How To Develop A Successful eCommerce Application: Complete Guide

In this COVID-19 you must have realized the potential of a mobile application for your business growth. With the advent of technology and as the Internet is now in hands of almost every person, people now seek mobile applications for meeting their ever-going needs such as ordering groceries, booking a taxi, scheduling an appointment, etc. A mobile application for your business surely helps you in increasing the revenue & sales of your business, in addition to building a trusty brand reputation.

Consumers now prefer to shop anytime and anywhere, even on the go, thus mobile ecommerce applications are more in preference vis-à-vis websites. Hence, ecommerce is turning to mobile commerce or M-commerce. It has been estimated that in 2019, there were sales of $2.3 trillion in 2019, which has been expected to reach the figure of $3.5 trillion, in 2021 globally. This comprises nearly three-fourths of total ecommerce sales. Here is the break-up of ecommerce spending in Q2 2019, by device.

U.S. smartphone retail m-commerce revenue 2018–2022

As per a recent report of Shopify, mobile phones and tablets account for 69% of total sales. So what are the reasons for such a tremendous growth of mobile commerce, and how it is reaching to a wide range of audience? Let’s know the benefits of m-commerce…

Benefits of Mobile Ecommerce Application for your business

Mobile commerce has been facing high growth since the last decade and many traditional business operators have been part of this growth. If you haven’t been leveraging the growth of M-commerce and you are still looking for reasons, then here are numerous reasons why you should have a mobile application for your ecommerce business.

1. Build Customer Loyalty

Although the working of the mobile application is almost like the web application, it is better designed, optimized, and personalized. It also comes with extra functionalities leveraging the hardware potential of the mobile device. It can improve the customer experience and facilitates in acquiring and retention of new clients. On a mobile app, the customers find themselves in a convenient online store where they can easily choose and purchase the goods without any hassle.

2. Comes with many advantages over a website

Some of the important features that a mobile application has and a website lacks are:

• Mobility: The consumers can use a mobile application through his/her mobile from anywhere and anytime.
• Speed: In comparison to the website, the mobile application pages load faster which improves the customer experience. You should know that in business even a fraction of seconds count. Most visitors leave ecommerce if it takes more than 3 seconds to load, which is generally not a case of a mobile app.
• Personalized Content: Shopping preferences and previous orders can be saved in the app, serving as the basis for personalized offerings.
• Offline Access: A successful ecommerce mobile application can provide its users with offline access to its content with basic functionality for comparing products, or checking prices.

3. Builds your Brand

An ecommerce mobile application builds a strong connection between the brand and customers. The users can share their customer experience, link to favorite products, reviews & ratings, etc. on their social network. You can integrate popular social media platforms on your mobile application so that the customer can share products and services, and talk about them. Suppose you have a pet blog then building a mobile app will help you reach your target customers on the go.

Also, mobile applications can leverage features such as Push Notifications for new offers, discounts, or stocks. This means that they can save money, so from a psychological perspective, they are likely to interact with such shops on a regular basis.

4. Increase in Sales & Better Efficiency

Obviously, mobile applications are more user-friendly and flexible than their website counterparts. You may seem their development a bit expensive but they will pay off by increasing your sales. An application built by experts bring in more clients, which in turn results in more sales, and ultimately more profit.

5. Real-Time Analytics

You can collect the data easily in a mobile application. You can monitor the user’s activities, their shopping trends, searching activities, and other related data through a mobile application. Later on, you can analyze this data and can come up with meaningful business decisions.

6. Contactless Payments

Digitalization has urged the contactless payment practice among the people. Payment apps provide ease, speed, and security. At the checkout, you don’t need to get a wallet from your bag to take out coins, banknotes, or credit cards.

Who are the biggest players in the market?

Before knowing more about the ecommerce mobile applications, let know about the top ecommerce mobile applications in the market…

Amazon

Currently, the biggest ecommerce mobile application Amazon was introduced in 2011 and was available in almost every country. Since then, it has continued to provide a seamless shopping experience to its customers. It comes with a super-fast interface, enhanced filter functionality, smart searches, and multiple payment gateways to name a few.

eBay

eBay is another mobile commerce company renowned across the world. The mobile application is available for both iOS & Android. It comes with a search feature for enhanced buying and selling experience. There are also extra features like bar code scanning for price comparison, auto-searching, linking PayPal account also makes the app more flexible and easier to use.

Walmart

Walmart is one of the largest marketplaces across the world, and alike Amazon it provides a superb shopping experience to its customers. Some of the extraordinary features of the applications are QR codes scanning, voice search feature, real-time price calculations, Easy checkout process, and many more.

Most popular mobile shopping apps in the United States as of September 2019

Essential Features of an Ecommerce Mobile Application

In a mobile commerce application, there are three main entities involved with different features. Each entity has its own set of features which makes the overall flow smooth and scalable.

