Updated: February 15, 2022 
Over the past few years, on-demand food delivery applications have become the go-to tool for users to order their favorite cuisines from different restaurants. These applications eliminate the need of making advance reservations and give people the liberty to enjoy delicious cuisines right at the comfort of their homes. While food delivery applications were slowly seeping into our daily life, it’s safe to say that the global pandemic only propelled their adoption so much so that it has become a daily habit for users to order food online.
This is the reason why food delivery platforms like UberEats managed to skyrocket their revenue in the past two years. As of now, UberEats controls 29 percent of the on-demand food delivery market Despite shutting down its services in India and many European countries, UberEats still managed to secure the top positions in the food delivery market in its home country – the United States of America. Following the footsteps of UberEats, many business owners and even small restaurants want to launch their food delivery applications and scale their business.
But, it’s worth understanding that launching an on-demand food delivery application like UberEats is not as easy as it sounds. Apart from finding a reliable food delivery app development company, you would also have to avoid unexpected blunders to develop a user-centric application. In today’s guide, we have put together a list of roadblocks that you must avoid at every cost while hiring a mobile app development company and launching your own food delivery application.
Is It Worth Launching a Food Delivery Application in 2022
Since there are dozens of food delivery apps already ruling the market, many restaurant owners struggle to decide if it’s worth investing in a food delivery app or not. The truth is customers’ reliance on such food delivery apps has increased dramatically in recent years. And, thanks to the global pandemic, people now find it more comfortable to order food online instead of dining out. That’s why the revenue of the on-demand food delivery market has skyrocketed beyond any projection.
Back in 2019, FE Bureau estimated that the food delivery market would touch the $12.53 billion revenue mark by 2023. However, if we analyze the current numbers, the market already generated a revenue of $28 Billion in 2021 and it’s further estimated to surpass $42 Billion by 2025.
These projections clearly indicate that the on-demand food delivery industry is growing exponentially and restaurants (and other food businesses) must understand the potential of online food delivery, especially if they want to scale their business and increase the repetition rate. By launching your custom food delivery application, you’ll allow customers to order food from your restaurant in a few seconds. Apart from giving your restaurant a competitive advantage, an exclusive food delivery app will also help you acquire long-term customers.
No doubt, apps like UberEats, Zomato, GrubHub, and DoorDash are ruling this market right now, but the high competition doesn’t mean new businesses can’t penetrate the market. By avoiding the blunders and integrating the right features, even new food delivery applications can acquire a strong customer base and replicate the growth of industry leaders like UberEats and GrubHub.
Different Types of Food Delivery Application
One of the biggest mistakes that restaurants/business owners make while hiring a food delivery app development company is not understanding their business model. In general, you can divide the entire food delivery market into two specific categories, i.e.,
- Aggregator Food Apps
- Restaurant-to-Consumer Food Applications
As the name implies, aggregator applications are food delivery solutions that are tailored to aggregate multiple food businesses on the same platform. In an aggregator business model, different restaurants can list their business on the platform, submit their menu, and start receiving online orders from the customers.
Here the entire food delivery process has to be managed by the aggregator itself. Whether it’s hiring delivery partners or processing payments, every single operation is handled by the aggregator through a fully functional admin panel. UberEats and DoorDash are two of the most common examples of an aggregator business model. Both these companies allow multiple restaurants to list their business on the platform and accept orders from the customers.
A Restaurant-to-Consumer application, on the other hand, is a direct approach towards delivering food online. In this business model, there’s no intermediary between the restaurant and the customer. The restaurant launches its own food delivery application where customers can access the entire menu and order their favorite cuisines directly. It’s worth noting that the restaurant would be responsible for managing the entire development as well as operational cost if it chooses to launch an exclusive restaurant-to-consumer food delivery platform.
This is the reason why this type of business model is considered to be an ideal solution for large-scale restaurants with enough budget and multiple food chains. PizzaHut, for example, has its own mobile application where customers can order pizzas and get them delivered to their doorstep. However, PizzaHut is able to manage an exclusive food delivery application because it’s a global franchise and offers its services in more than 100 countries.
So, before starting with the food delivery app development process, make sure to decide which type of food delivery application you want to launch. This will help you avoid unexpected roadblocks while hiring a food delivery partner or choosing the right features for your application.
8 Mistakes You Must Avoid While Launching a Food Delivery Application
1. Not Hiring a Skilled Tech Partner
After you have picked the right business model for your food delivery application, the next step would be to look for a development partner. Keep in mind that the development company you hire can make or break your business. The expertise of the developers you hire will also decide how your app performs among the users and whether it has the potential to retain customers or not.
That’s why you must be extra cautious while hiring a food delivery app development company. Instead of hiring the first prospect, you come across, make sure to scrutinize the web properly and compare the strengths and weaknesses of different service providers. You would also have to decide between hiring in-house developers or outsourcing the development process to an offshore development company.
Both these development approaches are ideal for different business models and it would be your responsibility to choose the right development approach for your brand. If you don’t have the desired technical expertise, you can also hire a technical consultant and let him manage the entire hiring process. In any case, hiring a reliable tech partner for your food delivery application will be extremely important as this will have a huge impact on your app’s overall performance.
2. Failing to Understand User Requirements
Before starting with the development process, it’s also crucial to have a clear vision of what your customers want and how you can meet these expectations through your food delivery platform. The market is already stacked with thousands of food delivery applications (both aggregator and restaurant-to-consumer platforms), but only a few of them have managed to succeed in terms of revenue and customer base.
