How Much Does it Cost to Develop a Restaurant App?

The food industry with its sub-services like delivery, promotion, and retail, is on an active growth. Does the credit go to mobile apps?

2021 is going to witness the food industry bagging a $951,239 million valuation. The segment along with its range of different sub-services like delivery, promotion, and retail, is on an active growth drive whose validation is the $951,239 million valuations.

A primary reason behind this growth drive has been the active contribution of mobile apps. Restaurant online ordering apps have made it easier to order food in real-time, find a restaurant, book a table, or simply leave experience reviews in ways that didn’t even exist before. A sign of this contribution can be seen in the stats that the restaurant-to-consumer delivery segment accounts for US$16,564m billion in 2021.

In this article, we are going to look into the different facets of restaurant mobile app development – reasons why entrepreneurs should enter the space and build a custom restaurant app, the different app categories, feature-set, etc.

Table of Content

Reasons to Develop a Restaurant Application

There are a number of reasons why restaurants aim to have a well-executed mobile app. Let us dive into them before moving to the nitty-gritty of restaurant mobile app solutions.

1. Brand Awareness

A restaurant mobile ordering app comes with a huge potential to better your restaurant’s visibility, marketing it to users, and increasing the overall footfall in your restaurant. There are multiple ways apps help you achieve high brand awareness – push notifications help with retargeting, wait time gamification helps with increasing engagement, geo-location tagging makes you popular in a particular region, etc.

2. Increased Bookings

Mobile applications for restaurants give you the benefit of increasing bookings and reservations. By making it easy for customers to find your restaurant and book tables right from within the application, apps help increase bookings to a massive extent.

3. Greater Loyalty

Great experience and good food are not always the reasons enough to increase your loyalty count. As a restaurant a reward system offering customers a discount on their next order or when they refer their friend can go a long way in terms of sales count and revenue.

4. Get Customer Feedback

Modern-day customers are very vocal about their experiences. While they might not be comfortable talking about your food or restaurant atmosphere, until it’s severe, on your face, they will most definitely share their experience online. The review/feedback section of your application can be a great space for you to learn what your customers want or what they are looking for.

All the reasons that we covered are the doing of innovative features-set. In the app industry, it is said that the more convenient the set of features, the higher are the chances of a business earning revenue. The same rule applies to the restaurant domain as well.

Must-Have Features for a Restaurant App

1. Opening Screen

This is usually the first screen that the customer visits when they open your application. It carries information around your unique offering or brand story, location details, and a peek into the cuisine that you offer in addition to testimonials from customers who have dined with you before.

2. Menu

The next important feature of a restaurant application is the menu section. Although fairly standard, there are a few things that can make your app innovative, like an extensive search feature that can help customers choose specific dishes on the basis of taste, course, ratings, etc. Moreover, it helps to add photos of the dish and a basic description highlighting its component or USP.

3. Online Ordering

Online ordering is one of the most common features that every restaurant app offers. You should add geolocation capabilities in the app to make it easy for the customer to pin their address and even track how far their order has reached once placed.

4. Table Booking

Although not mainstream, the table booking feature is also growing in popularity. You can give your customers the option to both choose a standard table or a specific table through the help of an interactive floor map – something that VR technology in restaurants can help you with.

5. Login via Social Media or email

When it comes to taking customers’ information, there are two stages that you can consider – one when they launch the app for the first time or second when they place an order or book a table in your restaurant.

Although our restaurant mobile app developers advise using the second because of the timeliness factor, irrespective of which stage you go with, ensure that you are giving them the option to login via email or social media platforms.

6. Payment Processing

One of the time-tested ways to optimize your restaurant app performance is to make the process of making payment easy and safe. You should give your users a number of payment options – debit card, credit card payment, pay at delivery, add coupons, etc. when they are at the payment stage.

At the payment stage, it is very important for your partnered restaurant app development agency to follow the compliances of payment integration to ensure that your customers’ data is protected at all times.

7. Push Notifications

The next in our list of must-have restaurant app features are push notifications. You should have an effective notification strategy that is timed around the key hunger hours like breakfast, lunch, and dinner. While these help with retargeting, you can also add notifications when the order has been accepted by the restaurant or when it’s in transit.

8. Ratings & Reviews

The last on our list is ratings and reviews. Whether we accept or not, we place 80% of our food order decision on the ratings made by other customers. The better the reviews the higher the chances of more people ordering from your restaurant.

Now, when we talk about reviews it’s important to give them a delete and edit option so that they can change their review once their issue is addressed.

The success of these features and your restaurant app as a whole depends heavily on how real-time and informative it is. A way of ensuring that is to integrate the best-in-class APIs inside the application. Here are the ones that our restaurant app developers trust –

Now that we have looked into the technical aspects of the restaurant application, let us get to the costing part of the article – the cost to launch an online food ordering app.

How Much Does a Restaurant App Development Costs?

It is almost impossible to give you a price quote on mobile app development for restaurants. What we can help you with is give you insights into the factors that contribute to the cost to build a restaurant app.

Here are those four key factors

Features-set
Mobile app design
Team size
Location of the agency.

When we talk about the development side of it, at Appinventiv we always advise our startup clients to build an MVP first. It is always wise to test the waters with a working model of your app idea than jump into full-fledged restaurant app development services. This way, you get to see how people are reacting to your app – changes they want to see, features they want more of, etc.

However, if you are convinced with your product idea, full-fledgedly developing an app for your restaurant won’t be a bad idea too. Either way, we are the restaurant app development company that can help you. Here are a few validatory examples.

Restaurant Apps Created By Us

We have worked with over 15+ restaurants for the digitalization of their solutions. Some of the most notable ones of them are Dominos, KFC, and Paradise Biryani. Our team of domain experts has hand-held these brands throughout the ideation and the deployment of all the custom iOS and Android apps for restaurant phases, helping them increase their conversion rates and in-restaurant footfall to a much greater extent than before.

So here were the details that can be of help for you to start your restaurant digitalization journey. The next step lies with the beginning itself – building a mobile app for your restaurant. Talk to our domain experts today.