Starting an Online Food Delivery Business in 2022? Here’s Your Launching Tips and Trends

If you own a restaurant, you’ve probably tried every trick in the book to keep your business supplies rolling, in the highs and lows of pandemic. Online food delivery app development and restaurant technologies might be the farthest solution in your mind.

But if you see current scenario, all the longstanding concerns of restaurants & food industry striving to survive are only being solved by online food delivery apps. All other traditional measures that QSR industry relied upon went into smoke with an increasing dependency on on-demand delivery apps.

The food delivering technology is getting smarter, more user-friendly, and more intuitive. Right from searching the nearby restaurants or finding the favourite food to paying the bill can be done right at the table or from the home.

Do you know what all it needs to develop such a promising Food Delivery App in 2022 and ensure smooth operations while fighting daily challenges that affect your business? Keep reading to learn how restaurants and QSR aggregators can enter into the on-demand landscape and leverage the power of online food delivery apps with assured returns and achievements.

Before that, take a sneak peak to the snowballing market of food delivery apps.

Market Overview for Modern Food Delivery App

Spot The Revenue Footprints Globally

• The global online food delivery services market is expected to grow from $107.44 billion in 2019 to $154.34 billion in 2023 at a CAGR of 11.51%.
• Global Revenue Generation of the online food delivery business in 2021 is $270,317 million and is expected to reach a point of $401,391 million by 2025 at a CAGR of 10.39%.
• The global user’s number is expected to reach about 2,638.1 million by 2025, in the food delivery segment.
• As per the business trends, the highest revenue-generating country is expected to be China in 2021, by $191,861 million.
• This rapid growth is mainly due to the food delivery companies that are resuming their business while adapting to the new normal from the COVID-19 impact.

How does Food Delivery Apps Work?

An on-demand food delivery app is not a single app, rather the mighty nestles the entire food supply chain to streamline the delivery operations. The app is a hub to three different food ordering apps i.e., Customer, Delivery Driver, and Restaurant/Admin. All three apps possess different features and functionalities to ensure seamless food delivery services.

Customer App: As soon as the customer installs this app on their device, he/she will have to follow these steps:

• To place the food order online, customers need to login or register on the app and provide genuine details, such as name, address, contact details, etc.
• Customers can browse the restaurants or specific food item on the app to add to the food cart.
• After adding all the required food items to the cart, the customer can place the order.
• Now, the customer can make the online payment or select the cash on delivery mode and confirm the order.
• Customers can track the order and delivery progress, then receive the order at the mentioned address.

Restaurant/Admin App: The restaurant that receives the order can control and manage the order progress with the Admin through the web-based food ordering app.

• Restaurants update their menu list with the food item’s name, description, price, and images.
• The restaurant can accept or reject the received order from the customer side.
• The order is expedited to the restaurants’ kitchen, and based on the order size and queue, the expected order delivery time is assigned.
• During the order preparation time, the order is assigned to the nearest delivery person to carry out the delivery process.
• Based on the delivery distance and the delivery person’s performance the order delivery payment is done.

Delivery Driver App: The delivery driver receives the order request, picks the order from the restaurant, and delivers it to the assigned location or the customer’s doorsteps.

• The delivery person can register or login through the delivery app with his accurate details.
• The delivery person receives the notification from the restaurant for new order pickup and delivery address details.
• Based on the convenience the delivery person can accept or reject the order.
• Upon acceptance, the delivery person picks the order from the restaurant and delivers it to the destination address.
• In case of rejection, the restaurant looks for another delivery person to complete the order delivery.
• After delivering the order the cash payment is collected (only if COD was chosen by the customer) then the delivery person marks the ‘order complete’ on the app.

How to Attract Customers to your Online Food Delivery App?

Offer customer services that can help your business stand out among competitors and compels customers to prefer you over other food delivery services. These services could be like safe, hygienic and sustainable food packaging, swift delivery services, and instant response to queries and grieve, proactively addressing delivery issues, appreciating repeat customers, so on.

