Food Delivery App | How To Build App Like Uber Eats?

Food delivery app like UberEats, GrabFood, Grubhub, and Deliveroo has taken a huge market share with marketing goodies and bizarre innovations.

Thanks to these food ordering apps, our lives become easier, faster, and convenient.

Are you running your own food business or currently using an online food delivery app? Whatever it be, the on-demand delivery app can be your savior.

No wonder that food delivery service app giants saw an opportunity there and entered the market.

According to Business Insider, by 2022, food delivery is set to become a $75.9-billion business. It is also forecasted to be one of the fastest-growing industries in 2020.

As a restaurant’s owner, making an app like UberEats means building bridges between you and food lovers.

Because users can easily order food online to doorstep through a delivery app. Moreover, when people are busy 24/7, a food ordering & delivery app will be a masterpiece. Isn’t it amazing?

So how to build a food delivery app like Uber Eats? In this article below, we will take you through the steps, idea validation, and everything else that you need to make your online food ordering app.

Popular food delivery business models

We’ve identified two major food delivery businesses for you. Let’s take a look at each of these models.

Order food only

In this kind of business model, customers can easily connect to local restaurants. Through food ordering apps, customers can connect with a wide network of food restaurants and simplify their interactions. Checking the menu, seeing the restaurant’s review, and ordering food — all gathered in one app.

At the same time, restaurants have the opportunity to expand their market. Although these apps offer their own delivery services, an order platform only generates revenue by charging 7 to 15 percent of commission to restaurants.

How does it work? Check out these following steps:

1. Customers place an order
2. Customers pay the order
3. Food delivery app sets commission
4. Restaurants receive order
5. The food is handed to the restaurant’s courier.
6. Delivery food to complete order

For example, Zomato helps users find high-quality food at restaurants across 24 countries with a variety of filters by price, location, discounts, reviews, etc.

Food & order platform

The order and delivery platform is a meeting point between eaters and restaurants. Thus, the partnership is beneficial from any eatery.

In this case, delivery services cut 20 to 30 percent on the cost of each order and may charge a flat delivery fee to customers.

Grubhub, for instance, gets food delivery right to your door from a large selection of restaurants with just a few taps on your phone.

How does it work?

1. Customers place an order
2. Order food platform charges a fee for restaurants
3. Customers pay for the order
4. The eatery receives the order and prepares food
5. The platform arranges delivery by its own courier
6. When food is ready, the eatery notifies a courier.
7. The courier picks the food up and completes the delivery

How does UberEats make money?

Uber Eats is basically a service delivery model between restaurants, delivery partners and end customers. Let’s find out how the company gains profit!

• Delivery fee: Depends on the distance between customers and restaurants. It also amounts to 15% of an order subtotal.
• Commission on orders: UberEats charges restaurants 30% commission from each order received.
• Promotions: Many well-known restaurants sign contracts to feature venues on the top of the list. As a result, this marketing fee will increase their visibility on the app as well as their revenue.

How to make a delivery app similar to UberEats?

UberEats is so popular among us. So, if you want to make your online food business stand out, you need to do more than just copying UberEats features.

But first, let’s take a closer look at the must-have features in an on-demand food delivery app!

For customers

Because this app is for customers, so you need to make sure that this app has a smooth UI/UX design and little bugs. Moreover, the app should have a great user experience to help users order food online easier.

Must-have Features

• Sign up: enabling new users to create an account using their phone number, email address, or sign up via a third-party service such as Facebook or Google for more convenience.
• Restaurant search: Think about a variety of filters by location, meal, food category, time, cuisine. It is also necessary with special offers, promotions, reviews, and pictures of food.
• Order placement: when customers make their choice, they want to easily and quickly add products to the shopping cart. If necessary, an online ordering system should be enabled with an estimated delivery time and courier location.
• Payment gate: once the order is ready, users can pay via built-in payment methods like credit cards, PayPal, MoMo, or cash.
• Notifications: your customers can keep track to the order status signifying whether the product is placed, being prepared, on its way through notifications or SMS

Find out more: How to build an app like Uber?

Additional features

• Order history: the option of allowing customers to see restaurants or favorite food for future needs.
• Order tracking: a real-time tracker is a great additional feature that you should not neglect. Moreover, users can chat with both the restaurant and the courier for concerns about their order.
• Loyalty program: offering users rewards is another great way to keep users returning to your food delivery app. For example, when ordering food via GrabFood, users earn Grab Rewards as well.

Tips, how to find the best route to the customer’s location?

• For iOS apps: CoreLocation framework
• For Android apps: Google Location API
• Besides, Mapkits and Google Maps is also a good development tool.

For couriers/ drivers

This delivery person app will help drivers deliver food to users more smoothly. With this app, the most important features are that if there is food ordering, they can accept or reject the order.

• Sign up: The deliverymen can register by using a simple login/password and go through the verification process.
• Order status: the driver can view available orders with details (delivery time, pick-up, and drop-off locations). Other necessary real-time orders tracking statuses are accepted, in process, rejected, canceled, etc.
• Delivery history: show a list of all orders including canceled ones and earnings.
• Notifications: the cross-communication features that help both courier and restaurant chat with each other and send updates concerning delivery.
• Loyalty program: providing drivers with bonuses or rewarding them is a great way to increase brand loyalty.

For restaurants

As a restaurant’s owners, you can accept customer orders, handle payments, track the orders, and keep up with the delivery services through this food ordering app.

• Sign up: this page allows each restaurant to create accounts with specific information like name, address, business time, contact information, etc.
• Order management: order tracking enables restaurant staff to see incoming orders and update order statuses. In addition, real-time updates for canceled, completed, delivering is also an important part.
• Advanced analytics and reports: Dashboard with all data of customers, delivery men with placed order, how many completed orders, where your app is more popular, your profit per month with relevant graphs.
• Notifications: allows the restaurant to communicate with the customer and courier seamlessly.

As you may realize, their food delivery app work closely together. Information from each element can be sent and shared with another third party.

Find out more: How to develop a location-based app?

Tech stack of a food ordering app

You’ve already known about the main business models for food delivery startups and the main features of UberEats-like food delivery services. Now, let’s move on to technical aspects. Based on our experience, we have gathered an essential tech stack for this kind of project.

Technology stack:

Programming languages: Kotlin (Android) and Swift (iOS)

Back-end development: Node.js

Frameworks and libraries:

• Restaurant listing: Grubhub API, FourSquare API
• Payment gateway: Braintree, PayPal
• Push notifications: Firebase Cloud Messaging, Amazon SNS
• SMS service: Twilio
• Navigation: Google Places API, Google Maps
• Mailing service: Amazon SES
• Social media integration: Facebook SDK

Development team:

• Project Manager
• Business Analyst
• UI/UX designer
• Android developer
• iOS developer
• Front-end developer
• Back-end developer
• Testing engineer

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

How much does it cost to build a food delivery app?

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