Imagine a US-based guy in the 1940s or 50s, after a long day in the factory now craving hot Sushi from a not-so-far Japanese restaurant, but has no time to visit it, and thinking, “Man, if only I could, somehow, get it delivered at my home.”
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Well, that’s no longer a wish in the 21st century. Just a few clicks on your smartphone and the scrumptious cuisines of your favorite restaurant are served at your premises.
This mantra has driven some of the renowned food delivery players like GoPuff, UberEats, and Zomato to offer a perfect success recipe – Food and Convenience!
Let’s talk about some numbers first!
As per a survey from Grand View Research, the market size of the online food ordering industry was $189.70 billion in 2021. And that’s not all! These incredible figures are further projected to grow at a CAGR of 10.8% for the period of 2022 – 2028. The fact that food delivery isn’t limited to cuisines anymore, on-demand food delivery mobile applications are witnessing enormous growth worldwide.
This huge wave in the online food industry has resulted in entrepreneurs worldwide taking a keen interest in starting their food businesses.
If you are also looking to invest in a similar endeavor, this blog offers a detailed view of building an app like GoPuff along with all the insights you should know before making any capital investments.
The increase in online food delivery applications has shifted the norms from dining out to dining in. This increase in food delivery app downloads is also closing the gap between online and offline food-eating cultures.
For instance, when it comes to eating ready-made food, restaurants, hotels, and eateries have always been the norm. This norm is gradually getting dominated by increasing demands for online food.
Now, let’s take a look at the market size of the online food industry.
The revenue generated in the online food delivery market is projected to reach $323.30 billion in 2022. To an entrepreneur’s delight, it’s growing at a CAGR of 7.6% and is expected to reach almost $466.20 billion by 2027.
These incredible figures are inspiring for an entrepreneur looking to benefit from this opportunity.
Before you build a GoPuff clone app, you must ask some right questions, to begin with.
These questions can be better answered if one studies the USP of some of the popular online food delivery services.
What started as a local hookah delivery startup in 2014, GoPuff is one of the largest food delivery and consumer goods services with over 2.6 million active users, and 200+ facilities in the US. Today, it also offers a wide range of everyday essentials like home cleansing products, personal care products, baby products, food, and drinks to over 500+ cities in the country.
Now, there’s more to the popularity of the GoPuff clone app than what it offers on its platform. For instance, let’s understand why US citizens like GoPuff.
But there is more that stands out GoPuff from the rest, i.e. customer feedback.
A great way to attract a larger audience and retain the existing ones is a transparent feedback system. The online food delivery giant efficiently handles customer feedback and uses it to improve its services.
At the core of any SME (Small & Medium-Size Enterprises) lies its business and revenue model. From key partners essential to run a business efficiently to income resources that will generate ROI, it encompasses all essential elements.
Here’s what the GoPuff business model looks like.
Business Model
GoPuff proposition – Delivery of products within 30 minutes! Failing to deliver the product within the time limit, they offer a complete refund. But to achieve the proposition, they have set up a network of micro centers for quick delivery across various locations.
Now, the GoPuff business model consists of three stakeholders – buyer, merchant, and delivery agents.
This is how the process goes –
Revenue Model
GoPuff makes huge revenue from its four income streams – product markup, delivery fee, subscription, and advertising on the platform.
The correct answer to the question ‘How to build an app like GoPuff,’ lies in the process. It’s the process that creates a thin line between building a namesake app that’s barely intuitive or a GoPuff clone app that makes a user click on the ‘Install’ tab at first sight.
From performing a thorough market analysis, understanding the target audience to select the right monetization model, and hiring a reliable app development team, you need to make the right decisions at each step.
There can’t be a better start than performing thorough market analysis for GoPuff clone app development. This reveals your answer to some of the important questions, including,
These are some inescapable questions that must be answered as it determines the foundation of a GoPuff clone app.
Pro Tip: An efficient way to analyze market size is to know the number of citizens of various age groups. This is followed by competitors offering services in a similar domain, among other factors.
A revenue-generating monetization plan is a good way to start a consumer and online food delivery business. Subscription plans, service fees, third-party advertisement via banners or videos, and merchandising are some of the best ways.
Here are some popular monetization ways adopted by some of the industry giants like Grubhub, DoorDash, Deliveroo, et cetera.
A small commission for the sale of each product is a great way to attract consistent revenue from a business. The commission margin can vary depending on the category of the product.
Offer exclusive access, convenience, and added benefits to users in various subscription plans.
Starting a new online business attracts brand sponsors looking to increase their product sales. Hence, the benefit of ranking at the top of the search engines can be commissioned as well.
For all payments ranging from debit or credit cards, Google Pay, or Apple Pay can be commissioned as an online payment processing fee.
In the GoPuff business model, a merchant isn’t responsible for packing and delivering the product to the customer. These logistics and shipping-related services can be incentivized as well.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioCKHsCIwtw
Let us further describe step-by-step points on how to build a GoPuff clone app.
Making a roadmap and finalizing all the essentials for each stage of the entire process sheds load off the mobile app development team. For instance, it’s important to know what type of domain and server would be efficient for your app requirements.
Designing is crucial to figure out the actual layout of the application. It includes visuals, tabs, and various other elements that uplift the aesthetics of an application.
A prototype app comes in handy in getting a glimpse of some functionalities of an application. This helps significantly to analyze and improve the way services are provided to a customer.
For instance, a prototype helps an app developer to know what happens when you click on a specific tab. Most importantly, it is economical and doesn’t cost as much as developing an actual app.
