How have food delivery apps made life convenient for customers?

‘Technological advancements have evolved customer behavior.’

To taste the food of the finest restaurant in the city, hungry customers used to drive through the busy streets to reach the restaurant location and line up in the queue or wait for the waiter to place their orders. However, technologically advanced food delivery apps have delivered the convenience and speed to the customers which they never came across before.

In just a few clicks on the smartphones, customers can place orders from their favorite restaurants and get them delivered quickly to their doorsteps. This level of comfort being provided by the food delivery apps have made customers addicted to them, gradually evolving their behavior.

FEATURES BEHIND THE CHANGED BEHAVIOR

Features of food delivery apps that have attributed to the changing customer behavior are discussed below:

1. Real-time order tracking: The hassle of calling the restaurant or any other food outlet to know the exact location of their orders has been overcome by the advanced food delivery apps. They can live track the delivery boys in a click and get their order’s exact location.

2. Frequent offer updates: The facility of instant push notifications with sound alerts arise curiosity in the minds of the customers. Offers or discounts being displayed as notifications on smartphones make customers happy to an extent that they take a step further to navigate the app and use discount for placing their orders. Offers and discounts being utilized by the customers saves their money and adds value to their ordering journey.

3. Multiple payment options: Contactless shopping was already in vague even before the pandemic. However, COVID-19 further accelerated this trend with food delivery apps acting as grease. Facility of multiple payment options like card payments and payment gateways make the customers free from the worry of coming in contact of anything contagious. This convenience paves way for the customers to place more orders using the food delivery apps.

4. Smart product search: Turning over the pages of the restaurant menu or asking the waiter for the product availability has become the thing of the past. Directly typing the name, using smart search options like tags and filters, navigating through the intelligently organized product categories, or getting personalized experience via AI provide utmost convenience to the customers by quickly displaying the desired food item.

5. Quick delivery: Food delivery businesses today are fiercely competing in the race of quickly delivering the products. This has turned out to be beneficial for the customers as they can receive their desired food items in minutes. Nowadays, food delivery apps come with the feature of smartly displaying the restaurants based on the customer’s location. Customers could easily find and navigate through the menu of their local restaurants. Ordering from credible local restaurants ensures greater satisfaction as well as quick delivery. This approach of getting food items from the range of a few miles has led to the emergence of hyperlocal deliveries and thus the advent of hyperlocal e-Commerce.

FINAL WORDS

Restaurants and other food outlets were of the opinion that post-pandemic the trend of using food delivery apps would decrease and restaurant footfall would be back to the pre-pandemic period. However, this is far from the reality.

As per Statista, revenue in the online food delivery market is projected to reach US$0.77tn in 2022. It is expected to show an annual growth rate (CAGR 2022–2027) of 13.68%, resulting in a projected market volume of US$1.45tn by 2027.

Regular updates of advanced features, increased accessibility, and attractive UI/UX made more customers cling to the food delivery apps. The global food delivery mobile application market was valued at $6,752.32 million in 2020, and is projected to reach at $62,836.97 million by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 25% from 2021 to 2030.

The above data indicates that food delivery apps will be increasingly popular among customers in the days ahead, and therefore restaurants will look for the best multi-vendor marketplace platforms powered by highly scalable and automated food delivery software that come with the efficient food delivery apps.