How to Develop a Grocery Shopping App? [Process and Features with Cost-Breakdown]

• On this page:
• Why Should you Invest in Grocery Mobile Apps?
• How to Develop a Grocery App?
• What are The Essential Shopping Apps Features for Your App?
• How Much Does It Cost to Build a Grocery App?

People nowadays look for a hassle-free, comfortable shopping experience. That’s why approximately 30 million mobile app users prefer using a grocery shopping app.

You can leverage this scenario by investing a grocery shopping or delivery app development.

If you are wondering, how do you make a grocery app?

In this article, I’ll be talking about creating a custom app for a grocery store or a supermarket. Following aspects would be included in the article to answer all your grocery app-related concerns;

• The process of developing a grocery app
• The primary features that are essential for your grocery shopping app
• How much does it cost to build a grocery app?

But before getting down to what goes into developing a grocery shopping app and the essential features required, let’s look at why a grocery app is needed?

Why Should you Invest in Grocery Mobile Apps?

As a technopreneur, keeping a closer look at the changing trends and shifts in your field is essential for your sustainability.

It helps you adapt to modern technologies and ideas and stay ahead of your competitors in customer service. Subsequently, mobile apps have done that for most of us with extensive features and utilities it offers.

Talking about grocery shopping, a few years ago, mobile devices started replacing handwritten grocery lists to avoid inconvenience.

As shown in the image above, with 59% and 69% of the US population opting for mobile devices to record their grocery lists and coupons, respectively, the change was significant.

Later, with the changing trends, grocery apps revolutionized the entire grocery shopping experience, generating an annual revenue worth $106 billion in 2020.

As the technological influx and Pandemic were the major reasons for it; the trend is expected to expand by 55% in 2025.

With that being said, it won’t be wrong to infer that online grocery delivery apps and smart grocery apps will be one of the primary needs of your target audience in the times to come.

Therefore, investing in a grocery app can bring you and your target audience with following advantages;

• Convenient and hassle-free shopping experience without the need to step out of your comfort zones.
• A reliable substitute to handwritten grocery lists providing easy access and saving options.
• Direct access to grocery offers, coupons, discounts, and more.
• A smart grocery solution that is built on specified features enabling entrepreneurs to target the right audience adequately.
• Providing additional content such as recipe books and healthcare tips to engage their target audience.

How to Develop a Grocery App?

Developing a grocery app requires you to follow through with a well-sought development approach and conduct massive research to cater to all the essential market needs and specifications.

Today, I would share with you a result-driven development approach implemented and recommended by Tekrevol.

Following are steps it includes;

1. Conduct Market Research

An essential stage of the pre-app development process is conducting thorough market research and defining your target audience.

It helps you get insights into user behavior and what your target market expects from your grocery app. Also, it helps you in developing an understanding of what is trending in the prospective market.

In addition to this, studying the existing grocery apps and included features help you highlight the loopholes in the existing mobile apps and rule them out with your product.

To collect proper data and get a better idea of your market, this is what you can do;

• Look for and study existing grocery apps for Android or iPhone on Google Play Store or App Store.
• Conduct user surveys with your target audience via social media, Google forms, and more to know more about your audience.
• Define your app development approach as per the collected data, including the budget, features, target audience, USPs, etc.
• Emphasize on prospects who showed the most interest in your product-related surveys, as they can be your primary audience.

2. Specify Your USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

A Unique Selling Proposition (USP) is an exclusive feature offered by a product or service that enables it to stand out from the competitors.

Once you conduct market research and analyze existing grocery apps, you highlight aspects to emphasize and provide a special feature to help your app stand out.

When you create a business plan for your grocery mobile app, your USP is the primary thing you add that often sets the base of your app.

Creating a USP may require you to develop a business canvas model and fill out essential details. The business canvas model used by project managers at Tekrevol looks like this;

3. Finalize Your App Technicalities

Next, you would specify what technology stack would be required for on-demand application development.

Here you also specify whether you would develop a native grocery app or a cross-platform application based on your target audience.

Other than that, what essential features you would add to your app to enhance user engagement (read the section below to read about essential grocery app features).

Also, the design and UI features are finalized in this section.

4. App Prototyping

This is a crucial step in the app development process.

At Tekrevol, 80% of our emphasis is on developing a fully functional prototype that includes all the required features.

A prototype is the alpha version of the product often given to the stakeholders to evaluate the performance and provide feedback to improve app functionality.

Prototyping your app helps you get critical insights into how you can improve your application performance. Also, you can get reviews from stakeholders regarding your grocery app.

If you wish to read more about what is an app prototype and how prototyping can help improve your app, we have an entire blog on “what is the process of making a prototype of your mobile app?”

5. Develop the Best Grocery Shopping App

Once you are done developing and testing your app prototype, get down to designing and developing your app.

Putting every technical, feature-based, and design-specific technique at work, you create a product that is the practical version of your business plan.

Developing a grocery app may require you to ensure that the UI/UX, frontend, and backend development approaches are in place.

Developing a full-fledged grocery app may require you to either hire an in-house development team or outsource to an external unit offering staff augmentation services or a dedicated app development service.

6. App QA and Testing

Once your app is completely developed, it is now time to test it.

Every development team consists of QA and testing engineers to ensure the app is adequately functional and does not include any glitches.