1. Fill the Demand Gap “Invention is the mother of necessity”. There is no better time than now to spill this idea into your venture and make inroads in this competitive landscape.While launching your food delivery app, ensure that you study the market well, understand the customer’s pain points and develop an on-demand food delivery solution that hit the bulls-eye.
2. Promote on Social Media Platforms Adopt Social Media Platforms to bring your USPs into spotlight and effectively grab the viewer’s attention with reels, videos, marketing memes, influencer programs, etc. Use paid promotions as well to clinch customer attention and ensure enough repetitive views of advertisement to endorse viewers’ reaction. Overall, study and follow the latest social media promotional trends to turn out to be extraordinary.
3. Connect One-On-One with your Prospects & Customers Reach out to your customers and interact with them on social platforms. Furthermore, be an active listener and respond positively to the customer’s reviews and feedbacks. One-on-one customer connect can help to introduce a personalized touch and can give a new dimension to your food business.
4. Offer Finest Customer Services Customer services is a support that you offer your customers, both before and after they buy your products and services. Arguably, it takes months to find a customer and seconds to lose a one. Do not miss a bit to go extra mile when satisfying your customers.
5. Introduce a App Referral Program People trust recommendations from friends 7X more than traditional advertising. Acquiring new users through referral programs is a marketing idea that spreads like a wildfire and reaches far and wide. So, the let the word of mouth chanting your app echo in the online space. This is a surefireway to higher app installs and increase user engagement.
6. Design an Appetising Menu A customer doesn’t like to spend too much time scanning the menu, so create a crisp, concise, and easy-to-read menu that conveys most of the item details and description. You can also entice customers’ with scrumptious pictures of well-presented dishes.
7. Accurate Brand Tagline A tagline is the simple statement that conveys a lot about the business’s core idea. So, create an engaging and relatable brand tagline that makes your brand memorable.
8. Collaborate with Food Bloggers & Influencers Offer exclusive discounts to food influencers that like to award their followers with free products or hefty discounts. Their single story can make your app post reach thousands of people. You can also create an event relevant to food influencers, this can prove very effective in promoting your restaurant.
9. Offer Deals to Employees From Local Offices Capture the crowd. The crowd that is most likely to make repeat purchases from your app. They are none other than employees. To reach them make local offices as your target. Give these offices discounts on food items. This will lead to a rapid increase in your customers.
10. App Store Optimization Increase your app visibility in the App Store or Play Store. Just by making your app rank higher in the App stores you can drive more traffic to your app and reach your target users in a flick.

Pain Points of an On-Demand Food Delivery Market

Experiencing a Hard Time in Engaging and Retaining Customers Businesses always experience a hard time, regardless of the industry, in meeting up the customer’s expectations which ultimately affects the business in the long term. Likewise, the food delivery industry is not an exception. Therefore, while implementing new tactics, create strategies that attract new customers as well as retain the existing ones too.

The online food delivery apps are an avenue to increase customer engagement by introducing attractive offers and discounts, referral systems, cashback and many more. Besides, as an app owner you can also team up with UI/UX team and work on enhancing the app design with a compelling user experience that can offer seamless app navigation.

• Incompetency To Find the Right Food Delivery App Partner

Having an online presence of your food delivery business can help to reach a wider customer base. While associating with the right food delivery partner can do wonders for your business, in terms of building a brand image and generating hefty revenue.

Having a reliable food delivery partner can give you a free mind in strategizing and implementing business tactics to promote and grow your business in a guided manner. But, before sailing on the boat, ensure rigorous market research in identifying the right food delivery partner app platform.

• Facing Challenges in Order Deliveries and Logistics Management

The restaurant business owners always face a major challenge of managing home delivery of orders, as they could not conclude over the requirement of fleet size, instant or on-time delivery, maintaining the food quality, etc. Due to this, these individual service providers fail to cover a wide geographical area and the maximum number of order deliveries.

Therefore, to overcome such challenges, restaurant business owners can associate with third-party delivery services to manage all the deliveries effectively and on-time. It will minimize the overall operating cost and time. The timely delivery services can also ensure to attract and retain customers for long, generate loyal customers, and ultimately boosts revenue.

Ways to Enter into On-Demand Food Delivery Market

The on-demand food delivery market is pretty versatile, highly competitive, and somewhat crowded too. To place your steps firmly in the market, it is highly recommended to make bold yet quite calculated steps to impress and invite new customers. So when you plan to enter into the online food delivery market, try to be unique and consider the following points;

