Restaurant App Builder

Why do you need a Restaurant App?

5 billion people in this world use a smartphone. That is nearly 65% of all people on the planet. For a restaurant business looking to go mobile, a large portion of smartphone users is their customer base. A restaurant app markets your restaurant to these potential customers. A restaurant app also helps retain customers. Existing customers can use your apps for various services.

The food industry is worth nearly a trillion USD. It is also extremely competitive and a food-related business not focusing on marketing itself, is likely to fail in the long run. A business that does not interact with its customers faces a similar fate. A restaurant app helps making both marketing and interaction easy for you.

1. Boost your brand

Creating an app for your restaurant gives you an opportunity to boost your brand. By incorporating your brand values, aesthetics, and theme that represents your brand you increase brand recognition and memorability. It could be in the form of content, logo, brand colors, and more.

2. Offer personalized customer experience

By making registration compulsory for your app, you can get certain basic information from the customers. This not only allows you to reach out to them later with promotional offers, but also gives the customers a highly personalized experience.

3. Improve your service standards

Using a mobile app, you can attend to the needs and orders of a greater number of customers in a more efficient and organized manner. This automatically improves the overall service standards of your restaurant earning you good reviews.

4. Increase returning visitors

As you start offering a great user experience, it is only natural that you would have a highly engaged audience. In fact, with features like geo-fencing and push notifications, you can reach your app users in real-time and give them a reason to come back to your restaurant.

5. Simplify location-based advertising

Location-based advertising makes sure that you are reaching out to an audience that is more likely to convert. Not only can you send out relevant promotional messages to people who are located in the same area as your restaurant but even encourage the casual passers-by to step in.

6. Increase sales

Your restaurant app gives you an additional avenue for earning. By adding food delivery option, you can make sure that you can serve even those customers who prefer eating at home. This means you get to serve more customers than you can seat in your restaurant.

7. Enhance brand loyalty

Once your customers install your restaurant app on their phones, the chances of them ordering from your restaurant or booking a table with you are considerably higher. This increases the overall brand loyalty of the customers encouraging them to come back to your restaurant more often.

Types of Restaurant Apps

Studies reveal that over 80 percent of customers have searched for a restaurant on their smartphone. Creating an app with a restaurant app maker is crucial given the possible base of new customers you can have. Given below are a few types of restaurant apps that you can make:

Restaurant locator App

A customer can use a restaurant locator app to find and locate restaurants in a particular location. A restaurant finder app can also be used to see reviews, photos, view menus, and locate directions to the restaurant.

Food Delivery App

With the help of the Food Delivery App, you can assign, track, and ease the delivery of orders of your customers.

Table Booking and Food Ordering App

Customers can book tables and pay bills using the Table Booking App for a great dining experience. They can even search for the restaurant, invite friends and get recommendations. Like booking a table well in advance the customers can also order food in advance by using the Food Ordering App so that the food is prepared just in time without any waiting involved.

Delivery Tracking App

The Delivery Tracking App allows the restaurant owners to keep track of their delivery drivers to ensure they don’t laze off on duty.

Promotional and Loyalty Program App

This app helps manage customer loyalty and referral programs. It sets up customized reward programs and informs the users from time to time.

Review App

The customer can search for a specific cuisine or restaurant and see the reviews for a place. This app helps customers know more about a restaurant that they want to visit. The reviews can be divided further into various categories like ambiance, atmosphere, etc.

Franchise Apps

Franchise apps are suited to restaurants that manage multiple branches. They do everything a food app does but only for a single franchise. Domino’s is an example of a franchise restaurant app.

Top Features of a Restaurant App

Depending on the type of restaurant app you make, its working will be different. We choose a food app since it combines all the various functions of restaurant apps. Here are the features how the general functions of a restaurant app function.

Food court

The food court feature helps restaurant owners improve their sales and increase business. It helps them manage various aspects of the restaurant like Staff management and Kitchen management.

