How to Build an On-demand Delivery App? An Ultimate Guide

Understanding On-demand Delivery Apps

Okay, enough saying on-demand delivery apps. WHAT IT IS? What makes Postmates, Doordash, TaskRabbit, Grofers quite famous on-demand delivery apps? How do they work?

Well if defined in a layman language, on-demand delivery apps are the app platforms that enable any business, enterprise, or startup to gather the demands of customers on the app and fulfill them by providing door-to-door delivery or service on an instant basis.

In short, an on-demand delivery app allows customers to order goods and services online.

There are multiple kind of door-to-door services we are leveraging today via on-demand service apps, a few of them being; on-demand medicines, grocery, food, beauty and body-care, on-demand service boys, and many more that are helping consumers meet day-to-day demand on the comfort of their home/office.

The Business Model’ to Know How It All Works

On-demand delivery apps work for specific user groups namely service providers and customers but to streamline the on-demand gig economy and successfully deliver the end product or service, on-demand developers build applications for all the user roles involved in the delivery process.

Before we understand what all users are involved in providing the service, let’s understand the types of on-demand apps.

1. Business to Consumer (B2C) Apps

B2C apps are also known as Aggregator app or Enterprise to person (E2P) apps. This category is responsible to provide products/services directly from the service provider to a single consumer.

Some of the popular examples falling under this category are:

Starbucks, McDonald’s, or McDelivery.

2. Consumer to Consumer App (C2C) Apps

Also known as Person to Person (P2P) app, C2C apps facilitate users to buy, exchange products or services from each other.

Some of the popular examples falling under this category are:

Zomato, Munchery and Frichti

3. Business to Business App (B2B) Apps

B2B or Enterprise to Enterprise (E2E) apps are focused on connecting businesses from businesses. They act as a facilitator for deliveries between businesses. They have two subdivisions namely vertical (providing services for single business) and horizontal (providing services for multiple businesses)

Apps like Cargomatic, Uber for truckers, CaterNation, Emerge and Eventio are a good example for illustrating this category.

As per the business model you’ve chosen for building an on-demand delivery app, the app stakeholders get defined. In other words, the on-demand app development company will work on developing the apps for every single user role separately.

If your app falls under the B2B category then the developers will build two apps for both businesses respectively. Similarly, if it is B2C, one app will be built for business and the other for consumers, and in the case of C2C both the apps would be focused on consumers.

Like for example, Uber Eats operates on a 3 tiered transactional strategy that involves B2B, B2P (Business to Partner), as well as B2C.

• UberEats partnership with restaurant partners where both the business gets benefitted by each other (B2B)
• UberEats partners with delivery persons or independent drivers and earn revenue via them (B2P).
• The third is the customers who order the food directly from businesses (B2C).

Features Included In On-demand Delivery App Development

Based on the different app categories discussed above, the on-demand delivery apps have the following user roles or stakeholders:

1. Customer App
2. Service Provider App
3. Driver App
4. Admin Panel (Web-based)

Let’s cover their features in detail for all these user roles.

Top Industries Disrupted By On-demand Economy

1. Courier Delivery

On-demand package delivery or courier service application lets the user deliver or pick up anything from anywhere to any place. This kind of apps helps startups and businesses to deliver orders or pickup from restaurants, retail shops, grocers, and more. Examples of such kind of popular apps are:

• Order anything from anywhere (Postmates)
• Deliver anything within the city using your own team (Pickrr)
• Deliver food from nearby restaurants (UberEats/Foodpanda)
• 60 minutes express delivery service (Bigbasket)

2. Online Food Ordering

This app platform allows restaurant owners to take online food orders and deliver food at their customer’s doorsteps. The online food ordering app solution supports some of the major features like real-time order tracking, online payments, order management, menu management, adding discounts, promos or referrals etc. Some of the successful apps scoring high in the on-demand food industry include:

• Search top local restaurants and order food online (UberEats)
• Order from local restaurants and takeaways online (JustEat)
• Find the best restaurants, cafés and bars (Zomato)

3. Home Services

Home services app allows the users to hire safe and trusted local professionals for getting household chores or personal things done that a user needs in a day-to-day life e.g. furniture assembly, TV mounting, help moving, home cleaning and repairs, business and taxes related help, appliance repair and more.

• A temporary staffing app to connect users with the trusted local handyman. (TaskRabbit)
• A platform to search & hire trusted local professionals to take care of all day-to-day needs (Urbanclap)

4. Grocery Delivery

Online grocery shopping apps were already catching the pace fervently amongst the consumers. Then we met an unfortunate pandemic that forced the compulsion of using the grocery app for home delivery services and left it as no more an option.

