With the Coronavirus pandemic, our world became even more digitized. Customers prefer to stay at home and use software products to handle most problems. Food ordering apps are convenient for clients when most people have a remote lifestyle, and most restaurants are closed.
Food delivery app development requires a thorough plan for strategies, aims, and ways of monetization. But the essence of any application is its functionality. In this article, we provide a list of core features.
Keep reading if you want to know how to make an app like Postmates and what to add.
Content List
Must-Have Features for a Food Delivery Mobile App
Now is an excellent time to create and launch your own food delivery service app. Particularly with market leaders such as UberEats, Deliveroo, and Postmates gathering high incomes and winning popularity among customers worldwide. According to the statistics, online food delivery will reach revenues of $151.5 billion in 2021.
Source: Statista.com
Before you start the development of your on-demand food delivery app, you should define your target users, their needs, and requirements. And then build the functionality putting your customers first.
6 Essential Food Delivery App Features
There are some features of the food delivery app that all customers expect to see. Let’s discuss them more closely.
1. Registration
Signing up is a crucial part of most apps. You need to add as many ways to sign up as possible for users’ convenience. Log in via social media and phone numbers are the most widely used ones. They enable getting all the necessary information like address, occupation, age, interests, and more immediately and seamlessly. Don’t forget to add a password recovery feature. The customers will appreciate it. And enable the customers to customize their profile.
2. Tracking
Navigation is one of the key things to consider. You should integrate Google Maps or other navigation or geolocation services API to allow customers to track their orders in real-time. Keep in mind that each platform requires different tools for geolocation features.
3. Payment Gateway
Payment system integration is a demanding and time-consuming task when building any on-demand application. You should ensure a smooth and fast user experience and safe payments at the same time. There are plenty of ready-to-use payment gateways like PayPal, but it is better to add a few alternatives like:
- Credit card
- Apple Pay
- Android Pay
- Stripe.
4. Push Notifications
This is a rather simple feature of a food delivery app, but it is crucial for user engagement and marketing. Push notifications help interact with your customers and inform them about their orders, discounts, offers, news, and updates. Keep in mind that notifications should always contain valuable information for users, and make sure you don’t disturb customers too often without reason. Send personalized messages according to the location, interests, and previous experience of a specific user.
5. Reviews and Ratings
Customers and their opinions are vital to the success of any food delivery business. Ratings and reviews are a great way to get valuable feedback from users. This feature enables rating and reviewing different restaurants and dishes in particular.
This feature is a must-have if you want to make your own food delivery app. Just add various criteria like delivery time, taste, service and ensure that the review process is simple and fast. Encourage users to rate services and exchange their experiences by sending notifications.
6. Searching for Food
This is a basis for any food delivery app, and you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of an effective search feature for overall user engagement. Enable your user to search for a particular restaurant’s name as well as dishes and cuisines. Apply such filters as geolocation (the closest restaurants), price, working hours, kind of delivery they offer, etc. It will let the customers find what they want right away and boost their experience.
4 Additional Features of Online Food Delivery Apps
Now you know the essential functionality that every customer expects to see in an app that specializes in food delivery. However, you should also think about specialties that will add uniqueness and improve the user experience. You don’t need to add everything we mentioned below; pick only the ones that meet your business goals and the demands of the target users. Here are a few ideas to consider.
1. Discounts
Discounts and loyalty programs always attract the users’ attention and encourage them to make orders more often. It helps not only to get new customers but also to improve the retention of the old ones. You can send promo codes for discounts or free delivery, or other offers via push notifications.
2. Social Media Integration
It is difficult to overestimate the importance of social media in marketing over the last few years. It is an effective way to promote your app and broaden your audience. Customers can post dishes or share their experience with your service. You can create different activities on social media platforms that will attract even more users.
3. Scheduling Orders
Timely delivery is a critical thing to satisfy the customers, and scheduling orders is a great opportunity to meet their needs. The opportunity to schedule an order allows the customers to get what they want on time and makes apps a great alternative to usual restaurants. It will be especially beneficial if you plan to collaborate with companies to provide meals for their employees.
4. Order History
This is a very convenient feature that allows users to see what they ordered before and make a similar or the same order right away. It saves the user lots of search time.
To Sum Up
We hope that our article will help you build an excellent on-demand food delivery app. The features we mentioned will help your business stay ahead of the market competition and deliver an enhanced user experience.