1. Start your Online Food Delivery Business Locally Having a humble beginning of your business can provide you with a wider scope of improvement and expansion. It is quite an easier and an intelligent call to set up and manage the online food delivery services in a small location or in a single city, rather than aiming for multiple locations initially. It will minimize the chances of business failure and losses. In contrast to that, it presents you a wider window to learn and improvise business strategies and expand your business to multiple locations. As a result, you can eliminate the scenario of experiencing heavy losses, in case of business failure.
2. Market your Food Delivery Business with Utter Creativity Strategic marketing of an online food delivery app will help you to educate and spread awareness among your prospects about your business idea and unique offers. Implementing a robust marketing strategy will lead your business to perform well in the competitive market. Following effective social media marketing, branding promotions, billboard advertising, etc. will help your business to reach prospective customers and help people to know about your business’s existence. While highlighting your business process and selling points will also help to grab potential investors’ attention.
3. Connect with Influencers and Food Bloggers While advertising about your business existence, collaborating with some market influencers and leaders can help you to increase your customer reach. It reflects the impression of a trustable name entering the on-demand food delivery apps market. But to make it possible, it requires thorough research to find the professional influencers and bloggers who can best promote your business with a wider reach and at the same time fit into your budget. So while collaborating with them do make sure to check the numbers of their genuine followers, the performance of the previous posts in terms of reader’s engagement and their comments.

Top Reasons; Why Food Businesses Should Invest in On-Demand Food Delivery App Development?

1. Real-time Tracking Real-time tracking is now the need of the hour for every business to ensure the best customer service. The customer and the restaurant owner can track the order flow in real-time through the food delivery app solution. This feature helps in building trust among customers and introduce a remarkable transparency level in the complete process of order and delivery.
2. Enhanced Customer Engagement Each entrepreneur aims to attract and retain their customers. The on-demand food delivery apps can support profoundly building loyal and firm customer relationships. The apps allow business owners to dedicate some time to exploring and implementing business strategies to engage more customers and make them use their services more frequently.
3. Ease of Doing Business The on-demand food delivery market serves the purpose of facilitating services to all the digitally active users and letting them explore the wide variety of eateries at their fingertips. Such ease of reaching out to customers and doing virtual business is a much faster way to fulfil customers’ demands and increase business revenue.
4. Seamless Payment Having a safe and reliable multiple payment mode is the major concern of any customer. The data breach used to be the severe issue in the traditional business model, whereas the on-demand delivery apps can ensure a seamless and secure payment platform. It contributes to enhancing the overall customer experience while manoeuvring the food delivery apps.
5. Thriving Future Demands The advancement of technologies and the introduction of handy services are making customers impatient to wait for their order for longer. Therefore, these on-demand food ordering and delivery apps will undoubtedly oblige numerous customers at a time while ensuring much quicker order delivery. The online food delivery industry has a wider scope of growth and improvement, as more and more customers are going to indulge in exercising on-demand food services.

How to Minimize Your Online Food Delivery App Development Cost?

1. Start with MVP of Food App MVP- a Minimum Viable Product includes the basic features to deliver the main objective of your online food delivery app. Such products are highly scalable and easy to customize to introduce new functionalities without hampering the ongoing functionalities of the app. MVP will help you to minimize your app development time, expenses, and provide hands full of time to analyse the app’s performance in the market and what new you can introduce in the app.
2. Simplified UI/UX The customer always prefer to use or spend more time on apps that are easy to use and yet have an appealing interface. Such simple app designs with customized solutions will also help in minimizing your online food delivery app development cost. The complex or highly customized design will definitely cost more and is a time taking process, which ultimately influences the app development cost.
3. Use Open-Source Libraries, Frameworks, & Third-Party Services To minimize the food app development cost, prefer open-source libraries, frameworks, and third-party services & tools, rather than developing customized components and features. There are many free-to-use components that are brimming in the tech market, it just requires some directed digging to find the most appropriate free sources. Expert and experienced developers can do this effortlessly.
4. Prefer Cross-Platform & Credible Technologies for Food App Development Developing a cross-platform could be a life saviour for any business, as the customers are very diverse and platform-independent. The cross-platforms can be less expensive, less time taking, and requires a single codebase for multiple platforms. To develop such apps ensure to adopt credible technologies that can influence the development cost, minimize development time, and resources. The budget-friendly and popular tools are; React Native, Flutter, Ionic, and Unity 3D.

Get Started With Your Own Online Food Delivery App With Codiant

At Codiant, we have an expert team of app and web developers who follow the stringent practices to develop a highly secured and robust app solution. Our developers are equipped with the latest technologies to maintain the product quality and meet the client’s expectations and dynamic market needs.

Apart from food app development, we have created numerous other on-demand delivery app solutions under various industries to streamline the business process. What you are waiting for, reach out to our experts to analyze your online food delivery app development cost, time, and other details as per your requirements.