Online grocery, food and other household chores delivery at customers’ doorsteps has become the need of the hour. For grocery store owners, supermarket chain owners or simply a store aggregator looking to improvise their ROI or expand business; an on-demand grocery app is a right medium.

Few example-setters in this industry are:

• An app that delivers groceries from local stores to doors on the same day. (Instacart)
• An app that stores users’ grocery lists and tracks what you don’t have in the pantry. (Mealboard)
• An app that shows the best available deals at local supermarkets. (GroceryPal)

5. Beauty & Salon

Getting pampered in less time, in busy schedules, in the comfort of the home in this tightrope walk of the life comes as the boon that every next person wishes for.

For such instant gratification, on-demand beauty and salon apps come as a rescue for people of all ages looking to be groomed at home. On-demand beauty apps have enabled users to make online salon booking appointments and hire an in-home stylist in just a few taps. Some successful models in the beauty industry include:

• Hire stylists : Hire your own stylists to serve you at your place.
• Salon booking appointments : To book salons online.
• Marketplace model : To list stylists with ratings and reviews.

6. Health and Fitness

The healthcare industry is a global trillion-dollar industry comprising telemedicine, fitness, and other clinical continuum applications.

Today in the wake of COVID-19 and with the technology advancements, we’ve seen a major revolution in the way healthcare and fitness services are delivered.

Day-to-day requirements like online appointment booking, appointment scheduling, remote visits with patients, wearable technology integration, hiring personal fitness trainers etc. have become the lifeblood of healthcare and fitness service providers.

Some of the successful healthcare apps and fitness app solutions running with the on-demand model are:

• Doctor visits the patient at his location (DoctorOnDemand)
• A Telemedicine app solution (Amwell, TeleDocto)
• On-Demand Medicines Delivery (MedPlus)
• Marketplace model – An aggregation of doctors, clinics, hospitals etc. (Practo)
• Personal trainer fitness app- (JEFIT)
• Calorie Counter & Diet Tracker (MyFitnessPal)

7. Transportation and Logistics

We are all aware of the phenomenal disruption bought by the on-demand taxi industry. Technology-driven platforms have made it possible for people to start their own online taxi booking business, logistics business & car-pooling platforms, which led them to rent their car on an hourly basis and earn more.

Here are few verticals in an on-demand ground transportation business that are running successfully:

• Cabs on-demand (Uber)
• Ridesharing Platforms or Car Pool (Lyft)
• Transport vehicles on-demand like trucks, vans etc. (Cargomatic, Uber Freight)
• Rental platform for cars (ZoomCar)
• Platform to hire chauffeurs for personal cars (DriveU)
• On-demand valet parking (Luxe)

How to Create An On-demand Pick-up and Delivery Service App like Postmates?

Whenever we talk about on-demand delivery, Postmates comes in the top of the mind.

Being the earliest startup to harness the power of the mobile app and the nascent on-demand ‘gig economy’ to serve city dwellers with courier services in just a tap of a button, Postmates is hailed as an influencer app in on-demand delivery economy.

Postmates is a San Francisco, U.S based logistics and delivery app facilitating order delivery or pickup services from local restaurants, grocers, and more in the U.S cities.

Postmates Biggest Rivals are DoorDash, GrubHub and UberEats

The on-demand package delivery app has three stakeholders:

• Customer App
• Vendor or Service Provider App
• Delivery Boy App

Want to know how they function? Or say, what all features they have?

Get the details here with the business model of Postmates

Technologies Used For On-demand Delivery App Development

1. Front-end Development

Native iOS App Platform : (Objective C, Swift)

IDE : Xcode 11, AppCode

Platform SDK : iOS SDK, Cocoa Touch

Native Android App Platform : Android SDK (Java), Kotlin

IDE : Latest Android Studio

Platform SDK : Latest Android SDK

Web Platform : HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, TypeScript

JavaScript Frameworks : Angular JS, React JS, Vue.JS, Express.JS, etc.

2. Back-end Development

• Programming Languages : Ruby, Elixir, Python, PHP, Java, etc.
• Web Frameworks : Ruby On Rails (recommended), Phoenix
• Database Servers : PostgreSQL, MySQL
• Web Servers : NGINX, Apache
• Cloud Server Platforms : Amazon Web Services (AWS, EC2, S3, etc.)

Top Market Players Making It Big Through On-demand Apps

Key Strategies and Value Proposition

Venture Capitals, well-established companies with backings of investors are pouring money into on-demand apps. For new startups and early-stage entrepreneurs the market has become highly competitive and full of risks.

Without any unique selling point and sustainable feature, it is hard to survive and thrive in the market.

The current market players successfully running and ruling the on-demand economy are breaking the clutter with their unique value proposition that makes them stand out from their rivals.

