Now these days Pets are more than a trend. Keeping pets is not seen today as the symbol of fashion. They are part of the family. Similar to kids, pets need sitters, when the pet parents are busy. This has increased the demand for Rover On-Demand Dog Walking App Development. According to the reports assembled by Research and Markets, more than 68 percent of the households in the USA have pets. And with no surprises, the numbers are increasing day by day. The inclination towards pets is increasing and people love to take care of an extra family member.

Industry Speaks:

A great surge in the pet industry has been seen for years. The financial downturn of the pandemic is not seen anywhere in the pet love. The quick-rising numbers have outpaced many of the leading sections. Looking from every metric, the pet industry has been the most lucrative industry of the time, giving rise to many online selling brands. The intense competition is there among the pet food retailers, pat care product vendors and majorly between the merchandisers who makes the high volume sales.

The two most popular players in the market, PETCO and Pet Smart accumulate almost half of all online pet product revenue. Amazon’s entry into the white-labelled pet care product selling gives a strong fight to startups who often lack the strategy of beating supply-chain glitches. Alongside, Walmart is also expanding its presence.

The sales figure of pet food increased by 63 percent amidst the Covid outbreak. According to the stats by Global Market Insights, the pet industry is expected to cross $350 billion by 2027, with a CAGR of 6.1 percent. In the US alone, the pet care product market has taken a new growth from $95.7 billion in 2019 to $99.0 billion in 2020.

The boom in the sales figure has given a strong rise to on-demand app development for pet care products or pet sitters. Dog walkers have been one of the most favored services for pet care. Keeping them healthy is necessary and there are many dog walker applications now offering such services.

There are many famous Dog walking applications such as Wag and Rover. Here in this article, we will discuss all the aspects of  how to create a dog walking app and its cost. This article is useful for entrepreneurs finding the pet industry lucrative and looking to develop an app like rover.

These days there are many app development companies that are providing customized dog walking app solutions, you can choose the best mobile app development company among them, for your next project.

How to Make Rover On-Demand Dog Walking App ?

Here, below you will find 5 simple steps for creating an uber for dog walking. The steps are easy to understand and simply formatted for the entrepreneurs to comprehend the process and cost. The development process starts from the business strategy development and goes through feature deciding, market research, revenue determination and steps to hire a mobile app developer.

1. Business Strategy

The very first strategy of every app development project is to create a business strategy. For creating the Rover On-Demand Dog Walking App, you need to create a clever business strategy that can stand by the competition and change of time. A strategy must suit your business goals for the future and present. You may be a pet walking service agency or an entrepreneur planning to start an aggregator business. While planning the services, you may also offer the services such as dog training, pet care and grooming services to expand the business, welcome more customers and earn revenue.

Also, it is not recommended to add up all possible services in the list. Instead, you must ask your available resources and decide the mainstream and then only choose the supporting business factors for monetization.

Determine the Revenue System

The basic idea behind every project development is profit. Either it is monetary profit or any altruistic reasons. For business ideas, majorly monetization is the core motive. If you are a dog walking agency, monetization becomes simpler. There are many ways you can earn revenue from the on-demand dog walking application. Here are a few of them:

Transaction Fee:

For aggregators, the transaction fee is a stable income. When a consumer buys some service and pays for the transaction. A percentage of the transactions is charged overpayment received by the vendor.

Paid Promotion:

Aggregators can charge for the paid promotion. When you let the agencies list on your app, they are charged the extra amount for featuring the services on the front page.

Paid Advertisement:

If you have decent visits over the website, other relevant businesses may be attracted to running ads on it. You can charge them a certain amount depending upon the size and area of the advertisement.

Surge Charge:

This is time-based income, where the higher prices are entirely dependent upon the demand level. If the demand is high and pet owners are not getting dog walkers due; you can provide them, dog walkers, at a higher rate. This helps in additional revenue for both dog walkers and portal owners.

2. Market Research

Market research is important to know user behavior and track trends. Reading the market thoroughly lets you understand the prospective business plans. Overall, this can be separated in three ways, where first you need to answer the question yourself:

• What is the targeted market and who is the targeted audience? This question may seem easy, but in fact, it contains a huge intricacy and complex research. Chase the target and narrow down the boundaries.
• What are the concurrent problems of your audience and how your solution perfectly solves the problem? Once you know the market, you need to understand the problems being faced by the users. And try to know, how you can solve their problem. Once you perfectly befit their needs, you can gain monopolistic power for the same.
• What are the current trends and how can you add value to the pet care market? Trends are always good for the market. The Pet care market is rising with speed; you need to know what are the trends in the market today and what else can you make people adopt to add some valu

3. Analysis of the Competitors

• Find out the competitive elements of the market. Like in your industry, find out competitive agencies and other dog walking service What are their USPs? What services do they offer? And which sort of marketing channels are they using.
• Next, you need to know the associated services. The type of service featured by your competitors and how they solve the customer problem. While understanding and researching the competitors, you need not copy the number of features.
• While studying about the competitors, you feel motivated and inspired. You can’t win a competition just by following your rivals. You need to put in something extra. Devise, what is left instead of their all efforts. And that’s the key you got for your market strategy. Your dog walking application must become the one-stop solution for the common and specific needs of pet parents.
• Find partners: Associate with your partners and collaborators. A business when ties up with another business increase features and services more than the income and assets. Integrating the number of services increases the resulting throughput.
• You can find the partnership with the businesses who have a similar business but offer different services such as veterinary doctors, pet training and other similar services. Partnering with the app can give more revenue. If you are aggregators, you may need to invite pet walkers and agencies to sell services.

