What would 2019 hold for food delivery apps? Here are all the future trends

Feeling hungry? *click on the phone* and voila! Have your food delivered to your location. The advent of food delivery apps has escalated the convenience of food ordering by leaps and bounds, resulting in massive popularity and retention among masses. A positive trend has been observed in investment scenarios with a high valuation of food delivery apps. As a developer, you must gain insight into market dynamics, growth perspectives and consumer behaviour. As per the reports of Statista, revenue in the Online Food Delivery segment amounts to US$7,011m in 2018 for India.

 

The Popularity of Food Delivery Apps

 

The traditional model of food delivery allowed a customer to place an order for food with a local restaurant over the phone and get it delivered to his/her doorstep within the stipulated time.  With the rise in the use of digital technology, and massive adoption of app practices the popularity of food delivery through mobile apps and websites has soared.  Not only does this modern method of ordering food delivery offers enhanced ease of ordering food, but it is also transparent. Consumers can compare menus, give feedback and choose from multiple options of food vendors conveniently. Ordering food online also curbs any chances of missed orders due to busy phone lines or lack of resources to monitor the phone.

 

Mobile Food ordering apps come designed with avant-garde UI offering a convenient food ordering solution. Consumers get to choose their order type i.e delivery or take away, pinpoint the delivery location on a map, pay for the food online in a secure fashion in just a few clicks. Apps allow users to create their individual profile where they save their desired delivery addresses and payment information that saves time for subsequent orders. Users can also save their preferred items under ‘favourites’ for re-ordering. Reports suggest that global online on-demand food delivery market grow 32 per cent by 2021.  All these reasons have made restaurants incorporate mobile food ordering in their system.

 

We at Promatics India, have worked on various food and delivery related apps in the past. Our fair share of expertise about food delivery market gives us an edge when it comes to food delivery mobile app development. Here are some exciting future trends in food delivery apps:

 

#Trend I: Customisation & Personalisation Options for Restaurants

Focusing on the branding needs of the restaurant businesses, more and more food delivery apps are offering customisation features to the food vendors. The restaurant page on the app can be customised to match the theme of the restaurant. A customisable layout for each food business which portrays their identity on a food delivery app is desirable amidst massive competition and works well for promotion as well.

Grubhub, Uber Eats, Zomato are a few popular food delivery mobile apps that allows restaurant owners to tweak their profiles to maintain a distinct identity online.

 

#Trend II: Real Time Menu Updation Features

More an more food delivery apps today are allowing restaurants to update their menu real time. As soon as there is a change made in the menu of an outlet at the point of sale, the same changes automatically get reflected on the restaurant menu on the mobile app. This enhances the process of ordering, minimising any chances of goof-ups. This also saves the time of the restaurant staff at the point of sale.  The feature is distinctly beneficial wherein more than one person from the staff is handling the order.

Uber Eats and Swiggy are two food delivery mobile apps that offer real-time menu upgrade to their customers.

 

#Trend III: The Upsurge of Push Notifications

Food ordering mobile apps that come ingrained with an option for push notifications can improve customer engagement for food businesses. Push notifications make it easier for businesses to keep the customers updated about latest deals, offers, promotions and discounts. As an effective marketing tool push notification keep the customers informed new items, new product updates, and new combo, etc.

From Zomato to Swiggy and every other food delivery app used push notifications to benefit the businesses they are catering to. Most of the push notifications are time strategically to influence the ordering process of a consumer based on his past behaviour patterns of app usage.

 

 

#Trend IV: POS Integration Feature in Food Ordering App

In a quest to streamline the food ordering process and solve consumer grievances regarding goof-ups, POS integration has become a readily adopted trend in food ordering apps. With POS integration, all orders received get pushed to POS station of the selected vendor.  Once the order is received, the restaurant is at liberty to accept or reject the order placed. This omits chances of order mix-ups, order not received, etc. and offers enhanced simplification.

JustEat is a food ordering app that to shares order details with approved external partners and services using a custom integration endpoint tailored to their EPOS.

 

#Trend V: Subconscious Menus & Ordering with Glances

The latest technological development, that has eased the food ordering process is ordering through eye tracking. The subconscious menus come equipped with an eye-tracking system. After the system calibrates a user’s unique eye movements, users are shown various options to choose from. The built-in software determines which options the user has glanced at for longest span of time. The system then chalks out a list of all things the user had glanced at and waits for customer approval. Glancing at restart button begins the process all over again.

 

Taking the world of food ordering by the storm are Pizza Huts’ subconscious menus which track a customer’s eye movements and configure the type of pizza he wants to have. This works well for apps focusing on user retention.

 

#Trend VI: Using Big Data

Data analytics gives us insight into real-time information about traffic, temperature etc. Estimation of accurate delivery time is a possibility with big data. Big data also helps a business understand their customers better along with other important analysis like the impact of temperature on food, the impact of market trends on stock consumption etc. Thus it helps in formulating best practices to improve customer service etc. Food delivery apps put to use the data from various channels to evaluate the consumer sentiment.

 

An excellent example in the food delivery app space that has realized the importance of utilization of big data is Swiggy. The company has committed the $80 million raised in a Series E funding round to build its capabilities stronger in engineering, automation, data sciences, machine learning and personalization. The company hopes to make a better prediction of demand, sort out the consumer preferences in an improved way, enhance delivery efficiencies and configure suitable geographical locations to expand its centers with the help of analytics.

 

Food delivery apps will surprise us consumers in many ways in 2019. If you are in this business you cannot just follow the leader but innovate as well. We at Promatics Technologies take pride in staying up-to-date with the latest technology trends that dominate app markets while serving various clients of national and international repute. If you are a food delivery app business trying to match the requirements of modern-day customers, we can be your one stop shop solution for all your app development needs.