A Step-by-Step Guide to Build an App Like FreshDirect

Last Updated on June 3, 2022

The number of e-commerce online grocery distribution giants such as Bigbasket, Grofers, Amazon pantry, FreshDirect and many more are now growing their market and revenue with a huge increase in quantity. According to a survey by think with google, 26% of shoppers surveyed, which 6 % of all consumers in the USA have been placing orders on grocery apps more than once a month.

The single online grocery app Bigbasket provides 1.6 lakh orders a day on average. Today, the shipping scenario is around 90,000 orders a day, and it has now risen and continues to rise One of the top grocery delivery apps which have been operating in the US is FreshDirect. 

Let’s talk about it a little.

What Is FreshDirect?

One of the first online food distribution systems in the United States is FreshDirect. The business manages and provides thousands of orders per day for groceries, frozen meals, fruits, vegetables and other products that shoppers usually find in conventional supermarkets using an advanced smartphone and web-based technology. 

The organization was initially founded in New York City and grew to cover most of the metropolitan area of New York and select counties of New Jersey, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, Delaware and the metro area of Washington DC. The processing practice called Just In Time eliminates waste and increases consistency and freshness, FreshDirect custom-packages groceries and meals for its consumers.

Former Fairway Market CEO Joe Fedele and Jason Ackerman, a former investment banker working in the grocery business, formed the company in 1999. 

FreshDirect’s firm, which was introduced to the New York market in 2002, became popular for its convenience, fresh food and comparatively lower prices than many supermarkets in Manhattan, albeit around 10 per cent more elsewhere. Initially, The business was producing $2 million in weekly revenue at the time.

Related Resource: How does Freshdirect work?

How To Build An App Like FreshDirect

A productive flow of software production processes covers six main stages. We’ll have a closer look at each one at the bottom, in-depth. Regardless of the scale and complexity of the project, it would make your grocery delivery mobile app plan a success following this development process.

Step 1: Strategy 

The first step in the process of starting your own grocery delivery business is to identify the plan to turn your concept into a functional product. In your overall business mobility plan, you will have a more important aspect of this. As the priorities of one product can vary from another, there is also an app-specific effect on the mobile approach to be tackled during the process of growth.

In this step, you will:

• Identify the consumers of the app
• Research the market
• Establish the priorities and objectives of the app
• Pick the app’s mobile channel

Mobile applications cost $15000-$50000 on average and will take between four to six months to create. Your plan aims to concentrate your imagination on a simple view of your concept for the app. You should move further into the next step of the chain of production of mobile apps with this in mind.

Step 2:  Analysis & Planning

Your app concept begins to take shape at this point and turns into an actual project. Research and preparation commence with the description of usage cases and comprehensive functional specifications being captured.

Prepare a product roadmap after you’ve established the specifications for your app. This entails prioritizing the criteria for the smartphone app and sorting them into targets for implementation. If time, energy, or costs are an issue, identify and prioritize your minimum-viable-product (MVP) for the initial launch.

Part of the preparation process entails defining the expertise necessary for the growth initiative for your app. For starters, mobile platforms for iOS and Android use distinct stacks of development technologies. If your goal is to produce a mobile app on both iOS and Android mobile platforms, iOS developers and Android developers should be part of your mobile development team.

Related Resource: Grocery Delivery App Business Models

Step 3:  UI & UX Designing

The aim of the design of an app is to have a sleek look with smooth and effortless user experiences.

A mobile app’s success is measured on the basis of how much consumers adopt and benefit from all its functionality. The aim of the UI/UX mobile app design is to develop outstanding user interfaces that make your app immersive, intuitive and user-friendly. Although refined UI templates can assist with early acceptance, to keep app users interested, the app needs to have intuitive user interfaces.

• Information Architecture & Workflows

The first step in the design process of your mobile app is to decide the content that will be presented to the consumers by your mobile app, the data it will gather, user experiences with the final device, and the user journeys inside the app.

For enterprises, enterprise mobility solutions have users with various roles and rights, and as part of the knowledge infrastructure of the software, it is necessary to implement these laws. Workflow diagrams help describe any potential connection with the app and the navigation configuration of the app that a user has.

• Wireframes

Designers of mobile apps frequently begin app design with sketches on paper. The digital representation of sketches is wireframes. Wireframes are conceptual layouts, often referred to as low-fidelity mockups, which offer the practical demands of your app a visual framework.

The emphasis is more on aesthetics and user interface of wireframes, not on colour schemes and patterns. Creating wireframes is a simple and cost-effective solution to designing and iterating app templates in the course of design review. You should remember device-specific architecture when making wireframes. So whether the app is used on iPhone, iPad, or Android phones and tablets, it delivers user interfaces that are intuitive and platform-specific.

• Style Guides

Style guides are “living documents” where the design standards of an app are registered, from the naming rules of the organization down to the navigation icons.

Generally, the style guides include:

• What font family can the text of your app use?
• What’s going to be the paint scheme?
• How would the app design represent your corporate brand?

Style guides make a contribution to the interface approach of an app. As part of the mobile app creation process, creating a style guide early on increases your mobile app developers’ usability. Around the same time, adopting a style guide helps keep the look and sound of your app constant. You should follow app design tips from Apple for iOS apps and Google for Android apps as part of the app design.

• Mockups

The final renderings of the graphic interface of your app are mockups or high-fidelity sketches. By adding your style guide to the application wireframes, mockups are produced. If the creation of your app continues to complete, expect more improvements to its layout, workflow, and aesthetics of details. The most common application for making high-fidelity mockups is Adobe Photoshop.

