As a company providing food ordering and delivery software we talk to many customers everyday who want to add the feature of allowing their buyers or customers to be able to track their food delivery drivers in real time on google maps. This sounds like a real nice USP feature to provide to your customers and buyers. However My experience on implementation of this feature has not been good and fruitful. technically this is an average feature and can be implemented. The issue that I saw was in actual implementation by the business owner starting off on a new business. Let me take you through a case study of one such scenario.

Case Study 1

Requirement – Client buys food ordering and delivery software from us with all the tracking features. however he furtherwants to implement a feature where even the customer can track their delivery guys and get updates in real time on where the delivery guy was and in how much time will he reach the customer.

Technical Implementation – We impemented this features using google maps api already integrated in our food ordering and delivery system. This cost client extra bucks for custom programming but he got the feature he was looking for and the one he felt his customers would love the most.

Execution Issues – Now client had just started his new business he had a team of 4 delivery guys and was catering to one specific area of a city. As in any team it takes time foe the entire team actually become and team and sync together and work seamlessly aand so was the scenario with clients team(and generally from my experience food delivery at ground level is still an unorganised sector unless managed by bigger and experienced business). Also clients timings with his restaurants was not yet synced. For pickup and deliveries sometimes the delivery team was earlier or sometimes late. These kind of syncronization generally happens more with practical exp. and less with on paper business plans on the ground level. Client was managing to get good business from his network and online sources however his biggest and major issue was that a very good chunk of his customer was becoming unhappy and giving negative reviews – the reason for this was they used to place order and expected that food be ready immediately and deliver guy should be on the way but when they saw the delivery guy loitering on some other area on the map or doing some other delivery they used to become unhappy thinking that the delivery team was not giving their order the equal importance. Also with real time tracking client’s team could also not give any good excuse coz customer was able to see everything in real time. After about 2 months and more than 50 complaints client came back to us and asked us to turn off the feature. After that he just sent email updates with the tentative expected times and gave an option of in app chat with their delivery guy. The very next month itself client only got 2 complaints. The simple reason behind this was that client got an update for e.g. that food would be delivered in 40 mins so their expectation was set and with no real time tracking there was no reason for them to get angry seeing the delivery guy in some other area or food still not being picked up in xyz mins and so on.

In a recent study that was conducted only about 12% buyers said that they would prefer to buy from a delivery company that provided them real time map based updates. an overwhelming 84% buyers said that they would prefer to buy from a delivery company that gives them decent expected delivery timelines and most important fulfills them.

Going by this it is clear that its not a good idea for a new delivery company to provide real time tracking to customers of their delivery. This feature would be good for a well established delivery team whose co-ordination is optimised.

Do you agree with this? or feel otherwise? Maybe your experience as an entrepreneur has been different. Do share your view in the comment section below. Would love to hear from you

If you are looking for Food Delivery Software then contact eDeliveryApp today to start your food delivery business.