If you are a student, bachelor, or a young working professional, there is a high probability that you frequently use a food delivery app to order food. Such food delivery apps are on the rise as people don’t usually have a lot of time to cook food for themselves due to work/study constraints. Going out to eat is also time-consuming, so many people prefer to order food from a food delivery app as it is more convenient and arrives at your doorstep. Such ease of use makes it a solid choice for anyone who wants to have a good meal without going through the process of cooking.
Food Delivery Apps are certainly on the rise and are becoming a competitive space for new startups. If you are planning to build a food delivery business, then ensure to introduce your business with a unique flair to stand out in the crowd of other food delivery apps businesses. In this article, we will discuss what approach should be followed and what factors and features are required while developing a food delivery app.

Purpose Of A Food Delivery App

  • The primary purpose of a food delivery app is to be an interface between different varieties of food to choose from and deliver them efficiently to the customer’s doorstep. 
  • Even though most customers will be young and tech-savvy, it is necessary to have a clean and intuitive UI. However, a cluttered UI with a lot of buttons and features might end up being counterintuitive.

Now, we know the fundamental purpose of making the app. We should delve a bit deeper into the application’s requirements so that the above idea becomes more apparent.

Requirements Of A Food Delivery App

There is a set of requirements that your app should fulfil to deliver a good user experience:

  • A smooth registration process with a variety of options to register is a must in the app. There should be an option to create a user profile that will give them all the personalized features necessary, such as saving payment options, address, etc.
  • It should have various cuisine options as no one wants to have the same food every day and might prefer different diets. A lot of food delivery apps in the gist of providing options end up giving too many, and yes, too many options aren’t great. Having too many options might confuse the customer, and they may end up ordering something they didn’t need. The app should have good healthy food options as the young generation is health-conscious, and they will appreciate a good catalogue of healthy and tasty foods.
  • The app should have a clean and intuitive user interface, and it should have order processing and tracking notifications that will let the user know at what time they will receive their order. In case the customer wants to enquire about something, the seller’s contact information is readily available.
  • It should have a robust and secure payment process and multiple payment options like Credit/Debit Cards, UPI, COD, etc. There should be a fair commission system for the delivery agents and sellers so that they keep continuing doing business in the future.
  • A search engine is necessary for a food delivery app as it will help the user filter the catalogue according to their wish. Having an excellent search engine is a great addition and will surely make the user experience more satisfying.
  • A Rating system is a tangible form of user feedback about the different listings in the catalogue; hence a sorting system built around those ratings is an excellent feature to implement in the app.
  • Robust servers should back up the app as you don’t want it to be crashing with user traffic and frequently go on maintenance, resulting in a poor user experience. 

These were the requirements you need to have in a food delivery app to make it a good customer experience. But these are just the requirements every food delivery app should have. But, the concern is, how will you make your app stand out among the competitors? 
Now we will discuss some demands that people have with food delivery apps, and by fulfilling those demands, you can make your app stand out from the crowd.

User Demands with Food Delivery Apps

Even though there are a plethora of food delivery apps with a lot of quirks. There are some features and goals that customers want a food delivery app to have. Here’s a list of a few of them:

  • People are getting more and more health-conscious day by day and want healthy and tasty food. Having such options is great for any app as it will attract health-conscious people and fulfil their needs.
  • Many students, young professionals, bachelors stay away from their homes, and homemade food is something everyone craves for. Having an app that is made around delivering healthy homemade food will be well received. It can help in women empowerment and will be a good earning source for homemakers.
  • Everyone loves sweet discounts time-to-time. So providing discount coupons to order from the app will increase the app’s user base and make users happy with the discounts.
  • Many customers have complaints about the delivery of the order; having quick delivery is a huge plus. Having a quicker delivery with a reasonable delivery charge will be appreciated by customers.
  • Many customers used to request some sort of discounts on big orders. So, providing a discount on exceeding a certain amount of bill will definitely motivate them to repeat such bulky orders in future.
  • Good customer service makes sure that the users are happy and satisfied with the service. If they have any issues, they should be able to contact customer service without any hesitation. As a result, can get every kind of support they need. Having a skilled customer support team is a great addition to any organization and will improve customer satisfaction.

These were some demands that people have with Food Delivery apps. Now we will discuss some trends that are being followed to make an app more enticing to the customers.

Implementing Prediction Algorithms in Apps

1. Rise of AI

With the rise of AI in Food delivery apps, it is used to give users restaurant and food recommendations based on their previous orders or their interests. This makes the user experience much more enjoyable and gives them options according to their liking. Having something like a weekly menu for the customer can be a good addition. It’ll provide them with a bunch of options without overwhelming them entirely with the whole catalogue.

2. Contactless Delivery

With the COVID-19 pandemic, people became afraid to order anything due to the virus’s fear of being infected. To tackle this issue, Contactless delivery has been introduced. Many services are following this practice as it negates the main medium of the transmission of the virus. The packages are disinfected so that they are completely clean and free of any harmful bacteria or viruses.

3. Exploring New Methods of Delivering Products

One of the significant trends other than contactless delivery is having new means of delivering the products, which is food. As robotics is getting better and better, it opens new opportunities to deliver products, one of them via Drones. Although not in many trends, delivery by drones are the future. They eliminate the worries of traffic, and more deliveries can be done in less time. 

4. Ordering via a Virtual Assistant

Home automation is a current trend, and virtual assistants lie at the core of such systems and in your smartphone. Ordering from a virtual assistant is very easy and fast. Having a good integration with Virtual assistants is a very good feature to have. It will enhance the user experience as well.

Conclusion

So, this is our recipe for a food delivery app. It is a competitive space with apps coming out with new bells and whistles every day. If you want to make your food delivery app successful and want it to stand out, make sure it provides a good customer experience. Along with that, it can retain customers for a longer duration with constant improvements in delivering a better user experience with time. Exploring and implementing new technologies is also a great way to differentiate yourself from the crowd of existing apps and future competition.
To build a food delivery app or any online app, you can connect Supersourcing for all the assistance. Along with development, we can assist you in finding the right development agency.