• Prototypes

Although mockups view the features of your mobile app using static designs, software such as Invision and Figma will transform these into click-thru prototypes. Prototypes are incredibly useful to model the user interface and the workflows of the app anticipated from the completed product. Although production of prototypes will take time, the efforts are well worth it, as they provide early-stage testing of the design and features of your software. Prototypes also help define improvements to the planned features of the software.

Some businesses also choose to do prototypes at a wireframing level especially when the technical specifications of an app are not well thought out. Or for a focus group, there is a need to review the app’s planned features.

Step 4:  The Development

In the grocery delivery app development process, planning remains an important part of this phase. You would have to before real development/programming efforts begin:

• Define the technological framework,
• Choose a pile of technology, and
• Define the milestones in development.

There are three integral aspects of a standard mobile app project: back-end/server infrastructure, API(s) and the front-end mobile app.

• Backend

This section contains the database and server-side artefacts needed to support your mobile app functionality. If you are using an existing back-end platform, changes to accommodate the desired mobile features can be needed.

• API

An Application Programming Interface (API) is a communication mechanism between the app and a server/database back-end.

• Front End

The front-end is the native smartphone app to be accessed as an end-user. Mobile applications consist of immersive user interfaces that use an API and a back-end for data storage in most situations. In certain situations, the software can use local data storage where an app wants to allow users to operate without internet connectivity.

Through new models of smartphone platforms, mobile developments progress even quicker. In addition, every few months, new mobile devices are launched. With platforms and devices evolving rapidly, agility within deadlines and budgets is important for developing mobile applications. Utilizing an agile growth strategy if time-to-market is a concern. This practice encourages regular product updates of completed features. As part of the agile development strategy, identifying progress goals facilitates the development of a mobile device in the iteration.

It is important to hire an experienced grocery delivery app development company to help you successfully develop a mobile app according to your needs and within the required timeframe.

Step 5:  Testing

During the mobile app development process, conducting rigorous quality assurance (QA) testing renders apps safe, functional, and reliable. You first need to plan test cases that cover all facets of software testing to ensure extensive QA testing of the app.

Similar to how use cases guide the mobile app creation process, test cases drive production of mobile applications. Test cases are for test measures to be taken, test reports for software quality measurement to be registered, and corrections for retesting to be monitored. The presence of your QA team in the processes of research and design is the best practise strategy. Familiarity with the technical criteria and priorities of the app can help generate precise test cases.

To offer a quality mobility solution, the software can experience the following testing methods.

• User Experience Testing

In mobile app testing, a crucial move is to ensure that the actual version fits the user interface generated by the design team of the app. Your app’s graphics, workflow, and interactivity are what can give your app a first-hand experience of your end-users. Make sure clear fonts, style treatments, colour scheme, padding between info, icon design, and navigation are included in your app. It would have a significant effect on its consumer acceptance to ensure that the software matches the initial concept criteria!

• Functional Testing

The accuracy of the features of your mobile application is crucial to its performance. It is hard to forecast the actions and consumption scenario of any end-user.

To cover as many potential testing scenarios as possible, the features of your app should be checked by as many people as possible. When two separate users try the same function but get different results, you may be shocked to catch bugs. Both users may, for example, fill out the same questionnaire, but both will enter separate details, which could lead to a flaw being discovered.

The aim of functional testing is to make sure users can access the features and functions of your software without any problems. It can be further broken down into device testing (the whole app working) and unit testing (individual functions of the app operating correctly).

If you are building an interface for mobile devices running iOS and Android, a functionality comparison for all versions of your mobile app should be included in your functional tests.

• Security Testing

For corporate smartphone applications, confidentiality is of the utmost concern. Any conceivable flaw will contribute to a hack. In order to do rigorous compliance checks on their applications, several organisations employ outside companies. A few easy steps can be taken by your QA and development teams to make your app safer.

These log in sessions can be monitored on the computer and the backend if the app needs users to log in. The device can terminate user sessions when a user has been inactive for an extended amount of time (typically ten mins or less on a mobile app). To make it easier for them to log in again if your app stores user credentials on the computer, you must ensure that you use a trustworthy provider. For starters, iOS offers the Keychain function that can be used to store the account information of a user for a particular app.

To ensure there is no data loss, data entry types inside your smartphone app should be checked.

Step 6: Deployment & Support

Store for applications running on iOS and Google Play for Android. However, before releasing your mobile app, you would need an Apple App Store and Google Play Store developer account.

When uploaded to the Apple App Store, iOS applications undergo a review period that will take from a few days to several weeks, based on the nature of the app and how well it complies with the iOS implementation standards of Apple. If your software allows users to log in then, as part of the release process, you would need to supply Apple with a test user account.

For Android applications, there is no approval process, and within a few hours of submission, they become available in the app store.

Control its use across mobile analytics tools after your software becomes available in the app stores, and monitor key performance indicators (KPIs) to assess the progress of your app. Check accident reports or other user-reported problems regularly.

Encourage consumers to provide reviews and recommendations for your app for your business. To keep users interested, timely feedback from end-users and periodically patching the software with updates would be crucial. Mobile app patches would have to go through the same request and approval process as the original submission, unlike mobile applications where patch launches may be directly available to smartphone owners. In addition, you have to remain continuously on top of technological developments for native smartphone applications and regularly upgrade your software with new mobile devices and OS platforms.

Tech Stack For An App Like FreshDirect

• Native iOS Apps: Programming Languages- Objective C and Swift, ToolKit- Apple Xcode, SDK: iOS SDK
• Native Android Apps: Programming Languages- Java and Kotlin, Toolkit- Android Studio and Android Developer Tools, SDK- Android SDK
• Cross Platform App: React Native + JavaScript/TypeScript, Xamarin+ C#,Flutter
• Hybrid App: Ionic, Cordova

See also: Grocery Delivery App Development Cost Breakdown

Frequently Asked Questions for building an app like FreshDirect (FAQs)