Ordering

There are three parts of how an order circulates in an app. The first part is the customer who interacts with the app UI and finalizes his order. The second part of the delivery app connects the user’s order to the restaurant through clouds and separate software installed in the restaurant. The final part of the ordering is sent as a notification to nearby delivery boys on a separate delivery only app who can choose to accept or reject the order. If the restaurant has its own delivery boys, they can skip the third part of the ordering cycle.

Restaurant Finder

The restaurant finder feature works by pinpointing user location and correlating the restaurant addresses stored in their databases.

Table Booking

There are two ways this can be addressed. Either a user can request a reservation through the app and allow the restaurant to confirm their booking or in the case of larger restaurants, a user can directly reserve a seat of their choice. In the first case, a simplistic ticket is raised whereas in the second case a virtual outline of the restaurant is shown to the user. It works similar to online theater bookings.

Dine-in

With the Dine-in feature, you can help improve user experience by letting them read the menu, choose an ingredient, book a table, call the waiter, manage inventory, place in-app orders and make mobile payments through the app.

In-app purchase

You can unlock your brand’s potential with your mobile app. You can let customers make payments and book tables well in advance. This will let your customers avoid queues and long waiting hours. It will also help in increasing efficiency and accuracy. It will allow you to reserve tables, assign seats, and remember customer preferences.

push notifications

The notifications help you grow your app significantly. The restaurant owners need to use push notifications smartly and in a sophisticated manner. Let the customer decide when they want you to send the notifications.

Coupons and loyalty card

A customer always looks for free stuff. This appetite for the free stuff can be fulfilled by using the loyalty and rewards feature or incentivized last minute bookings on the app. These are simple and work the same way as they work for other apps. You can periodically update offers and set conditions for user rewards on the backend. Starbucks increased sales by 80 percent after introducing loyalty programs.

Rating and reviews

It is highly relevant to look for customer feedback to improve the app for better optimization. A continuous review and rating cycles are important for any existing app. This will help you provide an improved user experience. A feedback page acts as a stimulator. Review and rating on a restaurant app is simple and straightforward. For a food app, the restaurant is registered on the app either itself or by professional critics.

Driver Tracking

Driver tracking uses the same framework laid out for the ordering functionality. It pinpoints the location of the delivery boy and simply shows it to both the restaurant and the user.

What do customers expect from a Restaurant App?

Apps for restaurants are a new concept. Customer expectations for restaurant apps are still evolving but they are usually very generic. Here are a few listed:

The app needs to be simple to use

Simplicity is the prime customer expectation. Apps with a good UI are important and a restaurant app with multiple functionalities needs to maintain that. While designing a restaurant app, keep in mind that most of your customer demographic is likely to be older. They like simple apps. Make them simple!

The app needs to be fast

Customers want an optimized app that loads and responds quickly.

The app should have new payment technologies

Technology advances fast and keeping up with it is necessary. Similarly, having the latest payment technology makes it a better deal for your customers.

The app should have a ratings and reviews section

Rating and reviews are the backbone of your app. Try to enhance the overall experience for your users by getting their feedback and improve on your weaknesses.

Each app has a special feature to keep customers engaged. For instance, Urbanspoon is one of the best Restaurant Finder App that runs on both, iPhone and Android. OpenTable is a popular table booking app. Starbucks works on the Promotional and loyalty program model. Domino’s Pizza has incorporated the Driver tracking feature in its app. Let us pick up four case studies to understand the various features a restaurant app can offer:

Case Study 1 – Starbucks

The Starbucks app is a success story and one of the finest examples of marketing through customer engagement. Starbucks makes a remarkable impression on the customer with its user-friendly app and sought-after loyalty programs. With the help of the Starbucks app, a user can pay bills online and earn & collect rewards. Starbucks runs reward schemes on user birthdays and free in-store refills through notifications. After gathering information about the user, Starbucks tries to enhance their personalized experience by offering them relevant perks and rewards.

Key Features of the Starbucks app:

In-app menu

The Starbucks menu tab features the list of all the drinks available in their outlets.

Special offers

Starbucks engages with customers by offering rewards like discounts, gifts, and complimentary beverages.

Loyalty program

Starbucks has a loyalty program feature in the app that offers stars against every purchase leading to earning a free drink and other goodies.

