Ways to Launch a Successful Online Food Delivery Business in any Situation

Being one of the most basic needs of humankind, food delivery continues to grow at a pace that outgrows expectations. The growth happens not just in terms of business volume but also in terms of the number of brands that provide the service. Brands like UberEats, Deliveroo, GrubHub, and Swiggy have proven the profitability of food delivery facilitation as a business. Market projections by Statista show that the segment which was valued at about $70 million in 2017 is all set to almost double its value to $138 million in 2023. When a business skeleton becomes successful, it is only natural to expect that a lot of aspiring entrepreneurs embark on the same business. We have seen the same scenario with mobile application development in general, and transportation apps to be specific. Considering the fact that the need for food delivery has not yet been adequately met, leave alone saturating the market, it surely might seem a lucrative option to create a business out of food delivery. However, it should also be noted that a few names like UberEats have already created a global presence, and it might be quite difficult for new players to compete with these giants. In addition, there are also a lot of local players who exert their domination specific to that market-Swiggy in India would be a good example. Although they might not be well known in the other parts of the world, they have been giving a tough fight to UberEats in India. This presents us with a situation that has two contrasting favors – on one side we are looking at the market that is quite wide and open, and on the other hand, we are looking at threat from competition. How is it possible that a new food delivery application can tread the path of profitability? What are the features that the app needs to have to find success in the market? Let us read on to find out! The first step: Most ideas, especially in the realm of app development for services, sound quite simple on paper but are contrastingly challenging when it comes to execution. A few points of experience can considerably increase the possibility of your success in the business. Experience in the field of restaurant management is a massive plus. It only gets better if you have already established a delivery system and have been providing delivery services, not essentially through an app. It helps understand the challenges better and also helps you arrive at practical solutions. It would be good if you do not have any direct competitors, and especially global giants operating in your area. Even if they do, an exit strategy involving selling your business to one of these big companies could still be considered a great success for your business. The skeleton: Most of the food delivery applications, and especially the aggregator business model needs to have different applications for different entities involved, in addition to the admin web interface/application. To understand the relevance of the different applications, we will need to look into the mechanism behind an app-based food order. A customer who has the food ordering app selects the restaurant and the items and adds it to the cart. Once they complete the checkout process and choose the payment method, the order details are sent to the restaurant and the delivery executives. The restaurant starts preparing the food and the delivery executive starts to move towards the restaurant to pick the food up and deliver it to the customer, assisted by the GPS. From the above process, it is quite evident that the customer and the delivery executive at the restaurant need to have separate applications. The customer application: It might not be an exaggeration to say that the customer app is the epicenter of profit when it comes to food delivery applications. There are a few features that are considered mandatory for customer application:

• The customer should be able to quickly register for the services by using a simple sign up process that involves either email addresses or phone numbers or even legacy logins like Facebook and Google.
• They should be able to find the restaurants in the vicinity that deliver food and should be able to quickly filter them by using options like time to delivery, proximity cuisines, vegetarian options, and accepted payment methods.
• The process to order food items should be simple and straightforward – keeping the process simple goes a long way in engaging users and retaining them. Important options like proceeding to check out should be made available at the reach of the thumb.
• Your customers should be able to use multiple payment methods like credit cards, debit cards, internet banking, and wallets. Your app should partner with a versatile payment gateway to have all of this enabled. You can also consider having additional payment options like cash on delivery.
• In addition, it would also be a great idea to have a feedback mechanism for customers that will enable them to rate the delivery experience and the restaurant food. This simple add on to the app makes the entire ecosystem democratic.
• Simple personalization experiences like listing the regular favorites of a customer on the app homepage, and having push notifications to keep them notified about offers and order statuses, and showing the estimated time of delivery go a long way in increasing the appeal of your app.

It is quite evident that when you collect information regarding the delivery addresses, the payment instrument information, and the identities of customers, there is a lot of sensitive data that goes from the hands of the customers to your servers. Therefore, it is important to ensure that your data storage falls in line with the regulations of the GDPR or any other data protection compliance that you might need to establish in your jurisdiction. The delivery executive app: The delivery executive is an important link in the ecosystem. If not for the delivery executives, it might be extremely cumbersome for the restaurants to appoint their own delivery fleet, manage them under their payroll, and have them standing outside the restaurant with their transportation ready even when there are no orders to execute. Delivery executives exist outside the payroll of both the app and the restaurant – they are, in essence, freelancers who have signed up with the app to work on a gig economy. However, they do have a part to play in maintaining the brand name of the app and the restaurant. The essential features for the delivery executive app are:

• Delivery executives should be able to easily register with the service. The customers might not need a complicated process to verify the identity but the delivery executives should have a proper process in place to ensure that their identity, their authenticity, and if possible, their personal information is verified.
• Delivery executives should have the freedom to choose their work timings and select the preferences of their locations. They should be made aware of the consequences of such choices in terms of the number of orders and proportional earnings.
• They should be given the choice to accept or reject any order.
• The commissions paid out for the deliveries should be made available in their bank accounts in the easiest way possible.
• They should continuously be notified of the progress in the order including the restaurant accepting the order and the restaurant finishing the preparation of food. 

Keeping all these features in place will ensure that you have a rich supply of delivery executives. It is to be noted that the success of your Ubereats Clone app depends, as much as on customers and restaurants, also on delivery executives. The restaurant app: It is to be remembered that at the end of the day, you are, as a delivery business, facilitating the availability of the products of the restaurant at the doorstep of the customers. Therefore, the restaurant app is of crucial importance when it comes to profitably completing your business ecosystem.

• The restaurant should be able to easily register themselves and it is bound to be a bit more complicated than the registration for customers or delivery executives. The restaurant should have a facility to upload its menu and if possible, add pictures of their menu items, update the availability according to the timings, along with the prices.
• The restaurant should be able to manage orders and if possible, handle them separately, keeping the online orders away from the regular orders.
• In addition to managing the menu items, the restaurant should also have an option to manage promotions, discounts, and seasonal offers.
• The restaurant should be provided with detailed analytics which will help them arrive at better business insights that can help them choose their next promotion or procure the raw materials for the orders that have been calculated for the future.

The administrator interfaces: The administrator functions as the big brother of all the activities happening on the application. They should be able to control the promotions on the app, the content, and even suspend delivery executives or restaurants based on their ratings and behavior. In short, they are responsible for keeping the sanity and sanctity of the app and the entire food delivery ecosystem. Conclusion: The need for food and the proportional need for food delivery services is not going to diminish any time soon, and the constructive onslaught of mobile applications will continue. This convergence makes it a perfect time for you to create your own mobile app for food delivery. There is no question that a food delivery mobile app might be a lucrative option for aspiring entrepreneurs, especially when the market is so wide and open. In addition, now that you are aware of the features that can make your product feel better, you are all set to deliver not just food but even business success.  There are multiple ways to proceed with your endeavor, and the first of them is to create your app. You can choose to either develop the app from scratch or use open source codes. However, both of them have their disadvantages in terms of cost and reliability, in that order. Another viable solution is to use white label clones of apps like UberEats. It saves you a lot both in terms of time and money. All you need to do is get in touch with a company that specializes in UberEats clone app development and let them understand your requirements. They will take care to create and customize the app for you, and deliver it to you in the shortest possible time.