What are the strategies to be followed by an On Demand Food Delivery Startup?

On Demand Food Delivery is the goto for startups in this current timeline. The on demand market right now is taken over and divided equally among the food delivery giants like Swiggy, Foodpanda and Zomato. The On demand market still has some areas to be tapped into, in regards to medical, travel, logistics to name a few.

The On-demand food delivery market is beginning to get saturated with startups coming up left and right with nothing to offer on the table when compared to Swiggy or Foodpanda. Below is a list of strategies these start-ups can follow in order to set up a proper food delivery system.

Finding out the target audience.

Most of the current food delivery startups, mistake the thoughts of people requiring delicious food alone to be delivered at their doorstep. The food delivery market isn’t limited to that alone, but also includes Grocery delivery, Restaurant food delivery and Curated, Customized food delivery.

All verticals though harbor a unique set of audience; businesses fail to recognize the potential it holds. Hence, it is important to find which audience the application has to target and customize it according to their needs.

Figuring out the scalability of business.

Scalability here refers to how the startup is going to run its business. Estimating the area of coverage is very important at start.Most startups go wrong here and start big, thinking they can cover everything. Factors like capital, manpower has to be taken into account.

Partnering with different stores, restaurants based on the target market.

Depending on your scalability the next step is to establish healthy partnerships with the restaurants and/or grocery shops within the area of coverage. ‘Which restaurants and grocery stores to partner with and how to build those relationships?’, is a question each food delivery company answers differently.

Industry giants like Swiggy and Foodpanda establish partnerships with restaurants and get commission off of each delivery they make through them for that restaurant. This is just one example. Another strategy is getting a monthly fee for certain amount of deliveries made. Choosing a proper partnerships strategy is up-to the startup. Proper research has to be done in order to partner a long lasting deal.

Getting sufficient delivery guys and putting together a payment strategy.

The startup should ensure that delivery guys are sufficient enough to cover the area of coverage of food delivery. The mode of payment should be set up for the delivery guys. Payments can be set up either monthly or per hour or commission per delivery basis. Either way a proper contract has to be set up to fuel a lasting relationship.

Implementing live tracking .

This is an important feature which more startups tend to ignore. Live tracking is very much needed in India where most of the GPS locations transmitted to the driver are incorrect and then forces the driver to end up in the wrong location. This causes a delay in the delivery with the end user not knowing where his food is and thus creating chaos and confusion.

Live tracking can enable the user to call up the driver and give directions knowing the driver’s current location. Startups ignore this feature because of the misconception revolving around investment and time. What they fail to realize is that Live tracking SDK’s out in the market, can be integrated in less than an hour and ready to go.

Creating a mobile application with the right features.

Food delivery giants like Foodpanda and Swiggy have separate apps for the end user, driver and the restaurant. This is the proper way to set up the application for a food delivery start up. The entire architecture works like this.

End user places an order.

Restaurant gets the order on their restaurant app, confirms the order and proceeds to look for drivers in the area.

Restaurant sends a broadcast signal to all the drivers in the area.

The drivers receive notification in their app and any driver can accept the request.

End User receives confirmation about the driver and his location.

Analytics

The final nail in the coffin would be to improvise the business and increase profit margins. This is achievable based on business decisions made; and the raw data accumulated by taking note of every order made previously would be the key decision maker.Once again having live tracking would be a plus in this case as the travel logs and trip durations are stored.This in turn could be the deciding factor in how a food delivery system successfully harvests a great rapport in terms of customer satisfaction and the profitability margin.

The above pointers for on-demand delivery start-ups are essentials and the key to succeed.