So, before you plan to create an on-demand delivery app it is extremely crucial to ponder- What your competitors are offering? What is their unique selling point?

To help you out, our team of marketing strategists have researched on top industry market players or on-demand delivery apps with their USPs.

Hope you find it insightful.

How to Kickstart On-demand Delivery App Development?

1. Market analysis
2. Choose your business model and a right marketplace
3. Find an experienced mobile app development company
4. Chart out required app functionality
5. Launch and test the service

1. Market Analysis

Before shifting gear towards app development looking into the market both in volume and value is equally important. Whatever industry you’re planning to build an app conduct market research for analyzing its customer segments (both demographically and segmentation wise), buying patterns, the competition, barriers to entry, regulation, and market value.

2. Choose Your Business Model And A Right Marketplace

As a next step, find the right business model to nurture your idea into a credible business. Validate your business idea genuinely solves customer’s problems and customers are willing to pay money for same. If it doesn’t relieve the pain, the business model doesn’t work.

You can also plan to execute a local rollout by getting build a MVP and test costs, quality and pricing in a local area. Collect customer references and feedbacks.

After working on the business model it’s time to underline the pricing and app monetization strategies. The main things to consider while choosing it are:

• How much do you need to earn?
• How does your pricing match with your competitors?

For your idea here we’ve compiled a list of on-demand economy companies with their monetization strategies. Let’s see how they charge their customers/partners and fulfill their financial targets.

Other App Monetization Strategies

1. In-app home page advertising
2. Delivery charges
3. Peak hours
4. Commission percentage
5. Extra fee for rush delivery
6. Subscription plans
7. Service fees (% from the orders and the delivery charges)

3. Find An Experienced Mobile App Development Company

After thorough market research and solid idea seeding a high-quality product is essential as that will result in your efforts and unique value proposition in the market.

In order to develop one, you have to hire a reliable mobile app development company.

Note that partnering with an illegitimate company may lead to serious consequences such as loss of confidentiality, hidden costs, loss of control and other factors that may tarnish your trust, service quality and plans.

So, what needs to be taken into consideration while hiring a mobile app development company?

Company Expertise

The easiest way to check if the company can turn your dream concept into reality is to get acquainted with their portfolio, professional experience and evaluate how well they have done similar projects.

Apart from this the other metrics that analyze company’s standards and compliances are:

• Its flexibility to adapt to unique business needs.
• Ratings, feedback, and reviews given by other clients as testimonials on their previous work delivered.
• Take a glance at case studies of similar on-demand apps developed by the company.

App Development Cost

To estimate the rough cost of development you need to know the functional requirements of your app, cost per hour charged by the development company (varies country wise) and several other factors including:

• App Discovery (on-demand)
• Project Analysis and Scope Statement
• UI/UX Development
• App Platform (Native, Cross-platform, Hybrid, Web apps)
• Technologies Used
• App Deployment
• App Maintenance
• App Security

Still, if you want a simple method to roughly estimate app cost, you can consider the product of two variables: number of hours and app developer’s hourly rates. Here’s the cost estimation formula.

Related reading : The Total Cost to Create an On-Demand Delivery App

How Codiant Can Help You?

Codiant empowers start-ups, physical stores, enterprises, and aggregators to take their business online with its user-friendly technology products. We’ve the combined expertise of executing technology products and developing on-demand delivery apps for more than 60+ businesses ranging from on demand food delivery, taxi services, beauty solutions, telemedicine, quick delivery of grocery, Cannabis, Alcohol and more.

Some Of the Popular On-demand Apps Developed By Us Are:

SIX Taxi App (On-demand Taxi App)

Six taxi is an on-demand taxi mobile app for public commutation that aims to assure that drivers earn more while driving less through the power of referral commission and provide a quick service fulfillment to passengers on the go.

Brilliant Move (On-demand Logistics App)

Brilliant Move is an on-demand logistics solution that powers customers, retailers, and delivery crews lacking a fully integrated and dedicated delivery network with an on-demand delivery platform.

ClickDrs (On-demand Doctor App)

ClickDrs app eliminate communication barriers between patients and doctors. This on-demand doctor app provides online appointment booking, scheduling, remote monitoring via high definition video calls, integrated billing, etc.

Qwikdrop (On-demand Courier Delivery App)

Qwikdrop is an on-demand delivery platform that connects merchants and individuals with crowd-sourced drivers to enable virtually anything to be transported locally in minutes.

Instrafresh (On-demand Grocery Delivery App)

Instafresh is a smart grocery shopping assistant app which allows shoppers to search store list nearby them. As per their favorite local stores, they can order the grocery products from the app. Instafresh personal drivers will pick and deliver their orders in as little as 60 minutes.