Online takeaway service JUST EAT has seen a boom in mobile orders, a sign of things to come as smartphone and tablet adoption becomes commonplace.
JUST EAT’s figures reveal that takeaway ordering on mobile devices increased 350% between Q4 2011 and Q4 2012.
In Q4 2012, more than a quarter (27%) of all JUST EAT orders came from a mobile device. JUST EAT expects mobile to be the most popular ordering method by 2015, with the number of smartphone users in the UK predicted to more than double between 2012 and 2016, from 19.2 million to 41.9 million.
JUST EAT has launched its own free app for iPhone, and iOS devices, which has already made it to the top of the food and drink section of the AppStore download charts. The new app makes it simple to call up menus and user reviews on a mobile or tablet device, and see what’s on offer nearby from over 15,000 delivery restaurants across the UK.
“We experienced a massive increase in mobile orders last year and see mobile as an exciting area for growth in 2013 and beyond. We are investing to drive more and more innovations in this area, such as our new mobile app, which gives hungry customers easy, anywhere, anytime access to thousands of top takeaways around the UK. By making this investment to provide the best mobile experience possible to the end customer, we’re enabling our takeaway restaurant partners to compete on a level playing field with the big national players, and capitalise on the explosive growth in mobile.” said David Buttress, Chief Commercial Officer and Acting President of JUST EAT.
The JUST EAT app includes new mobile features like inline ordering for maximum ease of use, ‘saved cards’, enabling customers to save their credit card details to their JUST EAT account for quicker re-ordering, filtered search results by cuisine or customer rating, and exclusive discount offers at 1000s of takeaways.
“Ordering from a menu on a mobile device can be fiddly but with our ‘inline-ordering’ user experience there’s no more flip flopping back and forth, you can just add items right there on the menu,” explained Daniel Read, Chief Product Officer at JUST EAT. “It makes building your takeaway menu order really quick and intuitive; the customer satisfaction results we have seen so far are beyond our original expectations, and we have more to come”.
The app is the latest result of a major push on innovation in the last 12 months, with significant investment made by JUST EAT into in building its product team, including major hires such as Daniel Read, previously Chief Product Officer at ask.com, and the creation of the JUST EAT Product Lab.
“Innovation is a major focus area for JUST EAT and the new mobile app is the first of many mobile developments at JUST EAT, as we look to adopt a ‘mobile-first’ approach to our business,” added Read. “We are already planning further updates to our mobile site and ordering app, as well as looking at rolling out the JUST EAT app to other platforms and other countries. We are confident we have developed the most convenient and user-friendly food ordering app available.”
The app was designed by JUSTEAT and developed in-house and in partnership with Grapple Mobile. The new app follows JUST EAT’s major brand re-positioning, launched in the UK in September with the strapline “Don’t Cook, JUST EAT”, backed by a £5 million spend on a new TV ad campaign and supported PR, marketing, social and digital execution.