Does online food ordering account for around 40% of total restaurant sales? Thanks to technology, this form of ordering food has disrupted traditional offline restaurant establishments and given tech-savvy people with busy lives an easy and efficient means of ordering their meals from restaurants online with just the click of a button.
Today, food delivery services have made dining easier than ever! Customers can access thousands of restaurants and menus in one central place and place orders without hassle or waiting. As this industry is projected to experience exponential growth over the coming years, more entrepreneurs are exploring custom food delivery app development as a business opportunity.
Uber Eats, one of the leading platforms in the food delivery industry, works seamlessly to connect restaurants and customers. Since its debut in 2014, Uber Eats has experienced tremendous growth and expanded to over 90K restaurants with over 81 Million Users! As a major player in the online food ordering and delivery industry.
How Can I Develop An App Like DoorDash or UberEats?
Let us get straight to business and answer the question, “How Can I Create an App like DoorDash or UberEats?” Below are several steps and popular development methods depending on your business goals and budget.
Conduct in-depth research & study.
The more time and money invested in research, the better optimized your development process will become. Conducting a thorough examination can help ensure your development moves appropriately without losing precious resources. Key areas for investigation may include:
- Competitor Research: Gain a greater insight into how customers run their business by studying their key strengths and failures, such as plagiarism. Though you should avoid plagiarizing anything you find here, there will still be valuable lessons you can glean from it that can help guide how your business develops. It may even indicate what to do or not do for maximum business growth!
- Customer Research: You must know your target customers intimately when conducting customer research. Creating user personas may help in this regard and provide insight into potential target customers’ behavioral patterns.
- Validate Your App Ideas: A key step in app development, validating your ideas is an essential step to ensure its potential, strengths, and weaknesses are tested thoroughly. Identify your goals for developing an app before creating its blueprint – then try its potential concerning strengths, weaknesses, and overall development potential.
- Research Current Food Delivery Trends: Make an effort to research and identify current practices within the online food delivery industry, enabling your ventures to remain compliant with market demands and ensure success for your experience.
Choose Your App Development Method for Delivery Food Service App
Once you’ve identified a real market need for your food delivery mobile app, the development process begins. Your options for development could include:
- Hire food delivery app developers.
- Building it yourself using a DIY app builder.
- Tapping internal resources for growth.
- Outsource to an app development agency.
Most restaurants and grocery stores don’t employ internal IT teams, eliminating this option. Hiring developers or outsourcing projects are costly options that won’t fit within a budget-conscious approach to project development.
So that leaves us with our second bullet on the list above–creating an app yourself using an app builder. Most readers of this guide will likely opt for such food delivery app development services when creating their apps.
Food delivery apps are an easy and cost-effective way to develop food delivery apps without writing code yourself. Platforms like JPLoft allow anyone to create restaurant apps using simple plug-and-play functionality, making the entire process simple and accessible.
Fix your business & delivery model.
Once your research is complete, take the next step by devising and finalizing your business model and delivery system. Consider logistics, business goals, and customer demands when making this decision; become an aggregator platform to deliver food from restaurants directly.
Uber Eats operates under a similar model and acts as an intermediary between restaurants and customers. Furthermore, you could create your app identical to DoorDash, or Uber Eats with inventory-based delivery, where orders would come directly from centralized kitchens or restaurants in your system while keeping quality checks in place for delivery of orders.
Choose an Affordable App Development Option Identifying an App Development Solution
This step is paramount to successful app development. Find a method that fits your budget, gives you control of the process, and delivers powerful results quickly. Among popular solutions are:
Rebuild Your App with Code-Free App Builders Like JPLoft
Code-free app builders like JPLoft have revolutionized development by offering no-code options that provide better solutions than custom app development.
DIY app builders facilitate faster development times on an affordable budget. JPLoft allows users to complete app projects within minutes – significantly cutting time-to-market times while simultaneously cutting costs significantly.
JPLoft consolidates all the aspects of app development into one central place and gives you complete control of the process. Furthermore, hiring technicians, designers, or developers may no longer be necessary – all can be managed from this platform with the minimum effort you require!
Select Your Features
Every food ordering app will include certain standard features. However, some of you may wish to design one specifically tailored to your business model with unique elements that set it apart. This guide will explore key characteristics of successful food delivery apps later.
Before diving into development, however, you need to understand which features are desired and why. Here’s why.
Your on-demand food delivery app development lifecycle will revolve around its features. While developing, it can be easy to get carried away and add features that appear cool–even if they have nothing to do with your food delivery app’s main purpose or goal.
Launch and promote Your App.
Now that the development phase is complete, it is time to launch and promote your mobile app on app marketplaces such as Apple App Store or Google Play Store, as these two are among the most widely used. Listing on both marketplaces enables you to reach Android and iOS users.
Once your app is listed, promotion begins immediately. App Store Optimization and Mobile App Marketing are effective ways of marketing it. Promote it on your website to gain exposure in search engine results while informing visitors about it.
Take advantage of various social media platforms and promote your app on these channels. Create app-only offers to encourage potential customers to download it for food ordering online, and read up on app marketing in this blog post from The Atlantic.
Conclusion
The food delivery market is rapidly evolving and expanding at an alarming rate, necessitating app development for restaurants and cafes to remain viable in this fiercely competitive world. Not only will a food delivery app automate your food business, but it will also boost your sales, increasing revenues exponentially!
Food delivery apps often share similar goals, purposes, and generic features; their approach differentiates them. Now is an ideal opportunity to bring your unique idea to fruition – whether creating something like Uber Eats and DoorDash or going in an entirely different direction altogether.
Hiring a team capable of offering one-stop solutions for an app like DoorDash or UberEats can simplify life when managing its development, saving time and effort by eliminating individual expert searching or market analysis.
An all-in-one-solution team can handle research, planning, development, testing, marketing strategy launch, post-deployment support, and maintenance in one package.
