How to Build a Food Delivery App (like UberEats, Glovo or Postmates): Development Stages, App Features and APIs

Research and analyze

How to make your own food delivery app? Start with researching and analyzing your market. Look at your competitors, find their upsides and downsides. It’s their mistakes that you should avoid. A proper research of your field will help you make your app better, quicker, and smarter. If you don’t have expertise to conduct an analysis yourself, find a team of professionals to assist you.

Choose your business model

While developing food delivery apps like Uber Eats, Glovo or Postmates, think about business model of your future startup. For the mobile food delivery, consider three basic options:

1. Using your own transport vehicles. It is a time-consuming model to build, which requires more investments, and involves higher responsibility.
2. Using taxi service or external couriers. With this option, your app becomes a connecting dot between three agents: clients, drivers and restaurants.
3. Delivery is performed by the food service itself. In this case, you have just to connect clients with the restaurants. This model offers less control over the process and minimal involvement.

How to monetize your app?

Let’s take apps like Uber Eats. The company applies three main monetization strategies:

1. Delivery Fee. Before 2018, UberEats had a stable $4.99 delivery fee. Now the company switched to a pricing calculator (delivery order fee is estimated by the distance between clients and food sites).
2. Revenue Sharing from food businesses. The platform charges fee from each order done with UberEats.
3. Advertising. Restaurants pay money to be promoted in the app search.

Choose your app functionality

Before switching to food delivery app development itself, you should understand what features and food delivery APIs your food delivery app will comprise. Start with some essentials. Just ask yourself: what are 3 features that you would like to see on Glovo’s, Uber’s or Postmate’s app?

Done? Now it’s time to get more detailed. Let’s make a short overview. There are three main agents of the process: a client, who makes an order, a restaurant, which prepares the order, and a courier, who delivers it. Consequently, three sides of your app should be considered.

Client’s perspective

• Start with sign up feature. Your customers should be able to create their account, track order status and leave feedback. Don’t forget to include authorization via email address or social media channels.
• List of restaurants with theirrating and reviews for clients to choose.
• In-app calls and chat. They enable customers to chat with restaurants and couriers as well as to check their order for updates.
• Payment system for your app. The easier to pay, the better. Try to include as many paying options as possible — PayPal, Google Wallet, Apple Pay, and credit cards.
• Functionality to place orders right from the restaurant menu. It seems to be a small detail, but yet important for a client-friendly service.

Restaurant’s perspective

• Sign up page as well. Create the food delivery app functionality for food businesses to join. Restaurant’s profile should at least include its name, location, menu, business hours and contact information.
• Tracking the nearest courier available to deliver orders. Make sure your app has a functionality to follow the courier at any stage of delivery.
• Cross interface communication between the restaurant, the courier and the client.
• Tracking order status. Restaurants must see upcoming orders, processing orders and already delivered ones.
• Enable restaurants to update content of their profiles.
• Another detail — functionality to set other special offers.

Courier’s perspective

• Sing up. Courier’s profile should include some personal information (location, language, vehicle), rating and feedback features.
• Functionality to manage upcoming orders and update status of those that have already been delivered.
• Enable courier’s communication with other parties — restaurants and clients — to solve some real time problems and send updates on order status.
• Account history to help with tracking the experience of any courier.

General stages of a food delivery app development

After you have identified requirements for your app, you need to find a professional team that will help you execute your plans and develop food delivery app. Let’s proceed to some general stages of the process:

1. Prototyping. According to your requirements, a professional team builds user flow logic and creates application screens.
2. UI/UX design. It is a main stage which comprises works on interface of your app and incorporation of its functionality.
3. Development. It is a complex process, during which developers put everything together and actually build the product.
4. Testing and publishing. After the product is built, it requires reviewing and testing. Quality Assurance team checks whether app’s functionality is fault-tolerant. This stage is crucial to ensure that everything’s working seamlessly.

What stack to use?

The stack you need totally depends on what functionality your app should have. Yet, it does not hurt to have some general overview. Let’s take a look at FoodTrucks — a cross-platform mobile application for truck owners, vendors and end customers developed by Fulcrum team.

In the table below, we outlined the stack our team applied, how long it took to develop food delivery app like this, and what functionality it comprises:

It’s hard to predict the precise cost of your app. Yet, there are two main factors to consider: a performer and an app itself. The price usually depends on the company which develops an app. We recommend you to search for outsourcing companies, since their services are much cheaper. Among top countries for outsourcing are Ukraine, India, and Poland. To learn the app development rates around the world, go and check our Offshore Software Development Rates Guide.

