Restaurant Booking App Development: Subscription-based app

With the increasing usage of mobile devices and faster internet services, food ordering via online applications has become more popular. The eateries and the users are relying more on the online channels to meet their needs.

Many food vendors are leveraging the prowess of mobile technologies to grow their business revenues. According to a survey, the restaurant businesses are expected to earn nearly thrice this year, compared to their revenue two decades back, which is a big leap in terms of sales profits.

Restaurant owners are looking for better ways that can help them gain more consumers while minimizing the human efforts needed at reaching out to new customers and noting down their reservations. They are replacing the existing manual processes with bespoke software solutions to ensure better customer experience at finding restaurant bookings while enhancing their profit margins.

Restaurant Reservation Apps automate the tasks involved making the process faster and more accurate. OpenTable, a giant in this category, claims to help to find more than 26million restaurant searches every month.

On the other hand, the customers can compare services, prices and location of the vendors to find them the best value for their money. Users can even avail themselves with special discounts offered by these apps, at the associated off-line stores.

On a similar occasion, our Mobile App development company led to the development of a Restaurant reservation system that works on both Android as well as iOS, which will boost the local restaurants in the long run.

The need for Restaurant booking mobile app development

The client was aware of the pain people face at finding a restaurant, despite the fact that there are several in the vicinity. 

At the same time, there were restaurants that didn’t receive much attention even though they offered similar services as the rest.

The client found this as a great business opportunity where the restaurants can share common screen space with details about their services and availability. The users too can find their desired restaurants based on various filters that include the likes of the cuisine types, the booking time, and distance from the current location.

The portal is a Multi-Vendor booking application where the users are charged on a subscription-based recurring payment model; while at the same time, multiple restaurant owners can show up their market presence, amenities, themes, cuisine specialties, and many more.

The restaurant booking system allows users to access the premium functionalities on an ongoing basis, producing a consistent revenue for the owners and enabling them to start more dynamic relationships with their customers.

The Credit Card details are obtained right at the time of Sign Up allowing the site owners to receive payments at regular intervals.

Let us have a quick look at how this Restaurant reservation system works.

Personalized accounts for using the Restaurant reservation services

The users need to create their personal Login IDs from the very start. The personalized accounts help the application to save user’s preferences from the past, thus optimizing results for the user.

The users need to register using their personal credentials like name, e-mail id, phone number, and the desired login password.

The customer can use the Login credentials to access the features of the Restaurant reservation application.

Finding the desired restaurants

The users can locate their preferred restaurants in the defined circle through a set of filters. The application sorts the result based on their distance, price, and cuisine types.

The users can select the maximum distance they can visit, and the application locates all the restaurants falling in the circle.

Enabling booking with restaurant reservation app development

Our table reservation app development company made sure that the customer could reserve their booking hassle-free for which we categorized the restaurants on multiple tags.

The users can select a date from the attached calendar, dining time, cuisines, and the restaurant from the list.

The image above represents the way customers can book a table of their choice.

What does the Restaurant reservation app development hold for the owners?

As a service provider, Restaurant owners can expect the restaurants’ reservation app to help them grow their business. The portal can be used to brand their restaurants as it offers them a great exposure against their potential customers while adding their website can add to their marketing campaign.

Creating a profile for the restaurant 

Much like the users, the portal allows the restaurant owners to own a space in the marketplace for which they need the help of the Admin.

The admin creates login credentials for the owners which can be used for managing details about their restaurants including the likes of location, Contact numbers, Email, and website.

Following is a snap of the admin panel for controlling Restaurant details:

Adding Cuisines to the restaurant profile

Much like the details mentioned above, the restaurant owners can manage the cuisines offered by them. The cuisine types are rather used as tags to make the search easier and more accurate. The owners can use it to present the food types catered by their restaurants and can thus gain attention from the right customers.

Adding the availability of restaurants on the calendar

Proactively expressing the unavailability on specific dates allows the customer to see you as a customer-centric business. Not only it saves them from the efforts to find you on the wrong days but also lets them search for temporary options.

In the following screen, the owner has unticked all the options for the dining time thus making it unavailable at any part of the day. The same can be done for a series of days by selecting the beginning and ending dates.

Availing coupon codes to the Restaurant owners

The Restaurant booking system Admin Panel allows the Admin to create Coupon codes to encourage the Restaurant businesses. The owners can gain more attention as the users will be pitched with discounts.

According to a survey by Retailmenot, 38% of the users tend to drive more than 10 miles if offered a good deal.

The following screenshot explains how the Admin can manage the Coupon codes:

Multiple Membership Plans

Being a subscription-based service, the user needs to select a membership plan before signing up. Each plan has its own set of features along with the time duration. Post the expiration of the plan, users are automatically charged for the plan renewal. The recurring model allows the users to receive the services for a long time while the Portal owners can have a stable source of income for future advancement.

Challenges faced while developing the Restaurant booking system

Restaurant booking app development was way more challenging than it actually appeared to be. With that many features at the front end and the back, our Mobile App developers had a lot to accomplish from the very beginning. That’s where experience shows up.

The Restaurant booking system primarily comprised of the restaurants that dealt with alcohol. To avoid the legal issues we had to somehow keep a check on the member’s age.

To implement the same, we came up with the idea of adding age verification as a parameter to allow registration.

Our Mobile App developers added another custom field that extracts the user’s Birthdate. The logic involved at the backend used the date of birth to proceed with the processes.

Moreover, it was important to alert the user of the nearest restaurants and their exact location. The exactness of location needed to be of high accuracy.

The users can set their radius varying between 1 mile to 10 miles and more. For a user who has opted for a 5-mile radius, has to be served only with restaurants that fall in that circle. The ones beyond the defined perimeter had to be excluded.

With those many challenges on our mind, we had to make sure that we use the right platform with perfect coding logic.

Technologies involved in Restaurants Reservation app development

• The Restaurant reservation system is primarily built on PHP and serves well on PCs as well as mobile phones. PHP offers a WYSIWYG interface that gives the developers a more robust platform to create, test, and deploy mobile applications across all the known platforms. Our developers found it easier to develop a restaurant booking system for Google Play Store and the App Store thus making it easier to access for users across the online channels.
• To regulate the on-time Subscription payments, we took the help of Stripe API. The integration allows the portal to automatically charge the user on due dates.
• Our developers have utilized Google Map API in abundance, especially for the mobile app versions. We integrated the Google Map SDK on the Android as well as on the iOS version to allow the application to fetch exact coordinates of locations. Similarly, Google Map integration helps to locate the restaurant correctly. With the help of jQuery based algorithm, the application picks the eateries in the vicinity with much ease.
• To make the inter-page navigations and immediate functionalities work faster our developers have made use of jQuery in the UI as well as for few parts in the back end.
• The date of birth is utilized well at the back-end as the jQuery logics help the portal to calculate the age of users. In any case, if the users’ age doesn’t exceed 21 years, the portal disallows them from proceeding.
• The database at the back-end is well managed with the help of the Yii2 framework allied with AJAX for the front-end synchronization.
• Other platforms like HTML are used as well to make the portal interactive and more functional.

Final words on Restaurant Booking app development

Developing a subscription-based restaurant booking app can help you earn through a more consistent channel where you can gain from both the parties while expanding your business contacts.

In case you are looking for a restaurant booking related portal that works on multiple platforms with ease, you can hire Mobile App developers from us. In case, you are looking to discuss your project or have a similar need, you can contact us directly.