How to Make an On-Demand Food Delivery app like GrubHub, Postmates or UberEats?

Plus, the number of food delivery app users is projected to grow in many regions. For example, the US market should have 53.9M of such app users by 2023. Such huge numbers make perfect sense if we take a look at one of the most important benefits that food delivery offers people — saving our most precious resource.

As of now, we have a dynamic industry with intensive competition and a lot of niches that can be filled in by disruptive start-ups. We, as Software Development geeks, would love to make a contribution and help the industry see new ideas that will meet the requirements of the modern market or even set up new game rules.

So, if you are one of those who want to step into the game and be a part of the market — welcome! We’ll help you out.

✅ Top Things Worth Attention When Building your Food Delivery App

In this section, we’re going to talk about a couple of aspects that we’d like to draw your attention to.

Food Delivery App Types

To begin with, it’s essential to differentiate types of food delivery apps as it impacts the development process. So, you might want to:

• build a food delivery app for your own restaurant/shop or chain of those.
• develop software to provide it to third parties as a white-label or out-of-the-box solution. Here comes the question if you’d also want to provide your clients with delivery services or you’d only take care of the technical part.
• be an aggregator like Glovo or Uber Eats.

Here are some tips on how you can make giving feedback as user-friendly and easy as possible using your app:

• Implement feedback forms directly to your app and make it as automated as possible. Meaning that while asking to write feedback in the form of text might be more useful to you, it takes a lot of time for users to leave it. So, think about how you can get the needed information without asking users to type.
• Offer bonuses for leaving feedback like early access to an app, free delivery for some orders, discounts, merch — whatever incentive you can think of.
• Send them a post-factum gratitude notification.
• Apart from it, you can send them a bonus that you didn’t tell them about. It might create a pattern that doing your a favor leads to getting something in return.

😀 Client App Features

Food delivery might have 3 parties that will use your app, depending on the business model you choose. These are consumers, food providers, and couriers. So, we’ll have 3 sections dedicated to each feature set. Let’s start with the one for customers.

# 1: Sign Up & Profiles 🔐

First of all, signing up doesn’t have to be necessary. You might offer to create an account to use advanced features like view previous orders, automatic payments, or delivery tracking within the app. However, to complete an order, asking for necessary information (like pick-up address and name) at the checkout screen should be sufficient.

You can also use it as an effective marketing tool. For example, send special offers, make dish recommendations to increase sales, reduce abandoned orders rate, etc.

Unfortunately, many users tend to turn this feature off so make sure to clearly explain how they’ll benefit from allowing your app to send them.

⚙️ Restaurants/Shops App Features

Another part of a delivery chain is an eatery or shop where the order should come from. Let’s take a look at what functionality you might need to add for this part of the app.

In case you’re building an app for your restaurant/chain of businesses that you need delivery for, these features are also important for your admin panel so as to manage the delivery workflow efficiently.

# 1: Menu Management 📋

First and foremost, it’s essential to keep food offers up-to-date. For this purpose, you can implement the following features:

• Adding/removing/changing dishes/items from the menu.
• Editing descriptions.
• Changing prices.
• Announce special offers and discounts.
• Edit the photos & others.

This data can help you optimize your marketing, sales strategy, procurement spendings, and a lot of other business metrics. Advanced functionality can include business optimization recommendations or making sales predictions with the help of AI, for example. However, that’s definitely not something you should think of right at the start.

🍔 Courier App Features

The Courier version of the app would have more features if you’re building a Glovo-like aggregator solution — couriers working for such businesses use a separate workflow unit that normally determines working hours on their own, accepts deliveries, communicates with a client, and gets tipped within the app, etc.

However, the final set of features depends on the delivery process at your company. So, even if you’re not going to build an aggregator food delivery app, it doesn’t mean that this section won’t be helpful to you. Plus, if you’d like to hear our opinion on your case, feel free to reach out to us.

# 1: Application & Profiles 📝

Unlike customers, couriers have to be registered to complete orders. Even though you can ask for as much information as needed for a working contract, for example, we’d still recommend giving them some space just in the beginning of the applying process.

Let them know about your paying policies, way of determining working hours, whether you offer a time-limited contract, whether couriers have a probation period, etc.

It might be a good idea to have some notes next to the days or time in the calendar. For example, if it’s a night shift or shift during holidays, and you pay for such shifts more, you can mark it next to each day.

💻 Admin Panel

So you can manage the delivery workflow, you’ll need a functional admin panel. Before we talk about each separate feature in detail, we’d like to talk about how you can structure it depending on your business model.

If you’re planning to build a Glovo-like app, it’s likely to be a whole separate software where you are able to manage all partner restaurants.

However, if you’re building an app for your restaurant, you probably already have some kind of restaurant software. Thus, it might be reasonable to either build delivery management functionality into the existing software or vice versa — integrate the existing one into the new-built one.

In case you have a chain of restaurants/businesses that you also want delivery services for, you can also unify their management within one software.

If you’re building an app for your restaurant/chain of restaurants, features from the “Restaurant/Shop App Features” section are essentially what your admin panel needs. Additionally, we’d recommend paying attention to the “Courier Management” section to get the full picture of how your admin panel should look like. “Restaurant Management” and “Analytics” features are rather for Glovo-like aggregator apps.

# 1: Restaurant Management 🍎

To manage partner restaurants, you’ll need a dashboard with all partners listed there. Surely, it doesn’t mean that you get to actually determine what they offer and at what price, however, you’ll need it for onboarding purposes, approving changes that partner restaurants might be willing to make, etc.

Apart from gathering the data, it’s useful to build software with features that would visualize the information in all forms of statistical infographics — tables, graphs, diagrams, etc. It significantly helps with tracking the dynamic development of your business to spot weak points and understand what are your strong sides.

If you have time, budget, and desire to implement AI tools into the software, you might include risk management features or have your software provide you tips on business optimization based on collected data.

🤖 Tech Stack to Develop a Food Delivery App

Luckily, there are multiple API/SDK options on the market, meaning that you don’t have to build a lot of features and infrastructure from scratch. For example, you may use the following ones:

• To integrate the Payment Gateway, you can use Braintree, Stripe, PayPal.
• For the Social Media sign up, there are Twitter or Instagram SDKs.
• To enable communication features like chats, you can use Sendbird or TalkJS.
• As for navigation and mapping, there are two sides. To determine customers’ or couriers’ locations, you can use Google’s Places API or Core Location Framework (for iOS). And for navigation, there is Google Maps API or MapKit.
• Scheduling functionality can be enabled with the help of Google Calendar or Cronofy that we already mentioned.

💡 Takeaways

Food delivery apps perfectly meet the demands of the modern world, meaning that you can build a successful business in the industry. However, you should know what makes you better and/or different from other competitors.

Let’s briefly summarize what steps you should take to a well-functioning food delivery app:

• Decide on a business model if you haven’t yet.
• Contact a development company (or choose other development options like out-of-the-box solutions).
• Build an MVP and collect user feedback.
• Apply user feedback to create a development plan that includes desired features.
• In case you didn’t build an MVP, develop and launch an app.
• Implement efficient technical maintenance, updating, and technical debt covering methods to support your app’s “well-being” in the future.

And you’re done with the technical part of the development!

In case you need help with the development or have any questions left — feel free to contact us! We already have a few successful cases on on-demand delivery app development using various Tech Stack. We’ll gladly share our expertise to help your idea skyrocket 🚀