The majority of us can’t survive without food delivery. UberEats became even more popular as a result of the pandemic and new safety restrictions. Restaurant patrons must now make an order and wait for a courier to deliver their favorite meal.
Furthermore, meal orders are the only method for restaurants to make money, and dine-ins are illegal in many nations, including the United States.
Despite Uber Eats’ popularity, many restaurant owners complain about the platform’s unfair service commissions, which eat into eateries’ already slim profit margins.
As a result, savoy restaurant owners are thinking of expanding their meal delivery marketplaces, such as UberEats. If you can’t defeat them, lead them, as the phrase goes.
Assume you’re one of the bold and optimistic food tech entrepreneurs who’s thinking of creating a Grubhub or UberEats-style app. In this situation, you’ll need to understand UberEats business model as well as basic processes for creating a similar or even better software. Let’s take a look at how food delivery marketplaces like UberEats Clone and others work and how much it costs to start a meal delivery aggregator.
Business Model of UberEats
The UberEats app is a restaurant aggregator and delivery service that works in two ways:
UberEats operates on a standard meal delivery paradigm, with a single app listing all of its restaurant partners.
UberEats also manages order delivery through its own logistics network, which it uses to transport orders from restaurants that do not offer delivery.
The following are some of the most prominent features of this food delivery app:
- Recommendations
- Advanced lookup
- Tracking of orders
- Specifics on delivery
Let’s look at UberEats’ monetization tactics now.
Further reading:
Case Study: Alfredo Ibiza’s On-Demand Food Delivery App
What is UberEats’ revenue model?
Three monetization tactics are used by the company:
Depending on the distance between clients and restaurants, delivery fees range from $2 to $8 per order.
UberEats charges a service fee ranging from 15% to 40% for each order accepted.
When a partner restaurant pays to appear first in a search, their visibility to customers is increased.
Follow these five steps to create a meal delivery app.
You need more than just imitating UberEats’ features to develop an app like it and make it successful with users. We recommend using the following methods to assist you beat UberEats:
Step 1: Research Industry Trends in Food Delivery
You must be aware of the following new distribution channels and trends:
Social Media Sites
Consider implementing ordering via social media accounts features to help your project stand out in the chosen niche.
Domino’s Pizza was the first firm to employ this method of ordering, allowing customers to place orders using their Twitter accounts. To place an order, app users “tweeted” a pizza emoji to the Domino’s Pizza Twitter account.
Users must have the following information before ordering Domino’s Pizza via Twitter:
- Make a “pizza profile” in which you can list your favorite pizza.
- On the Domino’s Pizza website, fill out the “default orders” area.
- Connect a Twitter account to a pizza profile.
- Assistive technology
Chabot allows users to place orders through messengers and request food with just one word:
Domino’s Pizza has created Dom, a chatbot that allows users to place orders and learn about special deals via Twitter and Facebook Messenger.
Grubhub’s system has been connected with Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant, allowing consumers to reorder any of their previous three orders.
Just Eat has decided to stay on trend by including Alexa into their ordering mechanism. Just Eat can place orders by voice and check the whereabouts of the delivery thanks to new Amazon hardware, the Echo Show.
Smartwatch
Wearable gadgets are extensively used by food delivery companies:
Domino’s was the first to release a meal ordering app for Android watches, which made ordering much easier.
Step 2: Decide on a revenue model
Delivery Fees: Food delivery services make money by delivering food from restaurants to customers’ homes. The delivery charges are depending on the distance traveled or a set price.
UberEATS used to charge a fixed $4.99 delivery cost before 2018. The corporation now calculates the prices based on the customer’s distance from the eatery. The shipping price ranges from $2 to $8 depending on the size of the order. Customers pay roughly £2.50 per order with Deliveroo.
Most meal delivery apps work with restaurants to share revenue based on predetermined commission rates from each order. On every order, the commission rate fluctuates from 15% to 40%, or it can be set depending on the amount of the order.
Advertising and Promotional Services: The meal delivery app makes money by emphasizing advertising restaurant profiles on the top banner of the search listings for a set period of time. Restaurants can boost their visibility by displaying promotional banners or adverts on the app listings for a set fee. Restaurants are keen to obtain more awareness and attract more consumers because the restaurant industry is highly competitive. Both the app and the restaurant benefit from this strategy.
Surge Pricing: This method of monetization is charging a delivery premium during peak periods, such as lunch or dinner. Various leading food delivery start-ups, such as Uber Eats, Doordash, Grubhub, and Zomato, charge consumers a higher delivery amount – surge price — when demand is strong, such as around lunch or dinner time, or during festivals.
