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Traditional brick-and-mortar stores are still a preferred choice for grocery shopping. But, as the dominance of a mobile platform prevails, gradually the trend turns in the favor of mobile apps. If we take an example of the United States, the online grocery sales number is expected to reach around 17.5 billion dollars in 2018 and predicted to cross 30 billion USD by 2021.

What drives the growth of grocery shopping app development?

In recent years, we have witnessed a steady surge in the on-demand economy thanks to the ‘app for everything’ approach. All the service sectors ranging from hospitals to hospitality have started leveraging the benefits of on-demand apps, and the grocery business is no exception. As a result, tech-savvy retailers jump on the grocery delivery mobile app bandwagon.

Also, as more people tend to purchase groceries on the move worldwide, the retailers have started considering developing a customized grocery mobile app. The mobile app development company can assist them to come up with a feature-rich grocery shopping app. Today, we have several grocery mobile apps like Instacart, Grofers, and Bigbasket are available.

What are the key features of a grocery delivery mobile app?

The grocery delivery mobile app is designed to keep the user’s convenience in mind. It has two panels- one for the customers or users and the other is admin panel. However, here we mention just the user-focused features.

• User Account

Customers can register themselves either by using the social media account or through a phone number. It is the first and foremost step toward a seamless shopping experience.

• Browsing of Products

Search or browsing features is the most important feature of a bespoke grocery mobile app. It is better to integrate filters to make the browsing simple and straightforward.

• Order Tracking

It is necessary to keep your customers informed about the status of their orders. This feature enables you to provide a real-time tracking and monitoring of orders.

• Payment Gateways

In the age of m-commerce, it is essential to give multiple payment options to the app users. You can enhance their convenience through providing credit card, debit card, and mobile wallet-based payment facilities.

• Offers

You need to come up with promotional offers regularly. You can offer a festive season discount or end of season sale or gift coupons to promote your business.

• Review and Ratings

Customers always like transparency. You can give your app users a platform to share their views regarding your products and give ratings accordingly.

The advanced or value-added features include push notification, social media integration, better navigation using Google Maps and the like. What’s more, you can add the multilingual support to attract the customers of different demographics. The app can fetch the data from the cloud-based servers to give the real-time information to the users.

How much does it cost to make a grocery shopping app like Grofers and Instacart?

Instacart has brought the radical changes in the way grocery retailers do the online business. It has got around $275 million in the fundraising, which has helped the business to expand all over the USA. Today, developing a grocery shopping app like Instacart can be a costly affair especially for small to midsize grocery retailers. But then, an app with basic features and excellent performance can also serve the purpose.

If you run a startup or own a small to midsize grocery business it is better to bring an app to address a vast audience across your province or state. You can update the app later with new features in line with the customer’s needs.

Talking about the cost, a mobile app development company can give you a quote on the basis of project requirements. There are many costs deciding factors like the complexity of app, duration, and hourly rates.

The app development duration and complexity of app largely depend on the features need to be integrated. When it comes to the hourly rates, there is a great variation in different parts of the world. For example, if you hire grocery mobile app developer from India, they can charge anywhere between $20 to $50 an hour. Whereas the same developers from the US ask for $160 an hour.

The variation in the hourly rates impacts your app development budget especially when your app project is complex enough and can take a longer duration. As per your app’s complexity, you need to hire more app developers and designers to meet the deadlines. It results in a higher app development cost.

Now, we will go through the app development cost for different platforms.

Grocery app development cost for Android Platform

When you hire grocery mobile app developers from an Android app development company, you may need to pay the marginally higher price because of a lengthy app testing process. However, this difference in cost is minor especially when you get an opportunity to address a huge audience consists of Android device users.

The Android app development company can charge between $10000 to $30000 for an Android app depending on the number of features. If you want to include more features, the cost can raise up to $50000.

Grocery app development cost for iOS Platform

An iOS app development company can charge anywhere between $8000 to $35000. However, if you want to add more features in an iOS app, there is a possibility of increasing the development cost significantly. A complex and robust iOS grocery shopping mobile app can cost you above $50000.

With an iOS app, you can address both iPhone and iPad using the audience. As the iPhone has started increasing its penetration worldwide, your business can get the benefits.

Here it is fair to mention that most mobile app development companies do not include the maintenance and support services in their development cost quote. You should better discuss this before assigning your project. Also, you should keep some provision for app marketing because your grocery app needs a promotional boost.

Wrapping Up

It’s time to give your brick-and-mortar grocery store a boost using the technological advancements. Just connect with us through sales@solutionanalysts.com, let us know your requirements, and get a competitive edge with a tailored grocery shopping app. We have delivered high-quality app solutions across various industry sectors across the globe.