Food delivery businesses from DoorDash to Uber Eats to Postmates to Grubhub are trending and demanding buzzwords of the flourishing online food industry in Europe, Asia, USA, and Middle East countries. These companies are well-admired by a target market that is looking and desperate for a fast, convenient, and crave-able meals or snacks, especially when they can’t or mustn’t leave their homes due to a global pandemic or for whatever reason.
This is the reason why almost all restaurant owners, capitalists, and entrepreneurs want to invest their money in the on-demand economy to acquire the best ROI.
However, due to different factors and reasons, a lot of business owners are dealing with failure in their on-demand food delivery venture. Many new players are also joining the multi-billion dollar trend but the sad thing is, only a few are capable of surviving and retaining their customer base with serving quality food and proper management.
It’s very important to look at and study the reasons behind the failure of online food delivery startups. And we’re here to discuss those mistakes so you can successfully launch an on-demand food delivery business. And if you already have a food delivery business but you think you failed, here are reasons why.
1. You let your customers WAIT!
Look at your “real-time food delivery”, is it making your customers frustrated? Then you are probably making your customers wait. It’s difficult to wait for their food when they are starving. The most important thing about your customer’s satisfaction is the speed of delivery. The waiting time should not be more than 30 minutes. Having actual time notifications can help you to arrange the food delivery business in a satisfactory way.
2. You’re getting disloyal customers
The market in food delivery is always demanding, and this is why it’s difficult to have regular customers and keep them around. Customers can easily lose interest in your app and brand and they’ll look for another app that has more options and provide faster delivery. If your business fails to focus on keeping its regular customer base, it can suffer in the long term.
To avoid this, you can offer regular customers with special promos, deals, discounts, and freebies. You can also consider adding a cashback system to your app. If your customers feel that they’re treated special, they’ll be loyal to your service.
3. Unstable user experience for consumers
Most of the time, food delivery startups are failing because they can’t provide a consistent user experience. Food delivery apps stand for a variety of restaurants and cafes. And it can be complicated to pack information about all of them into a steady and trouble-free package. You also need to remember that all screens of a mobile application must be in the same style, with a stable UI/UX throughout.
Consider hiring an expert in mobile app development company who can create an application that will be appealing to users and provide a consistent design and seamless experience across all app screens.
4. You serve bad quality food
If you want customers to be satisfied and retain them, you need to check if you are serving high-quality food. Furthermore, understand that the quality of food will impact your brand’s name. Your reputation can be protected if you provide quality food and excellent customer satisfaction. This should be your ultimate goal in your online delivery business since you are in fierce competition.
5. You are not prepared of large order volumes
As your food delivery business meets success, it may encounter a huge problem that’s related to the volume of orders you are having. Most startups don’t have any idea on how to manage all the orders since they just turn their attention on a huge user interface and performance that brings them to a higher level. This will just lead to increased delivery times and sacrifice food quality.
The solution to this problem is to acquire more delivery drivers or contractors to deliver food. However, you must calculate the demand first. You may use tools for data analytics and identify when demand will increase.
6. You don’t have proper marketing strategies
It’s important that you know how to market your product and services because this will provide understanding about why they should choose your brand among other competitors. It’s useless if you can create your product and provide quality services, however, if you don’t have an effective market strategy, then you’re like a flower without water that will most likely die soon.
Provide your customers with helpful information and new offers, and try to use your app to improve customer loyalty and retain them. You may also think of promotional campaign you can do on social media channels that can help engage more old and new customers.
7. You ignore working with and investing in app development companies
It may seem like you don’t really need to have the best technology partner but it’s always worth investing your resources in the best food delivery app development company to have a great online food ordering system. A lot of the best mobile app developers know how to turn your business vision into a real, smooth, bug-free and measurable quality product.
8. You are not extending the visibility of your geographical shop
Maybe you don’t have plans targeting where your actual customer is based on due to geographical issues, then you may want to consider setting up your delivery stores in numerous locations in the same city.
If you want your business to triumph, here’s How to Get More Restaurant Online Food Delivery Sales: 6 Ways and Steps to Consider.
