How to Make a Food Delivery Website: Business Models, Features, and Cost

According to Statista, the global online food delivery market is expected to reach $1.38 billion in 2025. More and more people are shifting towards online ordering system usage to not distract from critical activities and save precious time. It encouraging businesses to create food-ordering websites.

Let's see what the potential of this idea is:

• Over 25% of American consumers use delivery services at least once a week
• Utilizing delivery services increases restaurants sales volume for 10%-20%
• It is predicted that the overall users count of meal delivery services will reach $2.2 billion in 2025
• About 63% of customers prefer getting delivery to dining out

The growth of the food delivery market is driven by the increased utilization of mobile devices, demand for fast service, and virtual payment solutions. Above all, the convenience of ordering food through ordering websites for restaurants significantly contributes to their popularity. These platforms allow customers to easily compare the menu and prices of various restaurants, place an order delivery request, and use a credit card to pay. Given these trends, it's profitable to create an online restaurant website that meets global market needs and consumer demand.

As any industry, food ordering constantly goes through particular changes that suddenly become wholesome tendencies.

Let’s discuss 3 most vibrant trends in food delivery websites:

AI-driven personalization

AI-powered algorithms are an effective method to offer tailored recommendations based on user behavior, preferences, and past orders. This usually includes suggesting particular dishes, dineries, or even specific dietary options to individual users. Moreover, AI algorithms enable businesses to meet consumer expectations when it comes to customizations and highly personalized experiences within food delivery website.

Integration of voice search and chatbots

To make a food ordering website truly innovative and appealing for users, consider implementing voice search functionality and AI chatbots. These features are integrated into food ordering websites to simplify and speed up the ordering process. Users can place orders, ask for recommendations, or check delivery statuses using voice commands or by interacting with a chatbot.

Sustainability and ethical eating

Websites have started to incorporate features that promote sustainable and ethically sourced food options. This may include filters for organic, locally sourced, or zero-waste meals. Some platforms even enable users to see the carbon footprint of their orders or choose eco-friendly delivery and packaging.

As a lot of consumers become more environmentally aware, platforms try to align with their clients' values. By adding such functionality, you can attract and retain a user base that prioritizes an eco-friendly lifestyle, setting your offer apart from competitors who don’t cater to this growing demand.

Business models of food ordering platforms can vary according to the project aims and requirements. On the other hand, there is a local or traditional model. It stands for common food delivery from nearby places. A lot of restaurants, especially in urban areas, now offer delivery. So, local food delivery services usually work only within one country or even one city.

Food delivery gives many opportunities to start your own food ordering business. How to make a food delivery website? First of all, you need to choose an appropriate business model. Below we discuss the common business models.

This model provides an opportunity to online order food from many independent restaurants. How does it work? Such platforms connect clients with local restaurants, and the restaurants deliver orders on their own. Usually, restaurants pay the platform a commission from 7% to 15% per order received. Grubhub is an excellent example of how to build a food delivery website with an “order-only model”. The company made $8.7 billion in 2023. The number of active users has reached 31.4 million.

The main representatives of how to create a food ordering website with this model are Uber Eats and DoorDash. Such platforms provide both order and delivery. It’s beneficial for restaurant owners who cannot or don’t want to buy a fleet of vehicles and organize couriers' work. The main representatives of this model are Uber Eats and DoorDash. For instance, Uber Eats generated $12.1 billion in revenue in 2023. In addition, the number of users has reached 66 million.

The last business model consists of three services — ordering, cooking, and delivering. It means that the company prepares food itself. However, such a business requires a lot of additional expenses like salaries for chefs, refrigerated trucks, heaters, and so on. This business model is typical for chain restaurants like Domino’s Pizza. The company earned 4.48 billion in 2023. The company operates a total of 17,644 restaurants globally.

It’s always a good idea to study competitors first. If you want to create a food delivery app or website, it’s better to consider details. We’ve prepared five popular online food ordering platforms for you to review.

UberEats gives you an idea of how to create a food-ordering website and start making money. A lot of people trust Uber to drive them around the city. So, the company decided to conquer new peaks and become successful in the food delivery market. In 2024, UberEats is available in 11,000 cities all over the world. Uber Eats covers approximately 29 percent of the global food delivery market, delivering food from more than 600,000 restaurants. Uber Eats has functionality similar to Uber, such as cashless transactions, real-life GPS tracking, and order scheduling.

DoorDash is one of the biggest food delivery services in the United States. This service is available in 4000+ American and Canadian cities. It has more than 340,000 restaurant menus and over 30 different cuisines. DoorDash provides a chance to select ‘popular items.’ For example, visiting a restaurant for the first time, you can see the most demanded food.