4. List the Features

After the comparison and understanding of the competitors, you get a brief idea of the features. You narrow down the list of features into two parts, where the first is essential service and the second is the additional services, which are added later. Now you can focus more on the primary service as you find in Rover on-demand dog walking app.

5. Hire Mobile App Developers

Once you are set with your goals and made a rough idea for the roadmap, the next step is to hire the perfect resources. You may hire android app development service providers or any expert team of programmers. You may find any company with a similar portfolio of dog walking app development.

There are several platforms such as AppFutura, Clutch and Upwork etc. where you can hire eligible resources and programmers. You need to select the company with the expertise to create a dog walking app. The companies having experience in similar projects are considered more safe and reliable to make the better project.

Important Features of an On-demand Dog Walking App

For such complex apps, where multiple components of the app are there, the task of development is complex too. There are roughly three faces of the app, one is for consumers, the second is for dog walkers and the third is the admin.

Each aspect has its own set of features:

1. Customer App

Search and Filters:

This search helps the customer to find and choose from the number of services. Customers can search for the services, agencies, dog care service products, and cost of hiring dog walkers etc. The filter feature advances the search for pet owners to choose according to their preferences. You can fast your search and choose the most suitable one swiftly.

Profile Management:

This is one of the most common features nowadays for every app. As a user books the service or purchases a dog care product, it can check the profile of the agency. The profile comprises all details including services, products and gives a virtual check for the decisions. You can make qualified decisions for leaving your pet for care.

Photos:

Photos help get updates on your pet activities. Also, it gives you proof of your pet’s health and care. Dog walkers and Dog care agencies click photos of the activities and send the pics to owners.

Real-time Information:

For any dog care web app development like Rover and Wag, it is an essential feature to share the real-time location of their pet. Dog walking services need to build trust over the customers and real-time situation emphatically gives a sense of safety.

Reports:

The feature helps dog and pet owners in tracking all the bookings, activity levels and performance of their dog. Also, they can see the payments over the single dashboard.

2. Dog Walker App

Profile Creation:

In uber for dog walking apps, profile creation is a nice feature, where pet care agencies or freelancer pet walkers give a brief of their services. They can maintain the profile show their USP along with the profile images. Also, they can show proof of their registration to improve the sense of safety. Handing over your pet is not a small task and you need to be careful; which is an entirely comprehensible thing.

Accept and Reject Request:

As a customer visits the app, it searches for the service or product. Dog walkers can check the request posted by pet owners, check the details of the service demanded. They can accept or reject the services request.

Schedule:

Here, the dog walkers can maintain the schedule. They can plan out the upcoming jobs or schedule them It is also helpful in keeping track of the appointments and then there is less chance of missing them out. You get the right payment from the dog owner and does not end up with loss or chaos.

3. Dashboard

Manage Walkers and Customers:

Admin needs to manage both consumers and vendors. An aggregators app needs to provide different options and features to both parties. Here admin can manage all such things.

Allocation of Job:

Here, once the request is posted by the dog owner, it is then forwarded to the pet walker. Here the priority may be listed out upon the plan. Admin needs to manage the details and discard abrupt requests to maintain the credibility of the app.

Report Generation:

Admin can also generate time-based reports for tracking activities. If there are several plans provided to dog walkers, the admin can find the reports with tabular details of the dog walkers and respective plans. Admin can get details of the plan or subscriptions.

Revenue Management:

Here, the admin can check the reminders for pending payments and can check the revenue generated from sold-out services through commission.

Being a reputed android app development company, We recommend you that you have to check all the factors before hiring them, like size of team, location, past work, etc.

Time and Cost of Rover On-demand Dog Walking App Development

Once you have decided to develop the pet care platform or aggregator app, it is very obvious to think about cost and time. The time and cost of developing an on-demand dog walking app depend upon the feature and cost of an app. A simple app with ordinary features takes very little time to develop. It takes up to 3 to 4 months for developing such an app. Such an app can cost you between $10000 and $20000.

Calculating the time and cost of the development project is actually very simple. Just use the below formula:

Verdict:

In the digital era, mobile apps are a vital tool in every industry. For the pet care industry, now the small vendors too are looking for some sort of app. Dog walking startups costs are also rising with the mobile applications, but still, it is worth investing. A customer loves to handle such tasks using mobile apps.

If you are a service provider or aggregator, you must go ahead with the on-demand app development and you can watch your business grow. You can partner with any iOS app development service provider or android app development company, depending upon your marker researches. The Pet care industry is all set to grow more and the right time is now to step forward.