Ever since the pandemic, the shift of traditional grocers to online platforms has been quick and in large volumes to meet the ever-increasing demands of customers. And while this shift first seemed forceful, it is proving beneficial to most vendors now.
Customers don’t want to step out and go to a brick-and-mortar store to search and buy their groceries, especially with today’s fast-paced lifestyle. According to a study by Statista, the number of online grocery product shoppers is expected to reach 163 million in the United States alone. This estimate did not exceed 87 million before the pandemic.
If you are a grocer looking to expand their business by opting for grocery delivery app development, you should be aware of its associated costs. Average custom grocery app development costs can range between $40,000 – $300,000 and more, depending on the specifications of your app. Here is a step-by-step cost breakdown of developing a custom grocery app project.
Factors that impact Grocery App Development Cost
Grocery apps have been around for a while, and many new market players keep joining this space to reap its lucrative benefits.
However, this also raises the competition and the bar of what a basic grocery app needs to have to attract customers. When carrying out a basic grocery app cost estimate, these factors are to be considered without fail –
1. Registration/login
No matter what kind of grocery app solution you are building, your users will need an option to register an account through which they can order groceries and save their addresses, personal information, and other data points to use your app. You need to ensure that the registration process is seamless.
With the ongoing standards, you might need to also include social media logins to popular platforms such as Facebook, Google, and LinkedIn. These require API calling to these respective services. Hence, when estimating the overall grocery app development cost, you need to consider that.
2. Location feature
Al grocery app needs a location feature that helps the delivery partner understands where they need to deliver the order and helps the customers locate nearby groceries to order groceries from. Hence, you might need to integrate the same feature with different purposes, which adds to the cost of a grocery app development project.
3. Platform selection
You might have decided to build a grocery app. But have you thought about what platforms you will make it available on?
Are you looking for a website or a mobile app? If you are looking at a mobile app, are you planning to launch it on Android or iOS? Maybe both? The cost of developing your grocery app will fluctuate depending on your choices.
4. Type of development
Now that you have decided on the platforms you want to target, you should decide what development approach you want to take for your grocery app solution. You can go for native app development if you are planning to build a platform-specific app for only Android or only iOS.
If you want to target both platforms, cross-platform grocery app development makes more sense since you can build apps for iOS and Android with a single codebase and half the price. Even if you are developing an app for only iOS first but plan to expand to Android later, going for a cross-platform is more cost-effective as you won’t have to rewrite the app from scratch for Android later.
5. App UI/UX
UI/UX is vital in how users perceive and feel about your grocery app. If your grocery app doesn’t have a smoother interface and choppy animations, it might throw away the user, making the user want to uninstall your app. Hence, hiring professional app designers requires you to invest in app UI/UX.
6. App security
When users install and use your grocery app, they sign in with their social media or mail id and save their card details for making payments purchasing groceries.
This means they trust your app to be secure enough to safeguard their sensitive and financial data against fraud, exploitation, or misuse. Hence, you need to consider the cost of integrating proper security protocols in your overall grocery app development budget.
7. App features
Features you want in your grocery app will be one of the most important deciding factors on the overall grocery app development budget. In simple terms – the more features, the higher the cost. However, if you outsource your project to a reputed grocery app development company, they will cover all the basic features under their essential software cost estimate. But if you need additional features such as video calling and repeating ordering, the costs for such features will add to the basic estimate.
8. Required tech-stack for grocery app
Your grocery app will depend on many third-party vendors to be a fully serviceable solution. You need payment gateways like Stripe, PayPal, Braintree, and more for managing payments and refunds; then, you need services like Twilio for authentication and device verification.
You will also need cloud solutions from Amazon, Azure, or Google. And the list goes on and on. Hence, you need to carefully handpick the right tech stack so that your grocery app project is fully functional and under your budget.
9. Developer rates as per country
Where you get your grocery app developed will highly influence the overall grocery app development cost estimation. Average developer rates differ from country to country, which significantly impacts the overall cost estimations. Suppose you develop your grocery app in the US. In that case, the average hourly rate of developers is much higher ($80-$120) than if you hire dedicated developers from an experienced grocery app development company in India ($25-$70).
10. Developer experience and scale of your business
Creating grocery apps can require very specific skill sets; hence finding the right developer can be tricky. If you need to create a basic grocery app, you can hire an inexperienced or amateur developer to create your app’s basic logic and layout.
However, suppose you are truly planning to expand your business to a national or global level. In that case, you need to hire professional grocery app developers with proven experience in creating custom solutions. Hence, depending on your project’s scale and the developer’s experience level, your project cost may vary.
11. Number of iterations
The number of iterations to the app being developed will vary depending on the kind of developer you hire and how strong your communication is. More number of iterations, the higher the cost. Hence it is important to have a project requirement document ready before approaching a grocery app development company to have a clear idea of what you want them to build, saving you both development time and costs.
Final words
These factors affect the cost estimation of a custom grocery app project. Keep these in mind when developing your next grocery app project and outsource your project to a trusted, market-proven grocery app development company that has previously worked on grocery apps for different clients.