If you want to create a food delivery website to deliver from the local restaurants in the US and Mexico City, the Postmates website is the best option. The service is accessible in 4,200+ cities and cooperates with over 600,000 shopkeepers. Just like many food ordering websites, Postmates lets users place an order at local fast food chains and restaurants. This service also brings you groceries, gifts, and so on.

Glovo is a global on-demand food delivery service that operates in numerous countries across Europe, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. In 2023, the company had a valuation of $1 billion, with over 10 million users globally​. The platform allows users to order a wide range of products, including food, groceries, and pharmaceuticals, and have them delivered to their doorsteps. Glovo operates in over 20 countries, including Spain, Italy, France, Ukraine, Romania, Argentina, Morocco, Kenya, and several others.

Grubhub is another good example of how to create a food delivery website. The platform is available for both iOS and Android. The service operates in the United States, and it lets users order and deliver meals from fast food chains and restaurants across 4000 cities. Grubhub provides 24/7 customer support and real-time delivery tracking, which makes this process very convenient.

When make a website for food delivery, you’ll have two options: custom-built food ordering website or off-the-shelf solutions. Let’s overview each option and define how it may impact your solution’s success.

A custom-built food delivery website is designed and developed exclusively to meet your unique business needs and requirements specifically. It offers flexibility and allows you to create a platform that perfectly aligns with your brand and operational requirements. Here are the main benefits restaurants, business owners, and delivery services can extract from custom-built food delivery websites:

• Well-tailored features: When you make a food ordering website from scratch, you can add the functions that correspond to the nature of your business, like separate forms of payment, individual systems of bonuses, or special systems of order tracking
• Wholesome brand identity: You can make a food ordering website that organically aligns with your brand identity, especially on custom UI/UX design that will conform to the targeted audience
• Scalability according to your needs: Your food delivery site is developed from scratch with a huge potential for future expansions
• Diverse integration options: Additionally, you can connect third-party tools like CRM, ERP, or custom analysis tools to match your requirements
• Enhanced security: The benefits that come with having customized food ordering websites are all-round security since the code used is unique and won’t have major loopholes

Anyway, custom development has potential disadvantages, including higher cost, longer development time and possible challenges in future updates. However, custom food delivery website development may be better for disclosing your concept's true potential, as you can tailor every detail to match your business image. Besides, in the long run, a custom food ordering solution is a considerable finance saver, as you won’t have to worry about increasing fees from off-the-shelf website builder providers.

A ready-made food delivery website is a pre-built platform that you can quickly set up and start using. These solutions are generally more affordable and faster to deploy.

Here are the main benefits of off-the-shelf food ordering website creation:

• Quick Deployment: Ready-made food delivery sites are easy to implement, and it takes a few hours or a couple of days to have these solutions in place
• Lower Initial Cost: These solutions are normally cheaper when it comes to purchasing. Therefore, they can be tailored for small businesses or even fresh start-ups
• Simplified software management: It is normally easy to use and does not require specific IT expertise to run and manage most of ready-made food website solutions
• Accessible Updates: The provider usually performs updates, keeping your platform up-to-date

Let’s also disclose the cons of ready-made food ordering websites:

• Limited customization: Your ability to define the level of customization of features, design, and integrations is usually restricted
• Scalability Issues: Ready-made solutions may not scale well as your business grows, as you’re always tied to the service provider
• Generic design: The design of your food delivery website won’t stand out since many other businesses might also use the same website template or platform
• Recurring costs: You might need to pay ongoing subscription fees, which can add up over time.

For sure, you’re the main decision-maker when it comes to the form factor of your food-ordering website. However, a custom-built food delivery website is generally the better choice for businesses that want full control over their platform. This includes the need for a unique set of features, scalability potential, and general alignment of your business values and food delivery website.

Undoubtedly, initial investments are much higher. At the same time, the long-term benefits of having a food ordering site that perfectly fits your needs offers robust security, and allows for seamless scalability often outweigh the downsides.

Before getting into the development process, let’s single out the crucial elements of a food delivery business. Every food ordering platform has three different stakeholders. So there are four different solutions to make every part of the business work together:

• User-facing solution
• Restaurant solution
• Courier solution
• Admin panel

Each part of the platform has a list of required features. The functionality can be basic and advanced. Basic or MVP features stand for functions that are needed to satisfy the basic user needs. As for advanced, they add some exciting options and make the user experience better.

How to make a food ordering website? It’s common to create the MVP version and release it to the market. After getting some feedback from the users, you can develop more advanced features.

Let’s find out the details of each part of the food delivery website and features for each solution.

The customer interface allows users to go through restaurants and their menus, make orders, request delivery, and more. Let’s see what user-side features you should consider.