Food delivery platforms that fail to establish a strong brand presence usually don’t know their target audience. As a result, they fail to integrate the required features and struggle to acquire repetitive customers. To avoid such unexpected failures, make sure to research the market thoroughly and evaluate your USPs accordingly.
You can also consult with the food delivery app development partner to understand the target market more effectively. If you know the customer requirements, it’ll be much easier to plan for the journey ahead and build a user-centric food delivery mobile application.
3. Not Finalizing the Budget Beforehand
How much are you willing to spend on the development of your food delivery application? Answering this particular question, even before hiring a tech partner, will save you valuable time and help you sail in the right direction. The cost to develop a food delivery application depends on a plethora of factors and varies in every situation. You can get a food delivery platform developed for anywhere between $10,000 to $100,000.
So, to avoid any misunderstanding, it’s always necessary to finalize a budget right in the beginning. Keep in mind that this budget should also be inclusive of post-development maintenance support and additional miscellaneous charges like server hosting costs and third-party API charges. Once you have finalized the development budget, it would become much easier to hire the best app developers for your food delivery application.
4. Cluttering the App With Unnecessary Features
When it comes to building a food delivery solution, it’s quite natural for developers to expect that integrating multiple features will make the application user-friendly. Unfortunately, this is not true at all. Of course, it’s necessary to add essential features to your food delivery application, but cluttering the app with unnecessary functionalities can easily leave a negative impact on customer behavior.
Too many unnecessary features will make the app heavy, which will result in poor performance on the end devices. To avoid this situation, talk to your developers and finalize features that are highly imperative for your app’s functionality. Remove anything that would increase the load time of your application unnecessarily.
5. Not Focusing on User Interface (UI)
Recently, Google partnered with IPSOS to conduct a survey on smartphone users and evaluate how they pick different mobile applications from the cluster of apps available on the App Store and Google Play Store. Among many revelations, this survey also revealed that nearly 26 percent of users abandon a mobile app because they find it too challenging to use and navigate.
If your food delivery application has a poor user interface, it’ll fail to engage the users, even if you have integrated all the necessary features. Your customers don’t have the patience and time to deal with a poor interface. Instead, they want everything to be accessible within a few clicks.
So, to avoid a high app abandonment rate, make sure to prioritize your food delivery app’s user interface. The general thumb rule says that your application should allow customers to navigate to different screens within a few taps on the screen. One of the easiest ways to do this is to add a bottom navigation bar to your mobile application and add links to the most commonly viewed screens in it.
Zomato is one of the food delivery applications that has used bottom navigation the best way. As soon as a user fires up Zomato on his smartphone, he gets prompted to the home screen with a list of the popular choices and a dedicated navigation bar at the bottom.
This navigation bar allows users to navigate through different screens of Zomato with one click and access different features right away. A well-thought user interface is one of the major reasons behind Zomato’s unparalleled success in India. So, if you want to replicate the same growth for your food delivery platform, don’t forget to focus on your app’s user interface.
6. Launching the App Without Testing
Software testing is an integral part of the overall development cycle. Since the ultimate goal with your food delivery application is to engage users and allow them to order food in a hassle-free manner, it would be crucial to test its functionality under different scenarios.
Testing allows developers to be in users’ shoes and validate each module of the application from the user’s point of view. Consequently, they can make the required changes to the source code to enhance the overall functionality of the application.
It doesn’t matter whether you are going to launch an aggregator delivery platform or a dedicated restaurant-to-consumer application for your restaurant, testing the app would be a prerequisite before jumping towards final deployment.
If you have hired a professional food delivery app development company, the team will take care of the entire testing process on its own. However, it would still be a wise decision to stay involved throughout the testing phase so that you can ensure that all the potential bugs are removed.
7. Failing to Release Regular Updates
It’s important to understand that the mobile app market is changing with each passing day and it’s also affecting customer expectations. Every day new trends come into the picture that raises the standards for mobile app performance. If your app doesn’t comply with these latest standards, it’ll most likely encounter an unexpected rise in customer abandonment rate.
Why? Because users would get bored of seeing the same interface and features every day. To avoid this scenario and keep your customers engaged, it would be necessary to release regular updates.
Analyze the market as well as the customer feedback closely and then, implement the required changes to your food delivery application to enhance its performance. Releasing regular app updates will also keep your app ahead of the competition and help you keep expanding your customer base.
8. Poor Marketing Campaign
As we mentioned earlier, the on-demand food delivery market is a highly competitive industry. To penetrate this market and attract your potential customers, you would need a custom-tailored marketing campaign.
Failing to market the application properly is a common reason why many food delivery applications fail to get past a few thousand downloads in Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store. So, devise a well-researched marketing plan to promote your application among the masses and avoid unexpected failures.
Conclusion
When it comes to developing a food delivery application, developers are bound to make small errors throughout the development cycle. However, these minor mistakes are easier to eradicate and they don’t have a drastic impact on the overall performance of the application. The idea is to evaluate blunders that could cost time and money & eliminate them right in the beginning.
If it’s your first time stepping into the app market, you can hire professional mobile app developers to avoid these blunders altogether. A professional firm such as RV Technologies has a team of skilled developers who are familiar with common app development blunders and ensure to avoid them while working on different projects. Based on your business requirements, our developers will build a custom food delivery application accordingly.
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