Secondly, functionality of your app will be reflected in its price. The more sophisticated app you want, the higher prices you should expect. Although there is no free on demand delivery app builder instrument, you always can find some tools which will estimate the approximate cost of your app. For instance, check out our app costs calculator.

How to spend less money and time on your on-demand delivery app?

While thinking how to make your own food delivery app, you’ll probably focus on the money resources only. Undoubtedly, a top-notch delivery app requires financing, yet it’s not always like that. If you cannot afford to invest huge sums in app development, it’s not an end of the world. Even with the limited budget, you can manage to create food delivery apps like Uber Eats, Glovo or Postmate.

The secret, which lots of on demand delivery app builders are aware of, is to use already developed food delivery APIs for these kind of services. These APIs can serve you as the foundation for your app. It is more efficient, time-saving and cheaper. So, why not using it? We have prepared some money-saving resources for you.

Uber Eats API

Let’s start from the easiest and most obvious of food delivery APIs. If you have a restaurant and decide to invest in mobile food delivery, you should start with UberEats API. It helps you to manage menus and orders on the Uber Eats Platform. All you need to do is to integrate it with your restaurant’s Point of Sale (POS) system. And Uber Eats has already taken care about logistics.

Cost: the Uber Eats API implements a revenue-sharing model with vendors. It ranges from 15 to 40 percent per order.

Google Places API

What is Places API? It is a Google service that provides information about establishments, geographic locations, or prominent points of interest.

Cost: the prices are not too high. Google charges $2 to $14 for every 1000 queries up to a maximum of 100,000 queries per day. Besides, you can get $200 credit every month for free.

OneSignal API

With the Onesignal API, you can add push notifications to your app. Their main task is to alert users via your app about updates and news.

Cost: The API is free and offers limited support if you have less than 30,000 subscribers. Otherwise, access to the OneSignal API will cost you $99 per month.

Foursquare API

With the Foursquare API, your customers will be able get personalized recommendations on the places to visit or things to do in the chosen area.

Cost: Its price starts from $599. Though the price is biting, Foursquare API is definitely worth investing.

Google Matrix

Another useful food delivery API is Google Matrix. It allows you to count travel distance and time your courier need to reach the destination. You can also integrate with the Google Maps API.

Cost: the API’s price goes from $4 and, similar to Google Places API, you can get the same $200 free credit.

GrubHub API

If you’re planning to do your business in the United States, certainly use GrubHub developer API. It retrieves information on more than 115,000 restaurants in the United States. GrubHub team offers a semi-public API, and is open to work with new partners.

Cost: its revenue-sharing model ranges from 10 to 30%.

Mapbox API

With Mapbox API, you receive an access to a service with custom maps. The Mapbox APIs comprise different web services, but to build food delivery app, you need to consider just two of them — Mapbox navigation API and Mapbox geocoding API.

Cost: the API is free for up to 25,000 monthly active users.

Freshchat API

The Freshchat API enables a live chat functionality on your app. The feature is supported by Freshchat — a messaging service which lets you embed a widget in any site. It lets you engage with and manage queries from your app users — both anonymous.

Cost: the Freshchat API is also free to use with the limitation to 10 team members and 10,000 website visitors. If you exceed the limit, the charge is $15 per month.

Waze Navigational API

After you integrate this API, Waze application can locate and mark an address on the map or start a navigation session to an address or destination. Note that the Waze Navigational API is specific to cars and relies on the user’s information.

Though it’s quite a good alternative to other APIs, using it makes no sense, if most of your curiers do not drive cars.

TomTom’s APIs

Let’s look at two of TomTom’s APIs — NavAPP and MapLibrary. With them, you can add custom mapping features to the app. These APIs enable static and interactive maps to be displayed in any mobile and/or web application. TomTom real-time map making technology provides users with the most accurate and up-to-date maps.

Cost: it is free for under 2,500 requests per day. For bigger amounts, the charge goes from $25.

Choosing the right teamfii

To guarantee the success of your food delivery app development, it is crucial to find an experienced and well-qualified team of developers who will care about your idea as much as you do and knows how to make a food delivery app. The team who can foresee possible pitfalls, can properly analyze the market, and, finally, create a unique and good quality product.

We at Fulcrum, will be happy to assist you on every stage of creating your own food delivery app. Fulcrum is a team real IT nerds who want your idea to become a success and bring results.

That’s why we prepared a free checklist for you to see how far you are in building on demand delivery app. Click ‘Download’ and check your progress.

Originally published at https://fulcrum.rocks.