the distance between the restaurant and the customer’s address.
3. Featuring Restaurants / Advertisement
In-app advertising is the perfect way of generating revenues in such a competitive market as food delivery. The food items and the restaurants are shown on the top of the app to get the maximum number of orders. The restaurant then pays for getting featured inside the app.
4. Peak Hours Charges
Another model of generating revenue for a food delivery business is to charge extra during busy hours. The busy hour or the peak hour is a term that represents that all the delivery partners are busy making deliveries at that time. However, the customer can still get the order delivered by paying an extra amount.
5. Monthly Subscriptions
There is another revenue model that you can consider in the business plan. You can offer monthly subscriptions to your customers so that they will get free order deliveries throughout the month on an order worth above a certain amount.
Cost of Building an App Like Uber Eats
When it comes to the cost of app development, several factors define the cost of it. To be more precise, the cost of app development depends upon the project scope. The scope of a project defines all the boundaries and liabilities of the project. It includes app features, app design, number of developers, app functionality, technology stack, etc.
This might become a hectic task for you to determine the average cost of building an app like uber eats. Normally, a basic food delivery app with minimum complexities can range from $10,000 to $25,000. While a food business app with advanced features can range from $60,000 to $100,000.
What Next?
After this brief guide to building an app like Uber Eats, we hope that you may have got a piece of motivation to build an app like Uber Eats. There are several aspects to keep in mind before starting an app development startup. One thing is true that you are going to spend bundles of dollars if you think of building an app like Uber Eats. This is because there are several aspects involved that define the ultimate success of an app. But this doesn’t mean that you cannot build an app that would succeed in the future. If you need flutter app development services/ You can hire a flutter developer from flutterdesk or just contact us to get free consultation
If you have any type of question to ask, you can comment below and ask away. We would love to assist you in any way possible. Happy coding!
Bashir Ahmad
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