Mobile order and pay

This feature helps Starbucks during the rush hours as the customer can pay in advance and pick up his drink later.

In-app messages

Customers can fill in-app surveys sent to them by Starbucks, in return for star rewards.

Music

Customers can save songs being played at any Starbucks outlet to their own playlist within the app.

Starbucks is always active with their app and keeps revamping its loyalty program to offer a seamless user experience to the customer.

Case Study 2 – Chipotle

The Chipotle app has witnessed a high number of downloads and offers a great user experience to the customer. Chipotle is currently working on enhancing user experience further. The app helps collect online orders, manage deliveries and promote offers and advertising. The app further helps the restaurant process more orders without interrupting wait times for customers. Witnessing about 700,000 downloads on the iPhone alone, Chipotle app features include:

Reorders of favorites or recent orders

Chipotle offers customers a feature that lets users save their information for repeat orders, where they can place orders or reorders through a secure payment method.

Receive and redeem Chipotle offers

The Chipotle app has a feature where the customer can receive, store and redeem Chipotle offers in-app. Chipotle rewards each customer 10 points for every order they make.

Apple and Android Payments

The app offers a streamlined and secure payment option for users. Chipotle has tied up with reputed digital wallets for in-app payments.

Store locator

Location-based technology helps customers locate the nearest Chipotle restaurant and this feature is a hit in the Chipotle app.

Case Study 3 – Domino’s Pizza

Domino’s, the major pizza chain has more than 15,000 locations worldwide. It also has an app that helps their business grow. By using the Domino’s app, users can order and pay online. Users can even track the live status of their orders. It feels like having a pizza store in your pocket.

The features of Domino’s Pizza app are listed below:

Menu Browser

To take ordering to the next level, the Domino’s Pizza App has a feature where the user can see all the variety of options available. With the easy to navigate the menu, they can order their favorite pizza side dish or dessert.

Customize your pizzas

A consumer can now make a new pizza by selecting the crust, cheese, and change toppings with a drag and drop function in the app. This feature lets the consumer get exactly the pizza they want.

Safe payment methods

Domino’s has tied up with digital wallets to receive payments. Domino’s is extremely safe and that alone might be their app’s USP.

Delivery tracker

Users can track their order from the pizza store to their doorstep with the delivery tracker. The user can receive Pizza Tracker notifications even on a smartwatch.

Case Study 4 – Yogurtland

The self-serve yogurt chain Yogurtland created an app with website features. Like other brands, the Yogurtland app allows tracking and managing rewards to earn free yogurt. It offers the latest Yogurtland news and flavor updates in-app. The app also helps users create flavors of their own from the ingredients available. Listed below are some features of Yogurtland app:

Store Locator

Users will be able to find their nearest store locations and see the flavors that are on the customized daily menus. They replicate menu features in-store and let users read details and nutrition information on the app.

Find Your Flavor

The app offers a Flavor Finder, which allows users to search the unique flavors and discover which outlet is serving their favorite flavors.

Real Rewards

The user can perform a customized yogurt creation through their mobile phone to earn reward points. Through digital wallet integration and an intuitive interface, they can even create program signups.

Why does Appy Pie Restaurant App Builder have an edge?

You can attract more customers to your restaurant and increase your table reservations by creating a mobile app for your Restaurant, Cafe, Bar, or Club using Appy Pie’s App Builder. Appy Pie’s Restaurant App Builder allows you to create beautiful mobile apps with premium restaurant app features.

• Menu Creation with Food Ordering Page
• In-App Ordering with multiple payment gateways, like Stripe, PayPal
• Loyalty Card feature to Incentivize repeat customers
• Coupon feature to offer Discounts during Happy Hours
• Reserve tables using the Appointment Feature
• Add-on features like Opentable & GrubHub
• Give restaurant directions to customers via GPS
• Event Calendar to showcase Special evenings with Google Calendar
• Promote Offers & Events via Push Notifications
• Showcase Your Restaurant using Photo Gallery with Picasa, Flickr, etc.
• Study patterns of dining behavior with Google Analytics
• Manage inventory & orders via web Admin dashboard

With Appy Pie’s restaurant app builder, you can easily create a mobile app for your standalone restaurant or for multiple restaurants in a food court. To make it simple for restaurant owners, our app building platform has two different features: food court and online food ordering.