Food delivery apps work with restaurants to give daily offers on certain menu items. Food delivery apps offer a fixed pricing for a restaurant’s specific dish, which is often at a very low mark-up.
Restaurants take advantage of such offers to upsell more dishes in addition to the discounted ones. On the other hand, as the number of orders grows, so does the amount of commission and delivery charge earned by food delivery companies.
White labeling is a concept in which meal delivery services obtain food from restaurants and resell it as their own. Food aggregators make money this way, and restaurants don’t have to deal with any of the inconvenience. This arrangement is especially advantageous if the restaurant is new or family-owned.
Step 3: Keep an eye out for the most recent trends.
To stay ahead of the competition in the online meal delivery business, you must keep up with the newest market trends as well as technology advancements.
Social Media Ordering: Domino’s Pizza was the first company to offer social media-assisted ordering. Customers of Domino’s Pizza can utilize this function to order pizzas using their Twitter account. A pizza emoji must be tweeted to Domino’s official Twitter account. Customers must first create a profile on the Domino’s platform before ordering pizza through Twitter. They have the option of choosing their default orders, often known as Easy Orders. The pizza profile can then be linked to a user’s Twitter account.
Chatbots: Virtual assistants are quickly gaining popularity in a variety of areas, including food delivery. Customers can order food using Chatbots by just mentioning their orders. Dom, the virtual assistant for Domino’s pizza, can take orders over Twitter and Facebook messengers. Customers can also use the chatbot to find out about the newest discounts and coupons. Grubhub, another food delivery service, has connected its system with Alexa, Amazon’s virtual assistant.
Customers with a Grubhub account can reorder any of their last three purchases. Alexa not only helps you place orders, but she also tells you how long it will take for your items to arrive. Just Eat, another delivery service, has also integrated Alexa into their system. Just Eat can use Alexa to place orders and track the courier’s location.
Step 4: Decide on the key features of food delivery services similar to UberEats.
Consider the following elements when creating a Doordash Clone app for food delivery:
Login allows you to access the app using your email address or a social media identity.
Meal, filter, and food category searches are all available. This section should include photos of the dishes, a description of the dinner, and a description of the process.
When placing an order, you can add meals to your cart.
The order total and all specified dishes are included in the order checkout.
Users can pay for their orders using the built-in payment gateway. Integrate multiple payment systems, such as PayPal, Stripe, and MangoPay, according to our guidelines. This method was used in the creation of custom marketplaces. The whole case study can be seen at this website.
Users are notified about the status of their orders via push notifications and SMS.
Order tracking uses the CoreLocation framework for iOS apps and the Google Location API for Android apps to show real-time order monitoring. In addition, Mapkits and Google Maps will assist couriers in determining the most efficient route to the customer’s location.
Users can share their experiences and review restaurants through the app’s User Reviews feature.
Step 5: Select the Food Delivery App Development Technology Stack
Various technologies may be required depending on the business model of a meal delivery startup. Nonetheless, we’ve compiled a tech stack for Uber-like apps in the table below:
A list of restaurants
FourSquare API Payment gateway Grubhub API
- API Square
- Braintree\sStripe\sPayPal
- Find out where the user is.
- The Basic Location Framework
- API for Google Places
- Google Maps is a mapping service provided by Google.
- Notifications through push
Firebase Cloud Messaging Amazon SNS Urban Airship Amazon SNS
What Does It Cost to Create a Food Delivery App?
The cost of a mobile app is determined by a number of factors, including the number of platforms, feature set, number of integrations, and so on.
Only after the discovery (inception) phase will the mobile development team prepare a full app estimation.
What exactly does this imply?
The discovery (inception) phase is the first step you and your development team do in laying the groundwork for app development. This stage involves a number of elements, including:
- Specification of functionality
- Design for user experience and user interface
- Prototypes that can be seen
The product discovery phase can assist you with the following:
- Defining the scope of the project
- Creating a project road map
- Creating a reasonable MVP budget
- Organizing your resources
- A target audience was used to test the app MVP.
- Creating a compelling investment argument
So, what will the cost of the meal delivery app be?
We’ll need 50+ hours to construct the UI/UX design, 66+ hours to build the app’s backend, and 120+ hours to develop the app on each platform.
Keep an eye on current meal ordering industry trends to make an UberEats, Doordash, and JustEat clone app to stand out, and don’t forget to give your customers added value that your competitors don’t have.
You can use either an Order-Only or Order-and-Delivery Model for a food delivery app. You can obtain insights from the target audience and add other features during the second development stage by using the app MVP.
