Foodclick: mobile app for reservations, pre-orders and cashless payments in restaurants

The story of restaurant app development working as an aggregator for table reservations and solving other tasks – from choosing the place to eat and pre-ordering food to automatic payment and cashless tipping.

Read this case and you’ll learn:

• How to make the aggregator useful for everyone, with functionality for diners and a user-friendly interface for restaurant owners?
• What kind of integrations will automate order processing?
• How to get the first users into the application?
• What are the challenges of product scale-up?

We’ll tell you how to create a restaurant aggregator app with the best possible budget and the lowest risks.

For restaurant managers, problems can arise long before a customer walks through the door. Administrators confuse the details of orders and bookings and then spend a lot of time calling to clarify. Guests themselves forget about reservations or simply fail to turn up unannounced.

Restaurant mobile app development for Foodclick helped to solve the following tasks:

• Automate processes with table reservation software and remote order processing.
• Simplify the interaction between restaurants and their customers.
• Organise takeaway orders.
• Reduce unnecessary tasks for staff.
• Add the ability to make contactless payments and tip with a card.

Next, we'll tell you about the challenges we've faced as restaurant mobile app developers and how our app came to be.

• 660

  Restaurants connected 

• 4,7

  App rating

• 5 years

  Technical assistance from our team

Foodclick is a classic start-up where the founders faced the following problems:

The client was well versed in the industry, but had not worked with online restaurant reservation software. So he looked for a restaurant app development company with foodtech expertise.

That's how he found our studio, whose portfolio already included food delivery and table booking apps, as well as a restaurant aggregator.

If you have an idea for an online restaurant table booking software or service, but do not have a technical team, we can take care of the development tasks, including QA.

Details of our findings during the project.

While working on the concept for the future application, the client conducted market research, visited many establishments to better understand the service issues, and studied competitors' offerings and best practices. The conclusion was that there were many errors in order processing that affected both restaurant managers and diners.

At the start of development, the client did not have a clear brief. To create a working MVP you need to describe:

• The tasks that the product version will solve.
• The architecture of the system and the logic of interaction between it’s components.
• The main user journey scenarios.
• The technology stack.

We started the project with the design of the application, but many times we came back to the business logic and technical details - analysing each step of the development with the client, changing the functionality and explaining why it was better to abandon some solutions and ideas.

Not all business owners have a technical background. That's why we help clients at all stages where difficulties may arise:

• We conduct consultations to understand the essence of the project and suggest a suitable technology stack.
• Assess the complexity of the idea and its implementation.
• Create a development plan with clear timelines, budget and development logic in each sprint using Agile methodology.
• Prepare prototypes describing all processes and general business logic of the product.
• Maintain all technical documentation of the project and hand it over to the client.

We have described all the stages of development in detail here.

We have split the Foodclick aggregator into two parts:

• An app for guests with booking functionality and pre-order requests.
• The restaurant table management software, where all requests are sent for further processing by the administrator.

Let's look at the specific features of each.

When registering, the user links a card to the application, with the help of which he/she will continue to pay for orders. The card is debited at the end of the service. In the future, iBeacons sensors can be connected to the application so that payment is made automatically when the guest leaves the restaurant.

Facility managers can also add a database of waiters with their names and photos. If a guest likes the service, they can thank the employee with a tip via direct P2P transfer.

Functionality for managers to work with ordering and booking processes.

Restaurant table booking software allows managers to take reservations, pre-orders for take-away and any additional requests when serving guests in the venue itself. They transmit the order details to the kitchen or bar, and the waiter only has to deliver the food and drink to the table.

The financial details are also transparent. After each completed order, the payment is split: a fixed percentage automatically goes to Foodclick as commission for the service, and the remaining amount goes to the restaurant's account. This allows both the restaurants and the app team to easily keep accounts and generate income reports.

The first version of Foodclick was overloaded with features, so users may not have understood the idea of the app and continued to order in more familiar ways. Start with a simple MVP with basic functionality and gradually add more complex options to the product logic – for example, calling a taxi to a restaurant or accumulating points in a loyalty programme. In this way, users will learn how to complete basic tasks first and then regularly improve their experience with the application.

Restaurant table reservation software will never become popular without promotion and marketing to help communicate its value to the audience, demonstrate advantages over competitors and win the loyalty of the audience. Therefore, in addition to the development budget, it is important to consider the cost of a marketing campaign.

We've said before that we help our clients choose the right technology for their project objectives. To develop the Foodclick aggregator, our team used:

Front-end. React Native is our main front-end stack, which allows us to create cross-platform solutions for web, mobile (iOS/Android) and even Telegram web apps;

Back-end. PHP, Laravel – our main back-end stack and the most popular PHP framework at the moment;

Databases. PostgreSQL, Redis - responsible for storing the main data and providing a high level of security.

Server: Docker, Kubernetes – allows you to reduce the cost of maintaining server infrastructure and building CI/CD processes.

The Foodclick app has transformed the booking and service process, allowing guests to do some of the work themselves, with staff only involved when necessary. The level of service and customer loyalty is increasing, as is the popularity of the service and the number of partner restaurants. This restaurant mobile app solution is fully in line with the trend towards online and offline integration in foodtech and e-commerce that we discussed in this article.