Onboarding

Before ordering, users need to sign up. So, it’s better to integrate such registration options as email and password or phone number and password. To develop a signup feature, developers can use Amazon SES and Amazon SNS.

Profiles

Profiles include users’ personal information such as name, address, payments detail, phone number, and e-mail. Therefore, it's vital to use modern security certificates to guarantee data protection. Also, it’s a good idea to save an order history. Hence, customers will be able to repeat the order effortlessly or keep an eye on what they ordered earlier.

List of restaurants

This feature is vital to build food delivery website. It provides the listings of all restaurants you’re delivering from. It’s possible to generate extra income by offering establishments to get into the top for some fee. However, this works for companies with a strong market position and a comprehensive list of business partners. The most popular APIs for restaurant listing are FourSquare Places API and Grubhub API.

Search and categories

Customers need to choose a restaurant and dish from the menu. To make a food ordering website more user-friendly, you need to add a flexible search system. For instance, they can look for a particular food or restaurant’s name to select the dishes from. Besides, if you cooperate with different venues, it’s better to allow users to filter restaurants and cuisine by type of food, price, ratings, location, food preferences, delivery time, etc.

Payments

Users also need an opportunity to pay for the order using the service. You can integrate popular payment methods like PayPal, Stripe, and Braintree. Or apply for third-party services like MasterCard, Visa, and American Express. The main benefit of hosted payment solutions over non-hosted one is that they’re responsible for secure transactions and easy to implement. Besides, every payment gateway provider has its own SDKs placed on the official website. Those SDKs simplify the work for your software engineers since all the credit card information is processed by them.

Keep in mind that clients appreciate the opportunity to cancel their orders in case of an emergency. So, consider an efficient money back policy to facilitate the getting refunds process, thus, increasing customers’ loyalty.

Order tracking

Order tracking is a great way to enhance the service-customer relationship. Order statuses can be displayed on the screen. Or you can add a map and a real-time monitoring system. However, the last one requires a mobile solution for couriers to track the current users’ locations.

Ratings and reviews

Ratings and reviews will help you know what cuisine and what restaurants customers prefer the most. And what establishments offer poor-quality food. Besides, the majority of people check the reviews before opting for a particular service or product.

Here you can find the MVP features of a user-facing solution along with required development time.

This solution lets restaurants join the food ordering service and manage the order. For example, they can see and manage all the received orders. Restaurants can add information like name, location, working hours, contact details, and more. Besides, using location-based features, you can define customers’ whereabouts and enable them to order food from the closest restaurants. To accelerate the food delivering process, users can also save their locations. The most popular APIs for location search and tracking are:

• Google Places API
• Core Location Framework
• Google Maps SDK

Restaurant solution also offers to manage orders and look for a free courier. The page can show the order status like canceled, completed, or delivery. Also, it’s required to add a menu with photos and descriptions of the dishes. It’s good to offer customers promo codes to engage more users.

This part of the food delivery website is available for couriers. To use the service, they need to sign up. Here, you also need to offer at least two options: using email and phone number.

Utilizing this solution, couriers can fill in their personal information like photo, phone number, name, and others. Courier can look through the order details like delivery address, time, and order size. After that, they can accept the order.

It’s better to integrate a chat feature to make a food ordering website more comfortable. So, couriers can discuss the order details with the customer or restaurant manager. For instance, Freshchat API allows couriers to chat with clients in real-time. Freshchat stands for messaging service that enables embedding a widget in any food platform. Thus, the delivery men will be able to interact with and manage users’ requests effectively. Additionally, it’s better to create a mobile app for couriers since it’s more convenient for them to use an app on the go.

Admin panel

The admin panel offers a bunch of cool features for management. It lets product owners and their teams manage users, restaurants, and couriers. For example, it’s possible to edit, ban, or delete users.

Additionally, using the admin panel, it’s possible to manage the revenue by weeks, months, and years. The dashboard shows the most profitable restaurants and the most popular dishes.

You need an admin panel since it’s impossible to manage a lot of users manually. To create an admin panel for a food ordering website, developers need at least 255 hours.

As a web app development company with expertise in food delivery website development, we’ll discuss the appropriate steps you need to take to set up online ordering platform for your business.

It all starts with the project query you left on the vendor’s website. This application proceeds directly to the Business development manager. Once the request is processed, the manager contacts you to schedule a meeting for further project discussion and terms of fulfillment.

When you make a food ordering website, the solution workshop stage will help you determine the basics of your site development. Software experts here work closely with you to define the project’s scope, goals, and technical requirements. They brainstorm and map out the food ordering website architecture, choose the tech stack and design user flows and interfaces.

