How To Make A Successful Online Food Ordering Website?

7 min readJun 2, 2020

how to build successful on demand food ordering website

Are you really into the online food ordering and delivery platform? Across the world, more and more people prefer ordering food from delivery websites.

Even when Doordash, Grubhub, Uber Eats, GrabFood, or Postmates are now the top players, food ordering startups are still growing at a tremendous pace.

In the COVID-19 coronavirus crisis, millions of restaurants have shut their doors. But as a restaurant owner, you can sell takeaway food delivery.

The food ordering website will help your restaurant survive the pandemic as well as provide essential food supplies during the lockdown.

Thus, a food ordering marketplace platform is not only about feeding people around the world but also about how to make profits out of it.

Nevertheless, to say, food delivery is an attractive market for many entrepreneurs & established business owners.

Whether you want to create a local food delivery website or food ordering system for your restaurant, we are going to show you how to step by step.

But before diving in, let’s see how food ordering platform work and make money!

Read also: How to build food delivery app like UberEats?

Food ordering business model

You may think that the only profit of food ordering sites is sales they get for each restaurant? You’d be wrong! If you are planning to venture into on-demand food delivery services, here are 4 ways it raises revenue.

With the help of an online food app, customers can order food online by choosing their favorite food or restaurant and adding it in cart.

Then the restaurant where you choose to place order gets a notification. After that, the staff will prepare for delivery.

When your food is ready, the driver man delivers food to your doorstep. This brings about convenience for customers — with a range of choices: pay via card or cash.

Order food only

For example, Zomato use this kind of business model. Customers can connect with a wide network of food restaurants and simplify their interactions via food ordering web.

Checking the menu, seeing the restaurant’s review, and ordering food — all gathered in one app.

And how does it make revenue? Recently, the local restaurants deliver orders on their own and pay for delivery website 7 to 15 percent commission.

Food & delivery platform

Grubhub, Uber Eats, or DoorDash, for instance, is the food ordering and delivery platform that benefit both customers and restaurants.

Thus, delivery services cut 20 to 30 percent on the cost of each order and may charge an additional delivery fee to customers.

how does order food and delivery model work

Top 4 popular food ordering websites

With food delivery apps, your next meal is just a few taps away. That makes a huge competition and rushes in on-demand food delivery market with the same niche.

But there are hundreds of food delivery websites out there, how to find the best one? We’ve gathered all the essential info for the best food delivery apps for 2020.

Uber Eats: Food delivery and takeout

Uber Eats is one of the most food delivery systems in the world. Not only delivering great user experience, but UberEats is also an excellent option in terms of availability, even in small cities.

Through this food delivery platform, customers can order food from local restaurants while being noticed about estimated delivery times and being able to choose cashless transactions.

Availability: currently in many cities, including Chicago and Los Angeles, Singapore, Tokyo, Portland, etc.

Fee: UberEats charges 15% of an order’s subtotal for food delivery. Additionally, fees may vary based on distance and restaurants.

Doordash: Food delivery & takeout

Doordash focuses on food quality and on how the restaurants work well to get your food delivered on time.

One of the unique features during the food delivery website is that you can add information like where to park and to call before delivering the food.

Above all, Doordash also delivers drinks containing alcoholic beverages from the stores.

Availability: over 300 cities in 32 markets in the U.S. and Canada, including Atlanta, New York, Chicago, and Toronto, Calgary, among others.

Fee: The fee varies by restaurant. The price typically includes the cost of your meal, as well as tax, delivery fees, and sometimes, some discounts for new users, also on special days.

Grubhub: Food delivery | Restaurant takeout | Order food online

Like many food ordering websites do, GrubHub offers an option to search for your favorite food or browse through the list of local restaurants.

All you have to do is to choose food delivery from restaurants near you and order the food in just a single tap.

Availability: popular in more than 3,200 U.S. cities and London.

Fee: The app is free to use. Therefore, restaurants may charge a delivery fee.

Domino’s Pizza

Domino is a well-known pizza delivery app for food ordering. It is also the first fast-food delivery app to execute online fast food delivery.

This delivery app allows you to make quick online orders and delivers within 30 minutes.

Availability: Domino’s operates 17,000 stores in more than 90 countries around the world

How to build a successful food delivery website

You’ve known about top delivery websites. All you need to do next is download the app from Play Store, App Store and then order away from their website.

Or together with us, dig deep into tips & features on how to quickly start a successful food ordering business.

1. Custom built website

If you don’t have any ideas about how your food ordering website will look like, let’s get inspired by other platforms solutions.

But to succeed, you need much more. You should choose something new and focus on building a unique identity.

To clarify. it might be the user’s preference, your feature idea, and current trends.

The more feature-rich and secure website is, the more trust people put in you. And don’t forget about the advantage of custom design and programming.

Find out more: Top 8 UI/UX Trends For Mobile App Development 2020

2. Target audience

It is always advisable to start with a small area.

Less time to gather feedback and public reviews
Opportunity to test your services before scaling up
Getting adequate expertise and earning a good reputation on the market
Then it’s time to push your business further

So that is the reason why researching your market is really important. This will help you learn more about how to satisfy your customers, understand the ever-changing demands, which is a strong base to stand out on the market.

3. Great UI/UX

Platform design, usage convenience, and loading efficiency — All of these aspects lead customers decide to place an order or not. As the result, the better design, the more users engage with your app.

For example, the basics design process consists of the following: research, analysis, UI/UX that refers to design, development, testing, and branding.

4. Marketing

Tune SEO

SEO will act as a free source of constant traffic to your food ordering website. But expecting such features by default in a food delivery system will not be wise.

Only an expert team of designers, programmers, and app developers backed by an experienced SEO and ASO team can develop such a system.

Friendly to social media channels

Therefore, you should start with social media. People like to spend there more and more time sharing news, getting likes, checking someone’s statuses, etc.

And they also share food ordering experience from your delivery service? On the other side, they can check the rate and reviews of the restaurants for a better choice.

As our experience, we think you should entrust your tech team as well as the whole creative team to help you make it a reality.

5. Local demands

So following these essential ideas will come handy:

The operations in one city might not work in the other. According to different types of customers, you will have a different strategy plan based on market research.
The database and category vary as local cuisine preferences.
The payment system should be secure, fast, easy-to-use, and maintain multiple popular payments varying from city to city and country to country.

6. Additional features

Check out these handy points for more insight:

SMS live chat integration
Review and rating system
Advertising on 3rd parties sites
Advanced search option
Real-time tracking status

7. Mobile app version

According to a survey by eMarketer, US smartphone food delivery app users have increased from 13,9% (2018) to 16,3%(2019) and it is growing.

By 2021, more than 20% of US smartphone users will use a food delivery app. With a food ordering app, you can utilize native mobile features to give a better experience to users.

Thus, it is an up-and-coming innovation for restaurant owners in the future.

The list goes on. Let’s take a look at full article to know more!

How much does it cost to custom the food delivery website?