The today's age of mobile apps does not leave any space for superfluous movements in one's life: everything you need can be delivered right at your doorstep. Seamless, Doordash, UberEATS, Grubhub, Postmates – all of these cosy mobile applications allow to get your favourite dishes of any cuisine from any restaurant without having to leave your couch.
But Foodpanda with foodpanda mobile app has left a special impression on the public, and does not seem starting to cede ground within this growing crowd of applications. The global online food delivery service on emerging marketplace, it settled in already 10 countries.
We have the sufficient expertise to share with you some advise (Read the case study Want to Eat).
So what is foodpanda?
It is an online food delivery service which has become a global brand! And what is the secret of ifs success? Like any successful app it of course must have the bright and professional looking website and app design. And the key thing for the design is its focus on appetizing looks of dishes, as this puts the visitor closer to the main goal of the app – to place a food order in several taps on his smartphone or tablet.
But good website and app design makes up only 20% of the overall success, the biggest part of it is about maintaining the appropriate online food delivery system structure. Let us take a look at the structure of a food delivery system, which is about Foodpanda too:
Website
Mobile apps for delivery stuff
Software for service operators and restaurants to perform administrative functions
To sum up, an on-demand online delivery must allow customers to place an order both from the website and the mobile app. And the mobile app to work effectively must function on the 3 levels:
- Customer app - with the wide range of functions (mainly, concerning placing an order and delivery aspects) and the wide choice of dishes, cuisines and restaurants;
- Delivery guy app – where it's not a problem for almost anyone to sign up for the service and get the opportunity to earn some extra money, pick up the convenient hours of work and the most convenient orders to work with;
- Administrative app – for service operators to manage orders and restaurants – to accept or decline orders, renew the information on their current menus and prices.
Customer app must be professionally designed and convenient to place an order from, but the key components of success in the sphere of online food delivery are:
- Partner restaurants. They don’t have to necessarily be famous brands. The main thing for a food delivery business is good quality products and dishes made of them. Restaurants are the main point of inferest for the customers (who look at dishes) and main source of the business revenue.
- Delivery guys. There's a good restaurant with tasty food of high-quality products, with wide choise of cuisines - good, but how fast is the delivery? Is there the delivery service, hello? The fast delivery is the second main thing in operating online food delivery business.
Delivery must be fast, but it should not take much expense from the business: this means no regular stuff to pay to, but the delivery guys who work when convenient and without having to ride great distances from their homes.
The scheme of the delivery guy is quite simple: he picks the convenient for him work hours and picks up the orders most convenient to deliver. Work in a free time for anyone to earn some extra money – this model of cooperation with the staff providing the delivery proved to be the most efficient one. The delivery system becomes successful only in case if it is a convenient in use app for the delivery guy, with accurate maps and adequate revenue.
We figured out what the main principles of the successful work of an online food delivery business are, but let us consider in more detail each level of the food delivery app. Still, our first stop will be not what customers hold in their hands, but something more distant, but not less important - the website.
Website
As exemplified by Foodpanda, the online food delivery service's website should be a host page for various restaurants with their menus, overviews and feedbacks, and banners with their advertisements.
Right on the Foodpanda website a visitor can learn all the necessary information about a restaurant: its menu with prices, overall information, address, payment methods and even what time the delivery from the destination will take.
All the partner restaurants are also estimated by customers in the 'Feedback' section. To simplify and systhematize the information about a restaurant, it is categorized in the 3 blocks: Menu, Reviews and Info.
To place an order, the visitor should just enter his location, then click "Show restaurants" to see which eateries are available to place an order with, pick a restaurant, and then, clicking on the 'plus' symbol, pick the desired dishes from its menu.
In the small window at the left your order is displayed, and when you added everything you wanted from the place, you can click the 'Proceed to Checkout' button and place an order. Some restaurants may specify the minimum order sum.
Avisitor can pay for the order by cash on delivery, and most of the restaurants accept online payments such as credit/debit cards or Paypal. After clicking the "Proceed to checkout" button the client specifies his details, reviews his order and confirms it.
On the website main page a customer first picks his country from the list, after what the list of the most trusted and popular restaurants displays. Below the restaurant list the list of available cuisines is shown. A customer can also pick the desired cuisine from the list shown in the website footer.
Also in the website footer the client can learn about the Terms and Conditions and the Privacy Policy of the service. He can also learn about some of the most popular questions in the Help section, or contact Foodpanda Support simply clicking the "Live Chat" button in the left lower corner of the page.
Customer App Foodpanda
To make the service as effective as Foodpanda, it should be about the efficient customer mobile app, which should include the next functions:
- Partner restaurants. They don’t have to necessarily be famous brands. The main thing for a food delivery business is good quality products and dishes made of them. Restaurants are the main point of inferest for the customers (who look at dishes) and main source of the business revenue.
- Delivery guys. There's a good restaurant with tasty food of high-quality products, with wide choise of cuisines - good, but how fast is the delivery? Is there the delivery service, hello? The fast delivery is the second main thing in operating online food delivery business.
Rider App
Delivery guys working for the service should also be provided with the convenient foodpanda mobile app, where a rider will be able to:
Manage his worktime, choosing the most convenient for him hours of work;
Accept the most convenient for delivery orders;
See his finance
In case with the rider app, as well as the customer one, it is critical to provide the accurate maps.
Web-panel for administrator
Administrators of the service must be provided with the capacities to:
Add new restaurants;
Manage clients' orders;
Manage payment methods;
Manage customer profiles (in case some of them need to be terminated);
See customer reviews and answer on them.
Web-panel for partners
Partner restaurants' administration should also have the web-panel through which they should be able to:
Manage restaurant's menu;
Manage acceptable payment methods;
Manage client's orders.
Synchronization and API
For the effective work of the application the correct data exchange should be maintained between all the levels of the application: customer, riders', administrative. To make the system work more correctly there should also be synchronization with the restaurants accounting programs: to update menus and price lists on time.
Payments
Foodpanda riders are free to choose not only their working schedule, but also their payments structure. They can be paid monthly of per hour.
Marketing tools
To acquire new clients to the service it is reasonable to:
Adapt the site code to the search promotion and to work with search engines
Have adaptive design layout
Cooperate with social media
KPI
For the acquisition of the customers and their retention various methods exist, but the truly loyal and quality customers stay with the project without any additional retention campaigns.
Delivery model
The delivery model used by Foodpanda is combined:
Foodpanda can rely on partner restaurants' own delivery services;
Foodpanda uses mainly its riders – the people who work for Foodpanda delivery when convenient.
Average cost of the app like Foodpanda
The general cost of the project on the online food delivery is not the universal figure, but depends on many factors: the qualification and speed of work of the specialists. However, it is possible to provide some approximate prices in currency and in time. To develop an online delivery app you will need 518 – 548 hours. Between $12,000 and $18,000 is the average cost per application, with basic features only.