This stage also involves creating wireframes or prototypes and identifying potential challenges in the creation of your food ordering solution. By the end of the workshop, developers have a clear, actionable plan to guide the development process, ensuring the project aligns with your business objectives.

The Discovery phase is vital for food delivery website development since it helps make an informational skeleton around the project idea. This stage comes with meetings where a business analyst collects information about your business, goals, and project concept. When all information is scrutinized, the BA draws up the specification, which details the features and covers all tech aspects. After that, you get the final estimate. Moreover, UI/UX designers prepare wireframes for each website page during this stage.

Once all the preparations are done, UI/UX designers create mockups for your future food delivery website (page by page). Then, they utilize wireframes made during the Discovery Phase, project requirements, and time-tested UI/UX design techniques to build an online food ordering website that meets your personal vision and company style. After that, designers pass the project to developers and turn to the supporting roles. This is one of the UI/UX design services we provide.

Developers convert mockups into a working food delivery platform relying on their technical expertise. The whole process is divided into sprints (fixed periods), during which the team needs to fulfill a particular part of the website’s functionality. Commonly, sprints last two weeks.

It’s impossible to deploy the website without thorough testing. QA engineers run quality tests to ensure the website works as expected and complies with the test plan. After that, they put down the results into the bug reports and sent them to the programmers. Bug report describes the state of the website's functionality during which the issue was found. The information given allows developers to fix the bug as quickly as possible. Finally, before handing over the product demo to the client, QA engineers review all the features and conduct smoke testing to ensure new changes don't break the old functionality and your food ordering website maintains sustainable quality and reliability..

The software engineers make final tweaks to make sure the website performs as intended and is all set for release. Once polishing is done, the product is launched to the target audience for testing and getting the initial feedback.

In some cases, the collaboration doesn’t stop after the website is made. Your solution may require the development team to participate further. They can maintain the product by implementing new functionality or updates.

So, let’s find out the final price to create a food delivery website. All the estimates below are based on the average rate in our region (Central Europe, Estonia) — $50 per hour.

How did we calculate the final price to make a website for food delivery? We added development and non-development time. After that, we multiplied the time by the team’s hourly rate.

So, to build a food delivery website, you need at least $80,800. We calculated the MVP version of the service. If you want to add more advanced features, you’ll likely pay more.

Notice: The time and price above is approximate. Feel free to contact our Senior Business Analysts to get a custom feature list and project estimate.

Additionally, the final price can vary depending on the team’s location. For example, developers from North America have higher rates in comparison to software engineers from Central Europe. To give you a hint, we’ve estimated the approximate cost to make a food ordering website in different regions:

• Central Europe. $80,800 (based on $50/h)
• North America. $161,600 (based on $100/h)
• Western Europe. $145,440 (based on $90/h)
• Australia. $161,600 (based on $100/h)

Cleveroad is a custom software development company with over 12 years of experience in the IT market. Our team has been helping startups, SMBs, and enterprises to get custom software solutions for various domains, including on-demand platforms.

By cooperating with us, you'll be ensured of the following benefits:

• Expertise in a diverse range of business domains, including Retail, Logistics, Healthcare, Education, Social Media, E-Commerce, etc.
• The ability to choose between full-cycle software development with a complete team of software professionals and on-demand IT service covering your current business needs
• 250+ in-house software engineers available, including mobile and web developers, DevOps, designers, PMs, QA engineers, business analysts, and more.
• A variety of flexible partnership models suitable for every case: dedicated team, or fixed price model or IT staff augmentation services
• Cooperation with an IT partner certified with ISO 9001:2015 (quality management), and another important certification - ISO/IEC 27001:2013 (security management), guaranteeing outstanding quality and robust security for your solutions

Our portfolio covers a lot of custom software development projects in different domains, including on-demand application. One of our latest cases is a platform to book custom services. called AYIO.

AYIO is a social business platform that allows everybody to offer their services to others and become self-employed. Its core purpose to find a required specialist to do some work or service. The platform provides various services, so it’s easy to hire a professional. AYIO is focused on European users. Additionally, the service has a custom-made payment account that we’ve integrated using Stripe. User needs to create an account, after that all the funds are sent to the banking account automatically.

If you want to create create online restaurant ordering site​ from scratch, you need to hire an experienced team of web developers. Fortunately, there are a lot of companies, including Cleveroad, ready to assist you in creating a food ordering service

Here’s what Cohen Ben Frei, founder of AYIO says about cooperation with us:

If you want to create an online restaurant ordering site​ from scratch, you need to hire an experienced team of web developers. Contact us. We’re ready to assist you in creating a functional, reliable, and secure food ordering service!