Essential Features of Food Delivery Apps
What are the Essential features required for your Food Ordering App?
Ready to build a food ordering mobile app for your food business or your clients? Sure you are!
But do you know that there are many components of your food ordering app that cumulatively decide the success your business enjoys. This pretty much makes it clear that you cannot afford to mess up even a single section on the app or you will lose even the existing customers in no time.
We are not trying to scare you, but it’s the truth; a bad mobile app development strategy may have the exact opposite effect on your food business that a good one will on the positive side of the number line.
Although we know you are a pretty good developer with adequate insights on your project, here’s a quick list of essential components for your food ordering app:
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Sign Up
The process of signing up should be simple and shall ask for minimum necessary details. Google or Facebook sign up are two of the most common sign up options you would find in most mobile apps for the simple reasons that they are fast and accurate.
Earlier, the majority of mobile apps used to ask for the customer’s address on the sign up page itself. The practice was slowly given up by most of the mobile app developers because if the customer faced even a single glitch while updating the address, they used to uninstall the app right way. At present, most food ordering apps allow you to enter the address, assisted by GPS, in the app after the sign up process.
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Hamburger Menu
Also known as Side Menu or Navigation Drawer, Hamburger Menu quickly became popular among the users as well as developers because it maximized the mobile app functionality, while covering no space at all, on the app interface. For your food ordering app, Hamburger menu is vital for your app for two reasons: first, you can fit in as many sub-sections in it as you want and keep your app sizing from exceeding the pre-determined limit. Second, it is called ‘Hamburger’ and yours is a food app, period
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Food Menu
Needless to mention, this section of your app should be as simple as possible, while still letting your customer find their favourite meal. Even if you have a very big food menu, try to categorize the items through sub-menus or drop down lists. People don’t exploring the app if it is organized and neat. What they do loathe, is an app that has everything piled up on the first page itself.
PS – Don’t forget to include A-la carte section on the menu.
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Tracking Facility and Previous Orders
No one likes to sit in the dark. By not providing a tracking facility, you would devoid your customers of the excitement of their order being placed, food being dispatched and reaching their doorstep. Besides, a tracking facility is also a good real-time record for yourself, as it allows you to keep an eye on your staff. Previous orders is also a must for your app as the customer, sometimes, may want to skip looking a new meal and rather, just order what they had last time.
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Rate Us
Just as much insignificant this section is to your customers, its significance to your business is huge. One of the most important goals of your food ordering app is to avoid bad rating on app store or play store. Lately, a new way to avoid bad app ratings has been devised, in which you include a sub-query in the ‘Rate-us’ button. The query usually is ‘Are you satisfied with our service’? If the user says ‘YES’, well & good; take them to play store where they will give you a 5-star rating. If their response is ‘NO’, take them to the feedback page, where they can describe the issue they faced. However, the customer should be allowed to skip the feedback page and reach the app store or play store.
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Cart
Try to display as many item details on the cart as possible because usually, a customer would always like to have a final look at the items before checking out. Also, develop it in such a way that it allows the customer to modify the item quantity and add-ons.
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Payment Options
In real world, money is everything; this makes ‘Payments Section’ probably the most important or say ‘sensitive’, component of your app. Have as many affiliations from payment gateways, wallets and banks, otherwise you may lose out on a big section of people using a particular payment option that is absent on your app.
Also, thoroughly understand and design the customer grievances redressal strategy before even starting with the development process.
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Ratings & Reviews
This feature allows your clients to rate and review other restaurants on your application that serve their menu. So, every business value’s its clients, because, after all, they are the reason for the business. So, any feedback or rating is good to the business to have a sense of the disadvantages of their on-demand delivery software.
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Messaging in the App
In-app notifications are announcements that pop-up in the user’s screen when the application is on. So, whether it be pop-ups or animated interstitials – they are meant to deliver targeted or context-specific information.
In summary, a messaging service is important to have in a courier application, as it is a way to communicate with clients while being solicited by a message, clarity between the client and administration is critical.
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Order History
There should always be a list of potential items to be selected on the courier’s working screen that have not been managed for pick-up by any near courier available for collection. This means all selections should be populated by default; specifically, within 750-meters of the courier’s current location. In summary, the list of orders to be managed should include the set timeframe for delivery an orders address and the consumers contact information.
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Profile Personalization and Registration
The user’s profile serves as a repository of information. Past orders, annual preferences based on order hallucinations, and other information such as shipping addresses, saved outlets, payment options, etc., would be contained. Hence, the user’s favorite aspect of the profile is that it makes easy access to this information available.
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Social Media Integration
When you allow your users to contribute photographs of the food they’ve eaten and reviews of the items through social media and the app, you’ve got the potential for a lot of organic exposure. Great way to collect feedback and much more for your social media staff to work with as well. As such it will assist the customers to the reviews, and then thus contribute to incrasing sales.
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Search Filters
Customers will enjoy the convenience and the time savings that a sophisticated search feature with many criteria can offer as you have the option to search for the restaurants that you want by downloading a restaurant aggregator/ordering app. As a result, users should be able to search for items based on timely delivery, distance, or even menu items but again where there is variation in the offering by place, there is more required for an app for a single restaurant or chain.
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Straightforward Payment Methods
Payments are a grind every entrepreneur identifies. Despite being the final stage of ordering, consumers won’t try again if they have any small or large hiccups. All funding opportunities available in your on-demand food delivery app must be available to the consumer for the payment experience to be incredibly efficient and easy to navigate.
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Providing contact information for the delivery driver
Let’s say the consumer has ordered their food and paid for their order. You might want to give the consumer the delivery person’s contact information. This way, the consumer can contact the driver and track their orders.
In this blog, we discussed all the functionalities you would require to create a premier performer in the food delivery industry. Our professional mobile app developers will be thrilled to help you develop a meal or food delivery app.
