How You Can Build an On-demand Food Delivery Application With DhiWise

The article focuses on how to build a successful food delivery application for the aggregator platform,  its advantage,  technology stack, and the main features required to build the application. DhiWise fulfills all the requirements to speed up application development. Also, it helps to build a scalable application faster.

How? Keep reading to know more about it.

Today we live in a time where half of the world’s population uses mobile applications for their personal and professional use. Online service demand has shaken up nearly every sector including healthcare, education, and hospitality.  The food industry is no exception among them.

Online food delivery services are on the rise as more people prefer to order food online. . The food delivery applications such as Uber Eats, Swiggy, Zomato, and FoodPanda have made life easier for busy people and foodies.

The food delivery application enables users to choose from a wide variety of cuisines, restaurants, and even street food, making it a favorite among the people. With its popularity, restaurant owners, entrepreneurs, startups, and application developers have gained the attention of mobile app development for food delivery applications.

Why building an online food delivery application is a good investment idea?

Here are some key facts based on the market research that shows that creating an online food delivery application is a good investment.

• An increasing number of users and the application downloads

Applications like Zomato and Swiggy are more popular in India with millions of users.

Zomato- A restaurant aggregator and online food delivery company alone has 70 million monthly active users and 11 million monthly app downloads. It acquired UberEats in January 2021(in India). Swiggy- another app that provides online food delivery has 10 million app downloads. The number of app users is expected to reach 858 million by 2024.

• Revenue Rate

According to Statista, the revenue rate for online food delivery apps is expected to reach $11,666 million. The report shows the revenue is growing at the rate of 7.94% resulting in the projected market volume of  US$14,670 million by 2024. The most revenue will be generated in China followed by the US and India.

Although it has huge demand and a high capacity for revenue generation, it is hard for any application to sustain itself in a competitive market for a longer period.

Decide your food delivery application type: Aggregator or Personalize application.

The on-demand food delivery includes both aggregators and restaurant’s own food delivery applications. Aggregators such as Zomato, Swiggy,  and UberEats provide access to multiple restaurants through a single online platform. On the other hand, restaurants can also access multiple aggregators. restaurants and food businesses build their online food delivery apps.

Before planning, decide whether you want to build an on-demand food delivery application for a single restaurant or an application platform that allows multiple restaurants, contractors, and food businesses to register and access the application.

Building an entire application platform for multiple restaurants doesn’t only include one single application, but requires building a different front-end app for the restaurants, the customer(order food), and food delivery suppliers as well as the back-end to support all three front-end.

While building an application for a single restaurant only requires a front-end application and a back-end application.

In both cases, an Android application must be supported by the admin department and customer support team to run successfully in the real-time environment.

A step-by-step guide to building a successful food delivery app.

• Market analysis

Once you have decided on the type of application you want to build, start digging out the market. You can do your research online or refer to public records, but make sure you are getting the correct information.  Understand your target audience, competitors, the local and global market.

• If you are building an entire aggregator platform for multiple food businesses, you need to study the global market.

• Calculate how many users will be using the application.

• Finalize the features you want to add to the application.

• Identify the nitches in the food delivery system and develop solutions to fix that during digitization.

• Draft and implement the best development approach.

• Decide business strategy

To make an online business successful, always think about customers and what they need. Here are some key points everyone should take into consideration:

• Intuitive user interface and amazing UI/UX design
• Faster, convenient, and secure payment methods
• Pocket-friendly prices
• Faster delivery
• Customer support
• Monetization strategy
• Feedback and suggestion option

Another mandatory task is to write down important features you want to include such as efficient tools for finding and ordering food, scheduling delivery option, an integrated payment system, location tracking, and a feedback option.

Your application can generate revenue from advertisements, subscriptions, merchandising e-commerce products, or charging a service fee.

• Finalize technologies for application development

Building a scalable food delivery application is not an easy task as there are many challenges to provide better services to customers, restaurants, and delivery contractors while balancing technical issues in the supply and demand cycle.  

Therefore, when developing applications, always choose the right technology stack that can meet all the application requirements.

• Web application
  To build the front-end you can use Angular.js, React.js ,  or Flutter
• Mobile application
  You can build a Hybrid or Native mobile application. To build a Hybrid application you can use Flutter or React Native technologies
• Back-end
  The popular technology used for back-end application development is Node.js . It helps you to build scalable applications.
• Database
  We prefer to use databases such as MongoDB or MYSQL.
• Third-party services
  You may also need third-party services such as Google Map for location tracking and Firebase for push notifications

Now you can start building your food delivery application.

• Start building your application: Application and Features

• Customer: Web or mobile application

Here is the list of features required to develop your web and mobile application for customers.

1. Customer registration/ Signup
2. Sign in and Profile Editing
3. Restaurant search and Filter option
4. Browse Menus
5. Order Section
6. Add/Remove Cart Items
7. Checkout & Online Payments
8. Track the Order
9. Rate the Order and add Feedback
10. Direct Contact Section
11. History
12. Personal Offer Management Tools

• Restaurants/ Food Business: Web or mobile application

Add feature specified below for the Restaurant and food business partners

1. Login
2. Order Listing
3. Menu Management: Menu editing, Category management
4. Store Setting: Updating store hours
5. Payments
6. Order History
7. Rating and Review

• Delivery Contractors/ Partners: Mobile application

Delivery partners pick orders from restaurants and eateries and deliver them to customers. In the process, they require order information, the collection of customer information, and delivery addresses.

1. Log in
2. Orders
3. Earning
4. Profile Setting
5. History

• Platform Administrator: Web application

Platform administrators have full privilege to the food delivery system. They have access to restaurant partners, customers, food delivery partners.

1. Manage Restaurant/ Food Business Partners
2. Manage Delivery Partners/Contractors
3. Manage Customers
4. Manage Reviews & Ratings
5. Manage Feedback
6. Settings
7. Analytics and Reporting
8. Financials
9. Dashboard

How the entire process of food delivery application development can be simplified.

Building a food delivery application is time-consuming and requires a large investment when building an aggregator platform. Minimizing development costs without compromising the quality of the application seems impossible. DhiWise can make it happen.

DhiWise simplifies the entire application development process with advanced technologies (such as Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, React.js(Coming Soon)) and features support clean code architecture, module-specific access, easy maintenance, and testing, and much more.  

It enables you to create separate APIs so that you can scale up your application later.  The platform enables you to set up your project, add required platforms, set your models, permissions, and configurations. You can create constants, policies,  routes, and schedules to reduce repetitive tasks. Also, you can automatically generate the swagger documentation.

Overall, it helps you generate clean code in less time with minimal input and supports scalable application development.