Innovating the Food Delivery Industry with SocketCam
Blog Product & Tech Updates by Macie Blakeman
The food delivery market has undergone dramatic change in recent years. The birth of online order handling services put a technological twist on getting meals to customers, and the pandemic-driven interest in fully contact-free delivery has only pushed the concept further. What was once handled with a handshake now involves fully-traceable and guaranteed deliveries made possible with 1D and 2D barcode technology.
Consumer demand for online ordering, live order tracking, and at-home or work food delivery means that the food delivery industry is only accelerating, and Socket Mobile's SocketCam C820 represents another technological leap forward. Designed to operate with any camera-enabled Android or iOS smartphone, SocketCam offers accurate and high-speed scanning of 1D and 2D barcodes with a user-friendly interface at zero cost and with no need for dedicated hardware.
The process of delivering a meal from restaurant to customer involves barcode scanning at multiple points. Individual foodstuffs are tagged and scanned, ensuring no items are missed, scanned again when assigned a delivery driver, marking the pickup and routing the delivery, and once more after it has been delivered safely, within the time slot provided.
Until now, restaurants and delivery services had to use simplistic app software on their employee’s phones or purchase expensive scanning hardware. The SocketCam C820 is a free, camera-based scanning solution built on Socket Mobile’s CaptureSDK. Applications utilizing CaptureSDK can use any of Socket Mobile’s barcode readers, including both hand-held scanners and the free SocketCam C820 solution.
Accuracy and speed of barcode scanning is important for everyone from restaurant staff to delivery drivers working through multi-vendor apps. Any mistake or delay has a measurable impact on reputation, efficiency, and ultimately income. It only takes a few incorrectly scanned barcodes and misrouted deliveries for a restaurant's customers to move their business to a more reliable restaurant. This puts considerable pressure on the developers and product managers working on the apps which drive the modern food delivery economy.
Applications utilizing CaptureSDK and SocketCam can turn any mobile device into a professional barcode scanner to quickly and easily capture data on the move. There'll never be a penny to pay in licensing fees to either you as the developer or your customers as end-users, no matter how large your platform scales. SocketCam C820 is perfect for both small-scale restaurants to fleet drivers traveling throughout the country.
But being free from license fees and compatible with almost any mobile device makes SocketCam great for experimentation. For restaurants currently relying on manual tracking, a delivery app can be built quickly using Socket Mobile's tried-and-tested sample application source code. Staff can then be brought on-board using the devices with which they're already familiar, and can be quickly scaled from an individual test-case to complete deployment, once the benefit to the business of rapid data capture through barcode scanning has been proven.
With the free SocketCam C820, individual dishes can be tracked as they're packed, a delivery marked as ready for collection as soon as the bag is sealed, and drivers certain they're assigning the right bags to the right customers — all at high speed and using existing infrastructure. There’s no need for deployment of or training on unfamiliar hardware.
SocketCam can even help ensure that there'll be no time wasted at the point of delivery. Should a delivery take a driver outside cellular coverage, or a network outage meaning that it's not possible to transmit data live, the barcode can be scanned and its data stored for transmission once the signal is available again. No more struggling at the doorstep hoping for a scan to confirm as other deliveries in the vehicle grow cold.
A SocketCam-powered delivery solution offers a win for all involved:
- The restaurant, which can keep better track of delivery metrics and improve customer satisfaction through fewer delivery issues
- The delivery driver, who can speed through the administrative side of the job and stay fully informed of the number of deliveries they're making each shift
- The app developer, for whom SocketCam represents a reliable, trustworthy solution built atop the well-proven CaptureSDK which already powers over 1,000 apps from companies including Shopify, Square, PayPal, and more.
While SocketCam is ideal for on-the-go scanning of individual barcodes, those who expect a higher volume of scans (such as multiple simultaneous delivery drops to commercial venues or warehouse inventory and routing applications) may benefit from a dedicated hardware device. If that's the case, the process couldn't be simpler. Any of our high-performance 1D and 2D barcode or RFID/NFC hardware scanners can be added at any time and without the need to redevelop your app, thanks to our unified CaptureSDK.
The market for food delivery applications is rapidly expanding as consumer expectations for quick and accurate service are at an all-time high. It’s vital that restaurants have a reliable scanning solution for their delivery services in order to meet these expectations and maintain customer satisfaction. From the restaurant to the customer’s doorstep, barcode scanning is imperative to the food delivery journey and SocketCam is an innovative solution for all delivery apps alike. Data capture on-the-go has never been easier, and our free camera-based scanning solution provides a step in the right direction for the future of food delivery services.