Top 10 Essential Features of Food Delivery Apps in 2024

During times of crisis and epidemic, the industry of purchasing goods and services and having them delivered to your house or office has grown much faster than it has in the past. We will order things online and cook them ourselves more often in the next year, even though most families already get ready-to-eat meals delivered to their homes. Spending time shopping will not be productive. A meal delivery app needs certain functionality; this post will show you those features.

The practice of using cabs to deliver keys, paperwork, and small packages is commonplace. These services will expand in popularity and affordability as the walking courier sector grows.

How do food delivery apps make money?

Businesses are embracing digital transformation as the digital era begins, bringing convenience, speed, and ease to people's lives. Nowadays, people are so busy with their daily lives that they look for affordable, quick solutions at the convenience of their doorstep.

The convenience of on-demand mobile applications makes them quite popular in this area. With the tap of a finger on your phone, you can book a cab, buy movie tickets, order takeout, book a hotel room, and much more. That is why it seems like every business is concentrating on developing mobile apps.

Is developing an app to order food on demand something you plan to put money into? Is the investment's merit uncertain, though? If you need some numbers to put things in perspective, here they are:

The restaurant business made $160 million in total in 2015 via a smartphone app.

The internet food delivery company made $7,092 million last year. Most of the market's revenue comes from restaurant-to-consumer deliveries, which cost $5,825 million.

Forecasts for 2023 indicate that the restaurant-to-consumer internet food delivery market will bring in $22,898.2 million. 

Statistics on Online Ordering and Delivery

There is a 60% weekly delivery/takeout rate in the US. 

Compared to dine-in visits, internet ordering and delivery have increased by 300 percent since 2014.

Recent studies indicate that the worldwide market for online on-demand food delivery app development services will increase from 2022 to 2027, reaching a value of USD 266.05 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 24.64%.

Recently, the daily downloads of the Instacart, Walmart Grocery, Shipt, and Target apps for on-demand delivery increased by 218 per cent, 160 per cent, 124 per cent, and 98 per cent, respectively.

Online meal ordering is becoming increasingly popular among consumers, which is driving growth in the market. Mobile app development should be on your radar if you want to maximize your ROI. Opportunities abound in the market right now; you should take advantage of them. App Features That Every Restaurant App Ought to Have for Food Delivery

Choosing which features to include in your restaurant meal ordering app is the next logical step after making the smart decision to make one.

In light of this, we have compiled a list of fifteen features that we believe are essential for a restaurant app to succeed in the market.

If you want to build a top-notch app for your restaurant, you should study what makes an on-demand food ordering app tick. The fifteen most important functions of the meal delivery app are as follows:

1. On-Demand Food Ordering App Push Notifications

You probably have a plethora of food delivery applications installed on your phone due to the exponential rise of online meal ordering. The most effective way to get noticed and stay ahead of the competition is to send push alerts. Consequently, it facilitates customer-business communication. These messages have multiple purposes; for example, they can convey location-based order drop messages, special offers, and discounts.

Your on-demand food ordering app's alerts, besides not being a sales pitch, should be useful to consumers. Make an effort to control push notifications in a manner that contributes to the massive expansion of your company app. Keep potential customers up-to-date on all of your sales, promotions, and loyalty programs. Consequently, this is a great way to grab and keep a customer's interest.

2. Giving the Address and Phone Number of the Delivery Person

Assume for a moment that the buyer has gone ahead and paid for the item. The customer might appreciate it if you gave them the delivery person's number. Because of this feature, customers can get in touch with the delivery person and monitor the progress of their products.

3. Reward/Discount Programs, Cashback Programs, and Loyalty Programs

You can get more people to use your food delivery app if you offer coupons and discounts. Frequent, large discounts are a surefire way to keep customers returning.

Bringing in new consumers is more crucial than increasing brand recognition if you want them to be loyal to your brand. For this reason, big businesses put a premium on their reward points. Retail giant Starbucks, for example, witnessed an 80% surge in revenue following the launch of its loyalty program.

4. Real-Time Food Delivery GPS Tracking

The ability to monitor the whereabouts of one's food in real-time using GPS is a crucial component of meal delivery applications. Providing two-way tracking and operation is the purpose of GPS. As a result, it's useful for pinpointing the user's location for meal delivery. Once the site is confirmed, users may easily track the delivery people's status and whereabouts.

The leading meal delivery apps use it to give their customers the best possible service. So, some great APIs for this feature include Google Maps, MapKit, and Waze's Navigation, among others. One example is how Uber Eats uses Google Maps on all of its platforms.

5. Ease of Payment Processing

From the point of view of a business owner, payments are crucial to every company. Regardless of how big or small the problem is, customers will not attempt it again if they encounter any problems, even though this is the last step in placing an order. For the payment process to be efficient and user-friendly, your on-demand food delivery software must support all available funding choices.

Google Wallet, Apple Pay, your iOS PayPal account, Mastercard, your credit or debit card, online banking, or cash on delivery (COD) are all acceptable methods of payment. As a result, you may utilize the same page to promote the use of discount codes.

6. Filters for Searches

Customers will love the time and effort saved by using a restaurant aggregator or ordering app, which gives them the option to search for any restaurant they choose based on a variety of parameters. Suppose you're making an app for a particular chain or restaurant. In that case, you should let customers sort goods by delivery time, distance, or even menu options—these can vary greatly from one location to another.

7. Integrate Social Media

You may get a lot of free, organic traffic by letting your consumers post photos and reviews of the food they've consumed on the app and social media. In addition to being a great method of gathering feedback, it also gives your social media team a wealth of data to work with. Customers will be more drawn to the reviews, and purchases will rise as a result.

8. Profile Customization and Registration

To put it simply, the user's profile is a repository for data. A lot of things might be incorporated, such as previous purchases, preferences determined by order analytics, shipping addresses, stores stored, payment methods, and much more. Consequently, the consumer loves the profile because this information is so easy to get.

9. Order History

No courier has been able to retrieve an item from the list of viable options displayed on their operational screen. By default, all orders should be visible within a 750-meter radius of the courier's current location. Consequently, the order list should contain the scheduled delivery time, the patient's address, and the consumer's contact details.

10. Communicating inside the App

Notifications that show up on the user's screen while the app is active are called in-app alerts. Ads can be in the form of colourful interstitials or pop-ups, but their purpose is to provide relevant or contextualized content.

To that end, a messenger is essential to any courier software for communicating with clients and getting administrative details straightened out.

In Conclusion

One sector has shown success with Uber's X strategy: food delivery. Everything you need to create a formidable rival in the meal delivery industry is detailed here. Our skilled app developers would be happy to help you create an app for food delivery.