Re: Food Service App

TradeSpeedUK_Lt · 08-31-2019 05:30 AM

Hi,

I have a question.
I have someone who wants me to work out ways to create an App that his customers can download form an App store to use on Android, iOS and Desktop, where they can view menus and food items, add them to an order, and then order (and PAY), with the order coming through to the store.

I am confused with White Label vs Secure Accounts.

It seems to me that the customers would have their details in the app on their device, but they can’t see other people’s info. The store owner needs to be able to see all data, and get notifications when an order is placed, wither by email or notification in the app.

So, what would I need to be looking for? White Label? Secure? Private Tables?

Thanks in advance.

T

MultiTech

In order to do this you’ll have to white label the app; this will allow you to get the actual files that are your app so you can upload them to the stores, etc.
(Just as an aside here, having your app in a store is nice - but with AppSheet apps they run just as well inside a web browser (in most cases, and this sounds like one) as a progressive web app. This way people can just go to a web address and use the app; no downloading, installing, etc.)

This is something that’s a little trickier to make happen. From the sound of the use case, you’re probly not wanting to have to pay for a license for each person that accesses the app; if it’s for a local company to provide an online ordering service, you could have hundreds (possibly thousands eventually) of people accessing the app - you don’t want to have to pay for a license for each of them.

To solve this problem you’re going to need two apps; one that’s secure for management of things, and another public app for people to access.

But there are some limitations with the public app, the part of wanting customers to be able to see their data but not others is difficult; you can’t customize things like this in a public app.

I think the actual solution would be a business subscription, because then you can get a hybrid licensing structure to fit your situation.

I’m curious to hear thoughts from someone on the AppSheet team about a possible way to accomplish this WITHOUT needing a business plan; could a public app be constructed and still allow people to see their person data? @praveen @Adam @Aleksi

pravse

Most successful AppSheet customers are using the platform to build apps for use within an organization (for employees, team members, etc). Here’s what we learnt about consumer-facing scenarios:

Some apps are truly public (and usually either read-only or non-confidential data capture). That’s what the Pubisher Pro plan is for.
For apps for commercial stores (eg: a restaurant), there are good “off-the-shelf” providers like AppyPie and others that are cheap and standardized. In fact, those can even be integrated with an AppSheet app via an API call. This is why we have never integrated payment processing — we never really had a compelling customer scenario where someone really wanted to deploy something like this at scale on AppSheet.
Once in a while, there is a case of someone really wanting a custom consumer-facing app. Often, these are people with an innovative idea that they hope will scale. They need user signin and everything else and want it to go out to a million people. Cool — we’re ok with that via a business subscription. But almost always, there is no scale initially and our app creator is not ready to make that bet.

I think @MultiTech_Visions what you’re asking is — is there a cheap plan that lets users signin, where there is no scale commitment (i.e. not a business subcription) and that will stay affordable linearly with user growth. The answer is — we had such a plan. It was called the Standard plan, and we retired it after 4 years because it never really led to any such compelling apps. It just ended up being used for business internal applications in a sort of very limited-functionality incarnation.

Henry_Scott

@praveen, personally https://www.goodbarber.com/ is a better platform than Appyie for your suggestion

pravse

Right! I definitely do not want to endorse one drag-and-drop consumer app builder over another.

Henry_Scott

I understand. Was posting it here more for @TradeSpeedUK_Ltd benefit

TradeSpeedUK_Lt

Thanks.

I have found a guy who builds websites which include the foodservice aspect, and a reasonable price when you factor in all the features.

We’ll probably be going for that.

But thanks for the suggestions.
T

fjftist

Shabu Sai is a Japanese-style shabu-shabu and hotpot buffet restaurant chain with over 200 outlets in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia.