A Step-by-step Guide Towards Developing a Successful Taxi Booking App in 2020-21
For a business to stay motivated and win over the customers, it is important that it stays updated with the latest trends, and accommodate most of them.
The taxi booking app segment is one such niche that calls you to be abreast with the latest trends and keep updating your app with new features.
The market before the inception of the taxi booking app
The taxi booking niche, before the app world was introduced, was complete chaos.
It was a place that left the customers dissatisfied, whether it was timeliness, the driver’s behavior, or the charges.
Uber took up the challenge posed by the space and pioneered with its taxi booking app concept.
This led many others to think of the uncapped segment, and ultimately today you see a competitive and highly defined fleet space.
In such a demand-oriented space that calls for the ultimate experience, we have come up with a step-by-step guide that will help you define an app for the customers.
Before we launch into the guide, let’s understand how the app has redefined how customers and drivers lead their lives.
The market after the inception of the taxi booking app
The taxi booking app has made a great difference to the customers.
They can book a cab before leaving their homes, thus spending less time waiting.
The booking app also allows them to know the fare in advance and gives them complete details about the driver who is coming to pick them up.
The convenience and timeliness of the booking app have redefined the life of the customer.
For the driver, the taxi booking app is a heaven where they can earn as much as they desire to, and shut down their meters once they are done with the day’s earning.
It is almost like working on your own and gets them the freedom they have been looking for.
With such advantages, you simply cannot say no to the taxi booking app. It’s time to see how to get through the development of this booking app.
How does a taxi booking app work?
Let us begin with how a taxi booking app works, which will help you get a chance to explore the UI for the app.
• The registration page is the initiator for the taxi booking app. You can use social sign-in or your phone number to get started with the registration. This page is essential for ensuring proper login and to make sure you have all the details of both the customer/driver on your app. This makes up for the initial safety feature you want to incorporate in the app.
• The booking page is the next defined part of the mobile app. Your user should be able to make a booking with ease. With minimal text entries, the app should be able to book the cab from the customer’s exact location to the point they want to travel to.
• The drivers should be able to see that a booking has come their way. The drivers should be allowed to accept/reject the booking. Once accepted, the driver details should be available on the booking app of the customer and vice versa. This allows both, the driver and the rider, to know a bit about each other.
• The ride tracking page is the next defined UI step, where the user can track where the driver is and by when they will reach the user.
• Once the rider has entered the cab, the driver can start the ride. The ride ends only when the user has reached the destination specified in the app.
Essential Features for the Taxi Booking App
We now know how the app works, so it is time we learn about the features that you should install in the taxi booking app.
• Geolocation integration:
The drivers, when they accept the ride, get to know the location of the rider as well.
However, all drivers may not be familiar with the route to the destination. That’s why you need geolocation integration, which helps the driver plan their travel to the rider’s location.
In fact, this will also help them with the route from the location of the rider to their destination. This feature is a must-have for your taxi booking app.
• Payment options:
You need to give the rider several payment options on your app so that paying the money is easy and hassle-free for them.
Add the numerous wallets, net banking, debit/credit card, and other variety of options for the rider. This way they will realize that opting for a cab booking service is indeed a good idea.
Make sure you cater to the security needs posed by them when integrating payment gateways on your application.
• Notifications:
The user would like to get notified about the new updates in the app, new offers, and other such things.
The notifications feature is indeed a great way to connect with the customer and make them know of the new updates.
• The reviews page:
This feature is important as that will give the driver and the rider a complete boost.
Make sure you include the ratings and reviews page, which will help address the different issues faced by both. This will also help you improve your business and give it a better structure.
• Scheduling:
The ride schedule is in demand in the present times, and you cannot ignore it completely. You should allow the user to schedule the ride and help them get to the destination on time.
• Ride options:
Like Uber, you can segment the rides into different categories, based on the cars, money, etc. You should make a booking from the different segments easy for the customer.
The idea is to improve the ease of use for the customers and make an app that does not deny the rights to the driver either. We will talk about how best you can win over both riders and drivers with your app.
The winning formula for the taxi app development
It is not just important to know what to include, it is also important for you to know how to win over your customers.
There are certain elements that you simply cannot ignore when developing an app for your taxi business.
• Going smart
Going smart with your solutions is one of the winning formulas for staying updated and being relevant in a competitive market.
Know what is missing in the market, and how you can cover it up with your solutions.
For instance, for a very long time, the cab booking niche was facing issues like traffic congestion, which led to delays in reaching the destination.
It was also seen that people could not book cabs because there were none available.
To be able to combat this situation, the ride-sharing aspect was introduced. With this, office goers could share their cabs with other people.
A lot of people wanted to gain access to bikes or other modes of transport, and several apps introduced bike booking or truck booking through their apps.
The idea is to understand the changing market, the evolving needs of the customer, and the missing pieces in order to deliver a strategy that will win over the customers and give tough competition to the existing players.
• Planning as if you are a presidential election candidate!
Planning is essential when you are developing a taxi booking app for your business.
You ought to know what features you want, the kind of UI you wish for the application, and how the users should be able to navigate from one place to another in your app.
When you have planned or organized this structure, you can easily play out an app that will attract the needs of the customer, and be user-friendly to them.
Make sure you understand the customer’s UI preferences and their mobile app usage behavior, before planning the app for them.
• Don’t over-engineer the app
It is vital to stay relevant and be affordable to users.
You should consider options for the wide range of customers in different brackets and niches associated with you, and develop an app according to their preferences.
Make sure you consider how they connect with your app, what makes them book the cab, and what makes them cancel the same.
This will give you a complete idea of what you really need to address when including pricing and cab options for the customers.
• Keep 40% of the budget reserved for marketing
Marketing the app is yet another strategy that you need to define before launching the app.
The target audience to whom you are planning to market the app and their preferences should be considered before launching the plan.
You should even begin outreach activities before you plan the actual launch of the app and reach out to the potential customers using channels they most often use.
The winning formula for making more profit with the taxi app
2020 has presented many new things to us. One of them is super apps.
A super app is nothing but an app that offers multiple services such as taxi, food delivery, grocery delivery from the same app.
The concept of the super app has been very popular since the inception of the GoJek app that offers more than 25 services from a single app.
But in 2020, it emerged as the necessity rather than the market trend to not experience a nose down in revenue when the taxi market is already struggling due to COVID-19.
In essence, you don’t have to just offer taxi booking services from your app. But you should also explore other options such as courier delivery, food delivery, grocery delivery from the same app.
Since with the taxi booking app, you already have resources and infrastructure, you don’t have to spend more to offer multiple services from the same app.
Talking about the top taxi booking app Uber, it now allows users to order groceries too. For that, Uber has tied up with supermarkets.
In some cities of the USA, It even allows users to order prescription and home healthcare products from the pharmacy stores.
Before making a final call, get a live demo of the taxi + courier delivery app & free consultation
Coruscate Solutions being the top taxi app development company has already sensed the market challenge and developed a taxi + courier delivery platform to solve it.
The best thing about it is that it is highly customizable. Thus, if you have a unique feature idea of UI idea, our in-house app developers and designers can easily implement it.
The most significant benefit of our taxi + courier delivery app or platform is that you will get features of two different apps into the single app at the price tag of the single app.
We strongly believe that you should have in-depth knowledge of the taxi app before you make the final call. Thus, our most experienced business experts provide you with a free app demo and consultation.