Online Booking App Development: A Full Guide for Your Business

Online booking app is becoming a hot and profitable business due to the demands and the win-win relationship between producers and customers. With the advantage of technology and convenience, online booking service is flexible and easily integrated with other businesses such as food and beverage, accommodation, and transportation. Therefore, it is not surprising that online booking app attracts various investors.

In this article, Adamo Digital will show you a full guide to start a business as an online booking app company.

Define Your Business

There are various types of online booking apps with different technologies and targeted customers. Generally, online booking services are divided into two categories: on-demand booking applications and in-advance booking applications.

On-Demand Booking Applications

On-demand booking application is usually applied in the business which customers possibly choose services or products and track delivery to receive them.

For example, taxi services (Uber, Grab), dedicated delivery services (Landtran, 24 – 7 Couriers), home services (Homee on Demand), laundry services (Rinse, Cleanly).

In-Advance Booking Applications

In-advanced booking application includes the apps allow the customer to book appointments using calendars. Some typical services using this app include hospitality services, food, and beverages (Uber Eats, Starbucks), travel and tourism (Skyscanner, Maven), hotels (HotelTonight), events and entertainment (Appy Couple, Oyeplay), beauty services (Stylisted, Treatwell), doctor offices (Zocdoc, Practo).

Therefore, clearly defining your business model helps you analyze customers’ buying behaviour and build apps addressing their problems.

Technology Requirements

After defining your business model and market, the next step is the technology required, resources needed and the development processes needed to be launched. Do you have a team to build your app or maybe outsource a software company development? In fact, the quantity and the complexity of technology stacks depend on services and apps’ concepts. However, every online booking system need to own the following must-have functions:

Map and Navigation

This function is essential in both on-demand and in – advanced apps. Customers can base on the map and navigation system to find their services/goods or track delivery. The smooth of your Geolocation decides whether customers stay with your app or not. Thus, you should invest strongly for this feature before developing the others. You can add external libraries for maps to your app. Other brands such as Uber and Booking.com have used Google Map API in this feature.

24/7 Customer Access

Since there is no staff during the booking process, an app may guarantee to be accessible anytime, anywhere.

Notifications

Reminding customers about upgrading an app, new products or timely promotions are the best ways to build a relationship with users and analyze them. Online booking app is a competitive market where every brand tries to renew itself. Therefore, installing notification helps customers remember your brands, know what you are doing and become loyal.

Business Analytics

Mobile apps are ideal database storages which control the number of bookings, visitors, downloaders and most popular services. It is good to utilize them to study users’ buying behaviors for improving purpose.

Online Payment Gateway

The most important thing is the security factor. Information including customers’ bank details or debit/credit cards should be encrypted and hidden to protect their privacy. Moreover, you might give customers multiple payment options such as card or cash depending on their buying habit. In terms of the global app, global currencies support is advised.

Custom Features

They relate to particular businesses including promotional offers, marketing of outside service suppliers, feedback or ratings. Installing custom features depends on businesses’ specifics. For example, Uber allows their drivers and customers rating app and sending feedback.

Data Encryption

This is the priority and fundamental condition of app development. Encryption not only protects producers and customers’ data, payment information but also guarantees secure communication among customers as well as between customers and companies.

Marketing Process

No matter how good your app is, it will be forgotten if there is no marketing campaign to attract more people. Some people say that the best time to promote an app is on the very first launching days when your app is on the top chart of Google Play or Apple Store, that’s correct. However, your application can get more downloaders if you start a marketing campaign in two to three weeks prior to the official launch.

Another marketing strategy which is underrated is remarketing and retargeting. When people click to the app but do not move to the next stage to download and use, any information customers enter to the app can be filed, collated and utilized for remarketing or retargeting. Therefore, your app’s advertisement will appear on other social channels which customers use in order to boost conversion rate.

To conclude, app development, especially online booking app development is a potential field.  The tips for running the app development business mentioned here are the basic ones, but a strong player needs to analyze, predict the market permanently and watch innovations. Thus, to make your app become outstanding among competitors, it is necessary to work on your product, improve it to meet customer needs.