The number of on-demand food delivery apps has seen a surge in recent times. But to make it a success, it takes more than just building an app. Here are a few tips:

If there is one thing people like more than eating their favorite meal is to have it in the comforts of their home. The ubiquity and prosperity of pizza delivery over the last decade is a testimony to the model that is currently being leveraged by many food delivery applications. But if you too are looking to exploit this rising market, you need to tread carefully as along with the competition, the service itself has many treacherous aspects. Here are the basics you’ll need to cover: 

Efficient logistics 

As much as people like to have their favorite food, they equally hate having to wait for it. Plus if you consider that the only operational task of on-demand food delivery apps is to handle the logistics part, screwing that up is a shortcut to failure. Especially if you are building your delivery network from ground up, start with a small area and then expand by increasing your capacity instead of starting in wide area in the hope of capturing market share. After all, keeping a small number of users satisfied is infinitely better than pissing off a large number of them. 

Tracking 

As we mentioned, the only task of food delivery apps is to pick orders from the restaurant and deliver it to customers. One way you can make your users aware of this is through live tracking. Where your timer goes off only after the delivery is dispatched from the restaurant. This way, if and when an order is delayed, they would know that it’s the fault of the restaurant and not yours.  

Payment 

This is one aspect that applies to all kind of mobile services and food delivery apps are no exception. Ever since the rise of mobile wallets and contactless payments, the payment behavior of people has changed a lot and you must adjust to it by offering as many payment options as possible. 

Real-Time Updates 

How would you feel if you ordered your meal and ten minutes after waiting you are told that a particular dish can’t be served at the moment? This is a very common problem in food industry particularly because of the subjective nature of its products where a stock management system can’t simply be integrated into the overall restaurant app development to keep track of orders and inventories. 

So if you don’t wish to be in such an embarrassing situation, there are two possible ways- you can either ask your restaurant partners to pro-actively update the availability status of each item or you can simply fix the quantity of each item that can be ordered- after which restaurant will again to specify the number of orders they can serve. 

In-House Kitchen 

This step would come much later in your operations when you have established your application and have gained ample knowledge of the market. Food delivery apps like UberEats or Swiggy also operate their own kitchens that not only help them improve services but also boost their profits. The reason you need to wait a while before taking this step is that you would need enough data to analyze the order patterns to reveal popular meals, high volume areas, and more to be able to strategically place your kitchens.