Smartphones and mobile apps serve multi-purpose – be it getting a daily dose of news in the morning, booking a cab to the workplace or simply ordering lunch or reserving a dinner table at your favourite restaurant. The Mobile era has compelled several industries to land on this platform for survival in the marketplace. The restaurant is one such domain that is experiencing huge success through mobile app development. Let’s know how mobile technology is used by restaurants to delight customers and provide a superior dining experience.
Understanding next-generation customers is critical to decide the business strategy of restaurants. Future customers would undoubtedly be tech-savvy though you need to hire an expert restaurant app developer. This is what restaurants need to cope up with build an appealing table for customers of tomorrow and evolve their business.
Restaurant mobile apps help to deliver the next-generation customer experience with advanced loyalty programs and functionalities to reserve a table in advance or order food at home. There is a huge inflow of demand for the development of the restaurant mobile app considering the array of useful features and the competitive price it comes at.
Features & Cost of Restaurant App Development
Feature-rich and fully functional restaurant mobile app greatly help in connecting with customers, improving customers’ interaction with restaurant and spreading the word among other smartphone users. Take a look at the following features that should be ideally included in the restaurant app. You need to hire the best restaurant app developer to develop feature-rich restaurant apps for your business.
- Display restaurant menu with details of ingredients and cost
- Place the order through the food ordering page of the app
- Display ambience of the restaurant using photo gallery with Picasa, Flickr
- In-app ordering and payment with PayPal gateway
- Make reservations using the appointment feature
- Help route your customers to the restaurant via GPS
- Incentivize repeat customers with loyalty card feature
- Add-ons like Opentable & GrubHub
- Event calendar to notify users of special evenings with Google Calendar
- Send push notifications about upcoming & ongoing offers
- Analyse user’s dining behaviour based on ordering history through Google Analytics
The cost to build a restaurant mobile app depends on the number of features to be included, its complexity and the number of resources required to work on this project. However, restaurants need not worry about investing money in Restaurant Mobile app development as it is bound to give good returns in terms of the higher number of customers, brand visibility and systematic management of orders and customers.
Different Categories of Restaurant Mobile Apps
Depending on the type of restaurant business you run, owners can choose to develop a particular category of the mobile app that perfectly matches their requirements:
Reservation Restaurants
This category is an ideal fit for restaurants whose main purpose is to enable users to book tables in advance. The app shows available space in the restaurant at the selected time and accordingly allows users to make the reservation for a table for the specified number of people. Admin can manage these reservations by instantly confirming or rejecting the bookings as per the occupancy of the table at the given time.
Search for Restaurant Deals and Offers
Build this type of app if you wish to establish a connected ecosystem of restaurants where users can get to know the best deals on food items offered by restaurants in a particular locality. Users need to enter the locality or area where he/she is based and the app presents the best deals of restaurants based in that locality in a fraction of seconds.
Restaurant Searching App
This is a kind of listing app for restaurants that exposes the user to all restaurants in the city. Such apps act as a reliable platform for users to explore and find out nearby restaurants of their choice. Restaurant searching apps can also include a feature to find restaurants based on cuisine. The list of restaurants as per the search query should display reviews and ratings to give a rough idea of the quality of food and ambience to app users.
Food Delivery App
This is a kind of on-demand service offered to users through a mobile app. Food delivery app allow users to place an order for meals from their favourite restaurant, make in-app payment through the secured gateway, track the order and give feedback. Upon receiving the order, the backend system or admin forwards the order request to the respective restaurant. At the same time, the staff member informs the delivery person (either manually or through the connected system) to pick up the order from the restaurant and deliver it to the particular address.
Food Takeaway App
This category of restaurant app is slightly different from the food delivery one where the user is responsible for picking up his/her order. This app works exactly in the same manner as food delivery one, i.e. allowing the user to place an order from the restaurant, make payment and tracking it. However, the last step of getting the order delivered at home is omitted as the user himself/herself would pick up the order from the selected restaurant.
Related Post: Apps Like Uber Eats
Build a Restaurant App & Get Avail the Benefits
Though millennials are addicted to the trend of exploring restaurant services through the app, experts predict that this behaviour would soon be adopted by all age group of people using a smartphone. By having a mobile app for your restaurant, you can directly offer discounts on food items, promote it among app users, inform users about additions of new dishes to the menu, allow to place the order and give feedback, review and ratings.
Hidden Brains is a reputed restaurant app development company that builds personalized, custom and feature-rich mobile app. Discuss your requirements with our mobile app developers who are experienced in designing and development high-quality restaurant app.
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