As the pandemic hit the world economy, the food business saw a mixed bag of effects. While the brick and mortar business had to incur heavy losses due to lockdowns, the online food delivery businesses saw a massive surge in demand.
Online food delivery giants like UberEats, GrubHub, and Doordash gained the most from the pandemic situation.
Source: CNBC
When it comes to online food delivery apps, there are many players in the market, like Uber, DoorDash, Zomato, and others. With the new normal of social distancing, many restaurants are now looking to develop online food delivery apps. However, when it comes to features, there is always a doubt about whether they will be compatible with the scaling needs of your business or not.
Here are nine features that you can develop for your online food business app to scale online business post-pandemic.
One possible scenario of deliveries in a remote location or where you are suffering from a low-intensity network area is failed delivery attempts. But, what if you can leave voice instructions as bread crumbs for your delivery personnel to follow, and ensure deliveries on schedule?
“Voice Instructions” feature let customers leave important location related instructions or ask for contactless deliveries, and even ask for delivery to a neighbor. It is a feature that can enrich the user experience, and infuse better convenience. It is a prime feature that online food business owners are exploiting nowadays.
With an advanced search option, your users can easily find their favorite food without browsing through several categories.
Create a customizable search bar for your online food business app with filters for cuisine types, dish types, or restaurant names.
Advanced search options can help create a richer user experience, and increase the ease of ordering. You can even add favorite dishes or food as the top suggestions based on past orders of the consumers.
The pandemic has pushed the new normal of social distancing in business operations going further in 2021. With a safe tech solution, you can ensure contactless deliveries through service providers with medical clearances, and government approvals.
The tech stack solution that offers contactless deliveries also ensures that you can track your drivers or delivery personnel for symptoms, contractions, and other medical checks. Contactless deliveries will now be a necessity than just an additional feature.
Every user might have many times given some food instructions or taste preferences with a food order. With a live kitchen feature, users can have a real-time view of how their food is prepared.
Online food businesses can add live-streaming capabilities in their mobile applications to enable such a feature. The live kitchen feature can offer a user experience just like a physical restaurant. Fuse this feature with an advanced voice instruction attribute, and you can make the entire experience alive for consumers.
If you are a multi-vendor food-based marketplace, then order management is a vital feature for your business. Most of the online food businesses work with different delivery services and even restaurants.
Managing the orders when you scale becomes difficult. For example, you are a restaurant offering sandwiches online through third-party delivery service providers. A user asks for brown bread sandwiches, only to know that you are out of stock for brown bread.
So, for online food businesses, the inventory stocks should have integration with order management. You can even create app instances that initiate removing individual dishes from the menu due to inventory shortage.
You often see similar order recommendations that you have bought on a food delivery app. Such features should be incorporated across platforms to say for the partner portals, restaurant manager web interface, and admin panel. It can help you create special deals and personalize offers for each customer based on which food they order the most.
For any online food business, revenue tracking is essential. Many mobile app development companies offer a full tech stack for online food business with a central admin to offer revenue insights.
But as we move ahead in 2021, these graphics and insights for revenue tracking must be more interactive because when you scale higher, the revenue per order may increase or decrease. The revenue tracking feature can help you strategize better and achieve better results for each order placed on your app or portal.
Imbibing reviews and feedback are a necessary part of your app, and at the same time, you should get creative about it. Here, using gamification techniques can work wonders. It is an approach of introducing game-like features into your feedback and review system of apps. You can add discount coupons on each review to encourage better participation of users. This will help you know consumer behavior better as you scale.
Modern app development technologies have powered online food businesses to include Bitcoin, debit/credit card payments, and others. But, it’s time to move forward and look beyond the usual payment options. You can add secure and faster payment options with facial recognition and fingerprint sensor technology integrations present in every smartphone today.
2021 will be the year of the online food business as more and more physical food stores will look to increase the digital presence. So, in the saturation of online food business apps, unique features can help you stand out for customers. These features can not only help you scale but offer a better user experience for customers. Want to be the next food leader?
Don’t let the pandemic stop you from scaling your business. We at CodeBrew aim to develop the best online food business app integrating these amazing features with our technical prowess. Get in Touch with us for a free consultation on your online food business.
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