Let’s discuss in detail, how these features can prove to be beneficial for your restaurant business.

Food Court

The food court feature allows users to add single or multiple restaurants with order and delivery management system. Backed by multiple functionalities, the food court feature eases the process of food ordering by bringing restaurants, delivery persons, and customers, onto a single platform. With this advanced feature, not only the food court owners get to upscale their business growth, but even the associated delivery persons and restaurants stand to earn a good chunk of revenue in the long run. Under the food court, we provide a super admin web dashboard and three different apps – restaurant app, customer app, and delivery app.

1.1 Super Admin Web Dashboard

The super admin web dashboard allows the app admin to:

• Add, update and manage restaurants and food inventory
• Manage food orders & other settings like restaurant opening & closing time, minimum order amount & others
• Add, update and manage delivery persons

1.2 The Restaurant App

The restaurant app allows the restaurant owners to:

• Manage Inventory through White Label Web Admin Dashboard
• Manage food orders and track delivery persons
• Accept orders only after the delivery person has confirmed the request
• Send push notifications to the assigned delivery person and customer when the order is accepted and ready for delivery

1.3 The Delivery App

The delivery app allows delivery persons to:

• Register themselves directly from the mobile app, (but the delivery person goes live only when app admin approves his/her profile)
• Accept/reject any new order request within a given time frame, showing them pickup point with distance from current location and also the travel distance between pickup & delivery point
• Update the customer when he/she has:
• Accepted or rejected the order
• Picked up the order
• Delivered the order
• Track the order history and monitor the status of each, including canceled orders
• SOS SERVICE
• GPS Navigation to restaurant and customer’s destination

1.4 The Customer App

The customer app allows end-users to:

• Register themselves directly from the mobile app
• Register their cards directly from the app for the auto payment (We use Stripe for payment processing and ensure that the mobile app is PCI compliant.)
• Order food from nearby restaurants listed on the app
• Tip the delivery person
• Track status of the delivery person in real-time
• Make automatic payments once the order is successfully placed
• Track the order history
• Rate and review the restaurant or dish
• Mark any dish as their favorite

Online Food Ordering

The online food ordering feature has been specifically designed for standalone restaurant owners and allows them to create a restaurant app with great features like table reservations, push notifications, etc. With Appy Pie’s next-gen online food ordering feature, restaurant owners can create amazing restaurant apps within a matter of minutes and keep their business in the hearts and pockets of the customers. Under order food, we provide a web dashboard and customer app.

2.1 Customer App

The customer app allows end-users to:

• Register themselves directly from the mobile app
• Register their cards directly from the app for auto-payment (We use Stripe for payment processing and ensure that the mobile app is PCI compliant.)
• Order food, or book a table at the restaurant through OpenTable
• Track the order history
• Rate and review the restaurant, or dishes
• Mark any dish as their favorite

2.2 Web Dashboard

The web dashboard allows restaurant owners to:

• Add, update, and manage food inventory
• Accept/reject the food order
• Send push notifications to customers when order is accepted, dispatched, and delivered
• Track the order history and monitor the status of each, including canceled orders

Dine-In

Appy Pie’s food court and online food ordering are great features to make it easy for customers to order food on the fly. Now, you may be thinking of solutions to streamline your food ordering process at your dining area through smartphones. Appy Pie has the answer for that also! Yes, with our Dine-in feature, you can easily improve user experience by letting customers perform various operations in just a few taps. Listed hereunder are some functions that our Dine-In feature provides:

• Allows restaurant owners to manage inventory, users, waiters, and orders through White Label Web Admin Dashboard
• Allows customers to select a table, call waiter, place a food order, ask for a bill, make a payment, and tip the waiter
• Notifies hotel staff about customers’ requests

Apps for restaurants can be a powerful marketing tool and help you increase brand awareness. Appy Pie Restaurant App Builder helps you build apps that work seamlessly on multiple platforms making a mark in the food industry. So, go ahead and get started with your restaurant app.