Nowadays, the majority of businesses are adapting to the onset of the digital revolution. The Restaurant business is no different. The Restaurant industry is accepting the new era of digitization and with the help of emerging technologies transforming their businesses for customer satisfaction. The common yet trending use case for Restaurants is to create a Restaurant App.
By creating a Restaurant app the chances of reaching a different range of customers increase significantly. This eventually helps in growing the business. To prove the point, in 2021, the food industry approximately had a $951,239 million evaluation. The evaluation is mainly because of services like delivery, promotion, and retail.
The main reason for such immense growth is the usage of mobile apps. In fact, online ordering apps for restaurants made it simple for consumers to order food. The online ordering app also provides useful features such as booking a table, finding restaurants, pre-order food, menus, discounts, etc.
Now without any further delay let’s get into details regarding the reasons, steps, and cost estimation for restaurant app development.
Reasons for developing a Restaurant App
The food industry is opting for Restaurant app development for the following reasons.
✤ Brand Awareness (Visibility)
The restaurant mobile ordering app comes with better prospects for a restaurant’s visibility. This helps a Restaurant business boost its brand.
Further, by having a restaurant online ordering app the marketing sales, customer engagement and overall brand presence of the restaurant improves. In order to achieve such visibility via mobile apps, restaurants use push notifications (for retargeting), waiting time gamification (customer engagement), geo-tagging, etc.
✤ More Bookings
Mobile applications for restaurants provide users with exclusive perks on more bookings. Customers can easily find your restaurant and book tables or rooms right away. In short, apps help a restaurant business to receive more bookings than usual.
✤ Loyalty Points (Reward System)
Customers love features like loyalty points. The loyalty points make a customer feel important.
It is basically a reward system that a restaurant offers its customers for different benefits. These benefits include coupons, discounts on booking, and so on.
In addition, the referral system also popular as a “refer a friend” discount, helps increase the customer count for the restaurant.
✤ Customer Feedback
Nowadays, customers are very critical and vocal about their experiences in the public domain. From Restaurants to movie theatres they leave reviews and feedback on the apps or websites.
Restaurants can use customer feedback for improving their services and hence is an analytical feature for business growth. This shows that Customer feedback is one of the prominent reasons why restaurants should develop a mobile application.
Before moving on to the steps of Restaurant app development, let’s have a look at some basic features to include in your Restaurant application.
Must-have Features in a Restaurant App
You must have seen the mobile apps of big businesses like Starbucks and Mcdonald’s. Here we have mentioned a few features that your Restaurant mobile application must have.
#1 Food Menu
This feature is the most critical one for a Restaurant app. Here, you include different food items, beverages, and other food-related items along with their cost.
In addition, you must include sub-categories for the dishes. This will help the consumers select their favorite food item.
#2 Menu Customization
Your customers will have different preferences for food items and dishes. This means, that they will look for an option where they can create a list of their favorite items just like a playlist in a music app.
Hence, it is necessary that you include a Menu customization feature so that they can make a list of food items as per preference. A detailed description of the food items on your menu will help customers choose dishes easily.
In addition, a restaurant should also consider providing an option where the user can choose the ingredients for their dishes. This includes both inclusion and elimination of ingredients.
#3 Online Ordering Feature
Online ordering is common yet is a mandatory feature that every restaurant app has to provide. This is because the ordering feature facilitates users to pick and order the food items they wish. It helps customers interact with the restaurant easily and use services that are at their disposal. These services include home-delivery, dine-in, or pick-up services. But, these additional services may end up increasing the cost of your restaurant app development.
#4 Geolocation
Make sure that your restaurant app developers include the Geo-location Feature in your mobile app. This is crucial because it helps your customers track their delivery orders and pin the address as well.
Further, it also assists your customer in finding your restaurant on-site.
#5 Real-time push notifications
Your restaurant mobile application must provide Real-time push notifications. Whether it’s a food item delivery, pick-up order, booking of tables, or offers, deals and schemes users must receive the notifications that benefit them.
#6 Book a Table
Often restaurants make the mistake of not providing the feature of booking a Table. This hinders the business progress. Hence, it is important that your customers have this option when they seek to visit your restaurant for enjoying your food services.
In addition, you can also provide your customers with a visual feed using emerging technologies like AR/VR. Here, customers will have a visual of the onsite arrangement of seats and tables which will guide them to choose their preferred table.
#7 Secure Payment Gateways
Your restaurant app must provide a secure payment gateway for users. You can include third-party payment options like Google pay, Apple pay, PayPal, UPI, Online Banking, etc. to both boost and secure the payment process.
In addition, you can provide options such as payment through credit card, debit card, or Cash on delivery as well.
Check this out, How to make an app like Uber
Basic steps for the Restaurant app development process
To determine the cost of Restaurant app development it is important to analyze the basic steps that are involved.
Step #1 Market research and Analysis
Market research and analysis are critical for any business. The reason is simple; it will help you uncover the existing issues and concerns which you can use to your advantage like you can make your services unique and more efficient than what your competitors provide.
Step #2 Outline your Business Roadmap (Implementation)
Outlining your Business Roadmap simply means that you identify your target audience, figure out different ways to generate revenue for a business, and how you can manage the app development cost, time, etc… etc.
In general, having a unique app idea is preferable but you can also take ideas from big and famous restaurant apps that are doing well in the market.
Step #3 Pick an experienced app development company
Choosing an experienced app development company like Webbybutter will not save your time but also reduce the cost of the process for Restaurant app development.
Step #4 Idea Visualization and App Designing
One of the key aspects of any mobile app is visual design. Your Restaurant application must have a lucrative design to lure customers. A UI/UX developer is responsible for app design.
Also Read, 7 Steps Guide for designing An App in 2022
Step #5 Development and Testing
After your visual design is ready, the Restaurant app development team will add functionalities in this step. Once the functionalities are added testing team carries out thorough testing of the product before actual deployment.
Step #6 Restaurant App Deployment & Promotion
It is important to deploy your restaurant app with precise planning and strategy market. A proper pre and post-promotion strategy (marketing) will help you boost your Restaurant app reach and also lure customers to the Restaurant.
Step #7 Maintenance and Upgrades
An end-user is always interested in receiving updates while using a mobile application. So, not only you have maintained your app but also provide frequent upgrades in features to your customers.
Cost Estimation for Restaurant mobile app development
The million-dollar question: “How much does it cost to develop a restaurant app”? There are several factors that impact the cost estimation for restaurant app development.
Here are some of the factors:
- App Complexity
- Technology Stack
- Team Structure
- Features and Functionalities of the app
- UI/UX design for app
- Payment integration
- Third-party API- Integration
- Company charges for app development
Above, we have only highlighted the main factors affecting the cost of app development. There are numerous other aspects that are not included here.
But, if we estimate an approximate cost considering the mentioned factors, the cost for Restaurant app development will range from $15,000 to $ 40,000 which will include core features.
Final Remarks on Restaurant app development
Restaurant app development will demand some investment in the early phases but once you have it up and running your business will thrive and the application will bring in profits on a regular basis.
Webbybutter is an experienced app development company. By hiring us you will have a top-notch restaurant app built from scratch which will help your business grow.