App testing is another crucial segment of GoPuff clone app development that helps in ensuring its durability. Whether you are planning to launch your GoPuff app on both iOS and Android operating systems, testing helps to detect bugs and loopholes.
After the testing of different stages of app development comes to the launch stage which includes a smooth functioning of a long list of things. For example, backend and frontend app synchronization, and interface, among other things.
Developing a compelling app is one thing, but getting it to rank among other competitors is different. This can be effected using keyword optimization, backlinks, meta tags, et cetera. In addition, a separate section of customer reviews and a total number of downloads works best to improve app SEO.
There are different variants of the GoPuff app already available to customers. While some of them are succeeding, others are striving for recognition from their potential user base. Well, this is achievable using blogging, video promotion, social media marketing, reaching out to industry influencers, and quora threads among various marketing techniques.
An online food & grocery delivery app like GoPuff deals with three stakeholders – customer, merchant, and admin. Each of these application users will have different panels with diverse features.
For instance, a customer will only use the GoPuff clone for buying food online, browsing offers, et cetera.
Similarly, a merchant will use an app for product listings, whereas an admin has complete control of the app, for instance, to make amendments to offers & discounts, check app analytics, and change terms & conditions, among other essential changes.
So, it makes sense to make multiple application panels that rightly serve all. Hence, a need for different features as well.
Here are some features that will add value to its overall services.
Let’s extend the marketing aspect from the last pointer!
No matter how brilliant an app you come up with, it won’t become successful overnight – not without the right marketing approach. And marketing demands include various factors such as capital investment, time, effort, and above all – patience!
That being said, here are some metrics to ensure the effectiveness of your marketing strategy.
As the GoPuff business is launched in the market, you must expand your user base gradually. The best way to do so is to start local, and go global! A local market will be beneficial in testing your marketing strategies, products & services’ effectiveness, and performance, among other aspects.
Getting new users onboard is one aspect of business expansion, retaining the existing ones invites different challenges altogether.
Here are some effective ways to retain your existing customers.
Customer Support: Paying heed to customer feedback works wonders in improving the way you offer services. Having an experienced support team that provides quick resolutions to customer queries comes in handy in solving different issues faced by them. This improves customers’ experience and they may continue to shop on the application.
Rating & Reviews: Customer is more likely to leave reviews every time they make a purchase on the platform. Now, if you get a negative review, compensate for their bad experience with a gift voucher or some special deal.
Loyalty Programs: Choosing to offer discounts, eVouchers, and free deliveries on certain occasions is a good move to drive engagement on the application.
Those days are way behind us when people only had the option of visiting a restaurant to satisfy their hunger. The ever-increasing expansion in the food industry is giving birth to new restaurants day after day. This leads people to find more convenient ways to satisfy their hunger needs using restaurant finder apps.
If you have an innovative idea for an online food delivery business, it is high time you leverage this need for the benefit of your business. And for that, you will need an online food delivery app.
Now, how about getting an app developed by industry experts like Code Brew?
Our expert development team at Code Brew has not only worked on food delivery apps but has successfully created apps for diverse industries. It includes eCommerce, education, healthcare, real estate, and more.
Check out our portfolio to get a glimpse of our prowess in app development.
The efficiency of the app development process also depends on the programming language one uses to build it. For instance, the development process is divided into three segments – front end, back end, and API (Application Programming Interface).
These segments use different tech stacks.
Client-side corresponds to the elements a user interacts with, for instance, the homepage, product page, payment gateway, etcetera.
Here are some tech stacks to build a front-end side of a custom online food ordering app on different operating systems.
Web platform
Markup languages: HTML5, CSS3
Programming languages: JavaScript, TypeScript
JavaScript frameworks: Angular, React, Vue, etc.
iOS platform
Programming language: Swift 5, Objective C
Development OS: Latest Mac OS X
IDE: Xcode 11, AppCode
Platform SDK: iOS SDK, Cocoa Touch
Android platform
Programming language: Kotlin, Java
Development OS: Ubuntu, Mac OS
IDE: Latest Android Studio
Platform SDK: Latest Android SDK
All the technical application functions are performed on the back end. It works with service information and provides the desired results on the front end (to the user).
Here are some of the common technologies applied in back-end development.
Programming languages: Ruby, Elixir, Python, PHP, Java, etc.
Web frameworks: Ruby On Rails, Phoenix
Database servers: PostgreSQL, MySQL
Web servers: Nginx, Apache
Cloud server platforms: Amazon Web Services
It is a protocol description of how the system’s back-end and front-end interact with each other. API also relates to the integration of third-party services used in the process.
When building an app like GoPuff, numerous factors account for the overall cost. The list goes on, from the features you choose to include in the app to the resources required for the actual app development.
In addition, the app development company’s location adds to the app’s final pricing. For instance, the hourly rate of building an app like GoPuff in the US ranges from $100-150. While the same ranges between $80-120, and $50-120 in the UK and UAE, respectively.
So, the total cost of developing a food delivery app is around $40,000 to $50,000. This cost estimation includes mobile app design, android & iOS versions of the app, testing, and app launch. In addition, the website development for the same will lead to roughly $60,000 in total costs.
Note: These are only tentative pricing for the mentioned regions. The pricing may vary depending on the features you would like to include and the expertise of the development team you hire.
The restaurant finder apps have seen enormous growth in the last few years. A key factor for such a shift is people’s inclination toward ordering food online. This massive increase in eating convenience can efficiently be leveraged with an ingenious idea of launching your own online food delivery platform.
Now, do you think you have that next big idea for opening such a business-like GoPuff or Zomato?
Well, Code Brew is here to build you an intuitive app that perfectly serves your target audience and helps to expand your business over time.
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