I am doing a comparison of all food delivery apps that enable restaurants to build their own ordering channels. Today’s review is for a product named DotPe. I will only cover the User Journey for today
For the purpose of this exercise, I am looking at Smoke House Deli restaurant
Customer Acquisition
There is no listing page/app and the restaurant is required to market itself and get customers to their followers. So restaurants should already have an active base of customers that it can reach out to. This is different from Swiggy/Zomato platforms, where customers can browse a list of restaurants. This can be a bummer for restaurants who don’t have their own active base or who are starting new.
Score: 1/10
First Impressions
As soon as I open the link, I am thrown in a page that asks for my location. If I didn’t know where I got the link, I wouldn’t have any context. I might as well think this is a site that collects location rather than delivery my order. However, once I give my location, I have this nice home page, where there are three sections
- Banner (usually restaurant promotions)
- Payment Offers (very important, especially if this platform is to be preferred by customers)
- Menu
I would have preferred if the banner text is legible.
Once I go into menu, the experience becomes even better. Nice combination of images and text. Featured products at the top of the page, will definitely help a power user. Category selection is easy, and not cumbersome. Overall, even if restaurant has 100 or more items in their name, the customer should be able to navigate it pretty easily
Score: 7/10
Ease of Usage
As mentioned in the previous section, just to start ordering, customer needs to go through three pages (Location selection, Home page and then menu page). I wouldn’t be surprised if their customer funnel shows that customers are dropping out before they reach menu page.
As the customer reaches the menu page, the ordering is quite straightforward. In the cart page, there is also a way to add Add-ons to your cart. You can also select a multitude of offers. A neat experience there.
Score: 7/10
UX
User experience is quite neat and crisp. The colors are bright and matching restaurant’s colors. The icons could be a little better. There are also some issues like banner images not having good resolutions.
One thing that irritated me is that I have to select the correct Smoke deli store. For delivery, I don’t mind any store from the brand. Even during the selection, my only distinction between stores is the distance from the store. Maybe, they could build a feature to automatically select the store.
Score: 7/10
Differentiation to Swiggy & Zomato
Haven’t seen any differentiating features with Swiggy & Zomato in the app. The entire app is quite straightforward and has just enough features to browse menu, create an cart and order
Score: 1/10
To conclude, overall a decent experience from the end customer. Some features for acquiring new users and some differentiating features to Swiggy & Zomato will help the product grow.
Overall Score: 6/10
Do comment and give feedback for this blog. This will serve as inputs for my future product reviews.