You may test your grocery app against the specified business plan, app technicalities, design flow, modular integration, and stress handling.

Once the testing phase is complete, the next step is to launch your app on the respective app stores.

7. A Robust Marketing Strategy in Place

To make sure your grocery shopping or grocery delivery app reaches the target audience, you need to have a strong marketing strategy in place. It helps in bridging the gap between your audience and your product.

From App Store Optimization to social media management, your marketing strategy must include every essential aspect to spread the word to your prospects.

This is what a typical app development procedure at Tekrevol looks like.

Like what you read? For more insights on the app development process, we have an article that tells all about how to make a successful app

Moving on, let’s have a look at what are the essential features that must be present in your online grocery app to attract your prospects.

What are The Essential Shopping Apps Features for Your App?

When entering into an industry that is fairly saturated but is in demand, it is important to understand the needs of your target audience and provide them a targeted product.

In doing so, incorporating features that can improve the user experience and engagement is what you need.

An adequately feature-packed smart grocery app would include the following features, divided into two categories, Admin Panel and User Panel.

Grocery App Features for the User Panel

• Login/Registration: Login or registration is when users input their data such as name, email, phone number, address, etc. Although the app could be used without registration, this feature is essential for data synchronization and customization.
• Product Inventory: Since the purpose is to enable users to buy their required products, having a categorical product inventory is essential.
• Search and Filter Options: Applying filters like color, weight, price, etc., or directly searching for the required products helps improve the shopping experience.
• Product Category Tree: This is another feature to improve users’ search experience, enabling them to walk through to their required product via searching for it.
• Loyalty Card: offering loyalty cards can improve both online interactivity and offline sales. Offering loyalty cards in the form of barcodes or QR codes can boost your revenue and strengthen your user base collectively.
• Bonus, Offers, and Promotional Sales: Nothing excites your audience more than bonus offers and promotional sales when buying products. Showing these on your app’s home page or informing your audience with push notifications can help you improve your sales.
• Favorites: After opening the app, when users directly get to see their favorite and most preferred products can be a prospective aspect for your app. Since it enables feature and content personalization, it improves user experience.
• Push Notifications: Push notification is a primary way to communicate with your customers via your app. It helps in keeping your prospects updated and connected to your business.
• Shopping Cart: A cart is definitely an essential feature of the app for your customers to collect all the products and review them before finalizing the buying. This feature usually comes at the end of the buying process.
• Delivery Options: Providing delivery services can be an additional feature your grocery app can provide to your customers. With or without delivery charges, this can improve your chances to strengthen your user base.
• Payment Methods: A payment gateway is essential to include in your app to ensure a complete grocery experience. You may include several payment methods as per convenience. Don’t forget to add the cash on delivery feature.
• Map: Maps can help your customers to track orders, find offline stores, send location-based notifications, and more. Incorporating Google Maps or Apple Maps APIs can help you include the feature in your app with just a few clicks.
• Additional Content: Providing additional content such as built-in recipes and healthcare tips in the blog section can help improve user engagement and interactivity.

These are some of the essential features that we think a grocery app must have. However, the features and functionalities may differ as per your app type and target audience.

Grocery App Features for the Admin Panel

The admin panel in a grocery app can manage the app performance, user account, displayed data and functionalities, and more.

The following features on the admin panel can enable better management and optimization of your grocery app.

• User-Profile Management: Administrating and managing user profiles, approving user accounts, and optimizing their content can be done with this feature.
• Order Management: Admin panel must be enabled to view new and old order lists, confirm current orders, tracking their statuses, and other related details.
• Payment: Admin must have a track of all the payments made corresponding to the orders. Also, it would provide a means for analysis of the most used payment method.
• Push Notifications: Creating and sending notifications to all the users or a particular group of users to update about new offers, product lines, and services.
• Content Management: Keeping track of available content such as content, product inventory, blog posts, etc., and updating it as per the need.
• Analytics: Analytics can enable to keep track of app performance and activities to derive important data and optimize as per user convenience and need.

How Much Does It Cost to Build a Grocery App?

Coming down to an important question that pops up when developing an app, the cost.

The cost of developing a grocery app fairly depends on multiple factors;

• The size of the app
• The feature complexity
• Technologies stack and platforms used
• The hourly app development rate
• Location of the app development company

The factors may include more, but the basic cost of developing an app is subject to what is being developed, where it is being developed, and who is developing it.

To provide a ballpark average of grocery app development from a trusted mobile app development company, the cost may range between $40 and $50 per hour.

With a proper cost-breakdown structure corresponding to the stages of app development, Tekrevol implements a feature-based approach for cost optimization of every app development project.

Do you wish to calculate the cost of your app? Head straight to our cost calculator.

And, if you wish to read more about the cost of developing an app and the factors that impact the cost of app development, read here.

Wrap Up

App development is undeniably a dreading and risky task, but it’s always worth it.

As an entrepreneur, investing in app development requires you to think about the market value and need of the specified product, getting insights into what users expect from you, and what are future aspects of the app.

Subsequently, investing in app development is not just about the cost rather, it includes your efforts and time that add more value to the product.

So, when you are planning to develop an app, thinking about some of the primary aspects mentioned in the article can help you make a better decision. Furthermore, collaborating with a successful and experienced app development company, like Tekrevol, can help you think effectively in the right direction.