Creating a Successful Mobile App for Retail Business Like Zara

Alex Gurbo
Nov 4 · 6 min read

Shopping apps are the new black in modern tech. Users love them for intuitive interfaces and high speed while business managers benefit from the connection with the target audience that these mobile apps help build.

Building e-commerce apps requires a strong background in software design and development. Successful projects like Zara’s mobile app create standards business managers should follow to succeed on the market.

In this post, you’ll find out what determines the success of a retail app, what features to include, and how much it costs to develop a top-tier product.

What Makes Zara Mobile App So Successful?

Zara is an acclaimed frontrunner when it comes to combining high-tech experiences with a regular brick-and-mortar approach in shopping. The brand was among the pioneers in implementing self-service checkout and digital receipts — no wonder its mobile app is tech-savvy as well.
To understand how successful the company’s retail app for Android and iOS is, check out the following statistics:

  • User rating — 4.3 out of 5;
  • The app ranked 24th by the popularity in the ‘Lifestyle category’;
  • Wide availability — iOS, Android, Blackberry, and Windows users can freely access the app.

Zara manages to successfully combine a wide range of features with an intuitive interface. Here are the reasons for Zara’s popularity as an app:

1. Intuitive navigation

Zara app designers avoided a complicated drop-down menu and pop-up windows. Instead, a panel at the bottom of the screen is all a user needs to move through screens. The app implements a block-based layout, with all items grouped in a stylish grid.

2. Custom interface

It’s common for retailers to transfer the desktop-style to mobile applications — the Zara mobile app is, on the contrary, fully custom. There’s enough white space to avoid cluttering the screen, the interface is visual, all blocks and panels are big enough to tap effortlessly.

Keeping the inconvenience of typing on a small screen of a mobile device in mind, the project team designed the interface in a way that users start checking-out without filling a single form.

3. Multiple pictures of each item under different angles

Zara made sure that the app users get just as much information about items as desktop shoppers. That’s why there’s an extensive image reel accompanying each product article. A user can scroll the app to see a selected item in all available colors and sizes, from different points of view, zoom in to see the texture quality.

4. Wide range of payment methods

A long payment options list allows users to check out on their terms — a shopper can pay with a credit card (Visa, Mastercard, American Express), a PayPal account or the brand’s gift card. A wide range of gateways, without a doubt, increases the company’s conversion rates.

5. Multilingual support

To improve the brand’s accessibility across the world, Zara’s mobile app development team ensured the app is available in all widely-used languages. As for now, the app supports 20 languages and has a user base in over 47 countries.

6. GPS integration to pinpoint nearest stores

Zara is one of the most popular fashion brands worldwide — it recently hit the 1,600 worldwide stores milestone. The mobile app does a flawless job at helping users reach the brand’s nearest point of sale. To improve customer acquisition and retention, the brand has added a GPS module to the product.

A user will be able to see the nearest shop on a map to effortlessly access the newest collections.

7. Augmented reality support

Living up to its name of a tech trendsetter, Zara added an AR fitting feature to the mobile app. To bring any Zara’s clothes to life, an app user needs to point the camera at the item. An app will read the image and show a 3D hologram of a person wearing a chosen outfit.

How to Succeed With Your Own Retail App?

The retail app market is a tough crowd — last year, there were over 150 million projects in app stores — more are launched every day. Is there enough room in the market for a new mobile shopping project? The good news is since the target audience amounts to billions of smartphone users, it is within the developer’s reach to attract a large user base to the app. So, to create a shopping app without exceeding a reasonable budget, follow the steps below.

1. Distinguish between the app’s core additional features

Looking at advanced apps like Zara’s, a developer might think that a retail mobile app has to be crammed with features to be appealing to the audience. As the project scales, new features will follow — at the time of the first build’s release, developers should stick to ensuring the product’s essential features function as expected.

Here are the must-have features of a mobile app for retailers:

  • Creating an account. A user needs to be able to sign up to the store to view the cart, the shopping history, and save the payment info (having to type the credit card number for every check-out is too daunting for most). Make the sign-up process reasonably short, ask a user for essential data only. Adding social media sign-in integration is a common industry practice for increasing the speed of sign-ins.
  • Multiple payment integrations are essential to ensure a user has no obstacles during the check-out and can complete the process quickly and effortlessly. Aside from multiple gateways, make sure the retail app for iPhone and Android supports the currency of the company’s target markets.
  • Offline access. It’s convenient for users to access the store even if the connectivity is too slow, unstable, or lost altogether. Offline access is a challenging feature to implement as it requires reference data precaching — however, it leads to improved customer satisfaction and higher revenues.

2. Choose the right platform

iOS and Android are the most popular platforms for mobile app development. While each has advantages and drawbacks, take time to choose the right environment as you make a retail app like Zara, based on the following factors:

  • User base. Generally, Android has a larger worldwide user base everywhere except the United States, where iPhones dominate. If you’re catering to an American audience, choosing iOS as a platform is a wiser move, while international retailers should prioritize Android.
  • Development complexities. Generally, Android is known for a more complex development environment than iOS. Depending on the platform, software engineers use different technology stacks as well — Swift and Objective-C are the major programming languages for iOS development, while Android app developers write in Java and Kotlin.
  • Return on investment. By users’ incomes, iOS is a more lucrative platform than Android. On average, the return on investment of an iOS app is considered to be 85% higher than that of the Android one.

3. Create a clear development plan

Having to create an app for retail is a time-consuming process that can stall if the team doesn’t have a stage-by-stage framework to adhere to. Having a clear development plan helps ensure there will be no deviations from the company’s original goals and the project will launch smoothly.

A development plan usually includes:

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