How to Build a Food Delivery Marketplace App: Features, Time, and Cost
Let`s face it: online food delivery industry has worthily earned its place in the sun. It makes our life easier, saves the time, and changes the way we have a rest.
Moreover, in spite of its popularity, the food delivery market opportunities remain high enough.
The restaurant industry makes up a $490 billion market, when the food delivery opportunity equals to just 43%. It means that more than half of this market is still not occupied.
If you want your restaurant business to stay competitive, it's time to make changes!
In this article you will learn how to create your own food ordering and delivery marketplace app. Check out the famous food delivery apps, their main features, business model, and, of course, food delivery app development cost. We have also prepared a bonus for you - free PDF checklist on how to develop a successful marketplace.
The most popular food delivery apps
Before creating your own food delivery marketplace app, analyze what is already available on the market. Let's review the most successful food delivery apps and their main features.
The Deliveroo team works with hundreds of restaurant chains and independents to deliver food to your home or office. You simply have to enter your postcode and the app will show you all the restaurants and cafes in your area that provide online food delivery. The food is carried to your home or office by Deliveroo drivers.
OrderUp
OrderUp is a food delivery marketplace that allows to order food from the list of local restaurants, pay via the app, and track the driver. To deliver food, they recruit local franchises (read more about Franchise management software development: How to grow your business with custom Franchise CRM) who work with restaurants in their hometown. They are also responsible for advertising the app and local restaurants in their cities.
This app is available across 450+ cities in the US and Canada. Its main features include delivery tracking, delivery scheduling, and “delight” score factors in food quality, delivery quality and popularity. DoorDash also quotes the user an estimated time of arrival, because they know when a driver arrives and leaves the restaurant thanks to GPS.
UberEats is an online food ordering system powered by Uber. The app detects the user's location and displays the best local restaurants. Meal is delivered by car, bike or on foot. For now, over 40,000 restaurants are delivering food through UberEats.
Main features of food ordering apps
Before developing a food delivery app think about its functionality. We have taken UberEats as an example and described the basic features you need for this kind of app.
- Registration
- Card verification
- Restaurant selection by filters
- Food selection by filters
- Delivery location
- Order history
- GPS tracking
- Estimated delivery time
- Custom suggestions
- Ratings
How food delivery apps work
The concept of the app is pretty simple. After downloading, you enter your location. Then, you will see a listing of the best restaurants in your area and their menus. After you have submitted the order and paid for it, the app will display the approximate delivery time and the map, where you can track your courier.
Tracking is done by determining user's location. You can use either Google`s Location API for Android or CoreLocation framework for iOS. To provide driver with directions, use MapKit for iOS or Google Maps API for Android. UberEats has integrated Google Maps API into both iOS and Android systems.
UberEats aso uses machine learning and gives you suggestions on fast delivery options and food recommendations based on your past orders. Their approach to machine learning is worth to tell about.
One of the main app cores is the indication of the delivery time. UberEats engineers use not only the average data such as distance, speed and time to prepare the meal. They also have data about how long it takes to cook different types of dishes and deliver them in different times of day. All this information helps them to get more accurate data and build the relevant machine learning models.
Uber also uses data to learn about the best pick up spots. Daan de Lange, Head of UberEats Marketplace, explained:
"We have machine learning algorithms which sift through the data and understand where we have the fewest problems picking up a customer. It learns from the friction of a pickup. So, you can measure the time it takes from a vehicle arriving to the person starting the trip."
Technical stack of UberEats
We`d like to mention the experience of UberEats engineering team with React Native. After developing a web restaurant dashboard, UberEats team has realized that it needed features that were not available on the web browser. Engineers had a lot of experience with React, but limited iOS and Android exposure.
As a result, they have chosen React Native because of its multi-platform support and mobile development in language of the web. According to Chris Lewis, software engineer of UberEats, rebuilding the restaurant dashboard with React Native was a positive experience.
How UberEats makes money
Uber charges their customers $4 minimum delivery fee. Then the fee is divided between the driver and Uber. The delivery fee is based on distance that driver has to cover. UberEats also charges restaurants around 30% of the meal price.
How much does it cost to develop a food delivery app
Wrapping it all up into a pretty package, on-demand food delivery app development is really worth investing. If you plan everything right and put user experience on the first place, you will definitely get a desired result.