Online food ordering apps have befriended even not-so-technologically-savvy individuals during the last year. Food delivery apps have become the favorite of every foodie by offering them the convenience of ordering tasty delights from the restaurant of their choice without stepping outside their homes’ comfort. If you are in the food business and own a restaurant, building an online food ordering app is essential.

Application for customers

Let’s focus on the facilities that your customers must enjoy while using the app, and it includes navigating through the various restaurants, experiencing a smooth payment gateway. Here are some of the salient features that should be present in the app:

1. Registration and account creation
   Although the registration process is vital for companies to collect information about their customers, often users might not be eager to complete the process. Thus, you should keep the registration form simple or even allow your customers to login from their social media accounts.
2. Searching for food
   After completing the registration, when your users want to see the restaurants’ results, you would have to make their experience seamless by embedding in various filters based on cuisine, ingredients of foods, etc.
3. Adding a secure payment gateway
   When your customers share their payment credentials with you, they would expect you to protect their confidential information. Thus you should incorporate a payment gateway in the cart which encrypts all the data so that your customers feel confident enough to complete the transaction.
4. Real-time tracking
   Waiting for food without knowing how long it will take makes most of us anxious and tense. Thus you should enable real-time tracking features with the contact number of the delivery person so that your customers would have complete knowledge regarding the estimated time of arrival of their order.

Application for the restaurant

Some of the features that would help you to manage your business are:

1. Registration
   You will have to manage the restaurants’ registrations and allow them to receive orders only after the completion of the process.

2. Dashboard
   This is where you can get complete insights into the performance of your online food ordering app. Just with one click, you can check the number of orders placed and your earnings, respectively.

3. Assigning and managing orders
   When your customer places an order, you will have to check in with the restaurant and then assign a delivery executive. With the online food ordering app industry getting competitive with every passing day, your strategy needs to be strong enough for sustenance in the long term.

The Food Delivery Mobile and Web App

sVang is a web and mobile app for iPhone and Android phones to order food easily at lowest cost to customers and restaurants.

sVang

The amount of change that we are witnessing in our times is unprecedented. For example, in front of our eyes, a rising Netflix decimated Blockbuster in early 2000. The US took the lead in the digital revolution starting early 1970 for banking, and sadly, it is now falling behind in digital payments compared to China and India. Sundar Pichai of Google thinks that "The US needs to 'learn' digital payments from India." UPI's open nature led to its success through user-driven apps for real-time payments through 140 member banks in India. In the US, it is ridiculous that it takes three days for an ACH transaction to complete. The following YouTube video explains it well.

Why does America fall so behind in digital payments compared to India and China? The main reasons are;

• America still believes in Credit/Debit cards. India has revolutionized real-time mobile payments.
• American consumers still have doubts over the security of payments on mobile.
• The US still uses old, very complex, and slow payment systems, and the establishment of banks, etc., are reluctant to upgrade. If it ain't broken, why fix it.
• The US still uses ACH (Automated Clearing House), which was designed for checks, and the workflow for ACH still uses batch processes.
• The real-time payment technology is available, but banks are reluctant to use it.
• The lawmakers are not pushing for real-time payments, and hence it is very difficult to see a change.

The hope is on Apple Pay, Google Pay, Venmo, Zelle, Square, Clover etc., but the problem is they don't talk to each other. In other terms, we are missing a common standard that everyone could follow.

In India, ask for the phone number of the hawker or scan QR-code and pay instantly and money transfers to the vendor's bank account instantly.  

We should not be ashamed to learn from India - who implemented UPI (United Payment Interface), and each bank is following UPI protocol to build applications to transfer money instantly to another person. Gone are the days of credit card swipe - sooner we get this, better we will be.

What a day to start writing my blog using Ghost CMS when the US successfully landed Perseverance Rover on Mars at 3:55 PM Eastern. A time travel of 12 minutes from Mars to Earth - The rover was on its own and everything went in proper order for a successful landing. The rover traveled 300 million-mile journey since it left Earth more than 6 months ago. Perseverance will search for signs of ancient life on Mars.

Dr. Swati Mohan is an Indian-American scientist and she is the lead systems engineer for the mission. She brought lots of pride for the Indian community around the world for her crucial role.

This day on February 18, 1930, Pluto was discovered. Interestingly, the Vasant Panchami was on Feb 16, 2021 as per Hindu calendar and it is the beginning of good period and good days ahead of us. The Covid-19 virus is on decline and the numbers of infected people are plummeting especially in India and other places. The astrologers are predicting that the pandemic will be over by the end of May 2021. We will see if there is any reason to believe in fortune telling, astrology and other para-normal things on which rational people do not have a believe but I do since I am irrational.

I am looking forward to what we get to know through Perseverance Mars Lander.