Features for Customers

• Registration & Login
• Find Products
• Advanced Search
• Product List
• Offers & Discounts
• Loyalty Programs
• Shipment Tracking
• Product Details
• Add to Cart
• Image & Video Gallery of Products

Features for Sellers

• Registration & Login
• Active Subscription Plan
• Managing Profile
• Setting up Stores
• Managing Catalogue/ Products
• Import Products
• Automatic adjustment of inventory on sale
• Payment accounting
• User review
• Reporting tools
• Notifications & Alerts

Features for Admin Panel

• Login with Login ID & Password
• Dashboard
• Manage Users
• Manage Product
• Manage Promotion Rewards, Points
• Managing Payment
• Managing Referral & Invites

Let’s some of the essential features in more detail…

1. Login & Registration

The login & registration process should be easy for the user by including only the necessary fields such as e-mail address, contact number, & name, or you can also use external accounts such as Facebook, Google for the Sign-up process.

2. Filter & Search

If you are offering a wide range of products to your customers, then you should be sure that the users can easily find them. By using a proper search and filter function you can offer those products easily. It is not just limited to improving the user experience but also helps in a better conversion rate and also reduces abandoned cart rates. When a user searches for a product, he is more likely to purchase in comparison to that user who navigates for a product. With the right search service, businesses can also learn more about what customers want by what they’re searching for, information that can inform future business decisions.

3. Product Descriptions in detail

It may probably seem to you that writing long product descriptions is not so relevant for your ecommerce mobile application, as obviously users are more interested in seeing the product pictures. And who has time to read the long product description on their mobiles? But whether it is a small mobile screen or a desktop, product descriptions always matter. You need to provide the relevant product information to your users else later chaos or disputes can arise. You can reduce the risk of product returns, complaints, client dissatisfaction, or negative reviews by providing proper descriptions.

4. Product Images

As mentioned above, users are highly interested in seeing the product images. Product detail is incomplete without showing the images of the products. There are many customers who still don’t prefer to buy the products because they can’t see them as like in traditional brick & mortar stores. But by providing the relevant images at different angles, you can gain their trust efficiently. You can also provide them 3D product visualizations where the users can even rotate the products at different angles.

5. Add to Cart

It is a very nominal feature that every commerce web and mobile application needs to implement. By implementing a shopping cart features in your m-commerce application, you provide the user flexibility to purchase their added items any time, and can also remind them later for their added items. With a basic cart functionality, you can also enhance the features such as the visibility of reward points, coupons, and delivery charges.

6. Wishlist

Wishlist feature is also crucial for modern mobile commerce applications. It lets the admin know what products do the users want, which is not in stock. It also increases brand recall and loyalty among customers. Interestingly, shopping cart abandonment rates on mobile ecommerce apps are just 20%, compared to 68% on desktop and 97% on mobile websites.

7. Multiple Payment Options

The smooth user experience is not limited to the payment page but beyond that. You need to make sure that the customer faces no problems while making the payment and feels a smooth & seamless payment experience. For this, you need to provide the multiple payment options which can accept a wide range of debit & credit cards, net banking, all trending local payment methods, etc.

8. Order Tracking

After placing an order, the user tends to check every movement of his parcel from the warehouse to his home. Order tracking allows users to monitor their order processing and shipping. The user gets all the necessary notifications or messages at the right time. You can integrate an ERP solution into your m-commerce app for automating the order tracking process. Another smart way is to integrate API from your logistics service provider for automation.

9. Push Notifications

Push notifications have become an inevitable feature for mobile applications. These notifications can send timely updates, alerts, new offers, reminders, etc. to the users. Push notifications can also increase customer engagement to the app, and increase the turnover of inactive users. As per a report, push notification in a mobile app can increase the retention rate by 3 to 10 times. Push notifications can also track the user-behavior or its behavioral pattern. You should follow certain push notifications guidelines for getting better results. Some of them are:

• A personalized way of asking push-notification permission
• Attention to the length of push-notification
• Using pictures in push notifications

10. Membership Options

Membership features to the app or subscription models have become a new trend in m-commerce applications. The users want to get exclusive access to deal with some advanced paid features. It also builds a reputation for your brand and nurture your relationship with the customer and boost their loyalty to your brand.

11. Loyalty Programs

Many ecommerce applications are coming up with loyalty points feature to their customers whenever they make an order or do any other transaction. Driving loyalty through a special mobile commerce app is a smart move. You can also distribute promo codes or vouchers to your customers. Providing rewards for making a purchase on your app is highly intuitive for the users. They can also refer others to use your app.

12. Referral Policy

If you are not already a saturated established brand, then the referral policy can be highly useful for you. You would be surprised to know that 83% of customers are willing to refer after a positive experience, yet only 29% do. You get a high return on your investment by using an in-app referral policy.

Upcoming Trends in Mobile Ecommerce

In the current ecommerce market, it is nearly impossible to run your business effectively without developing a mobile application for it. A mobile application is not just handy for the users, but you can also leverage the hardware of the mobile for providing a better customer experience. Here are some new trends in the ecommerce industry that are improvising the shopping experience of mobile application users:

1. Chatbots

From the top giant companies like Google, or Amazon, to medium and small scale ecommerce stores, all are actively using chatbots for their business operations. Whether it is a customer support task or team communication work the chatbots can handle it all. You would be surprised to know that the chatbot market for ecommerce is expected to reach a valuation of $3 billion by 2021. A chatbot is programmed in such a way that it can handle all the queries that a customer can make regarding your niche. While the initial chatbots were having similar answers due to pre-programmed scripts, the newer chatbots are coming with pre-built machine learning and artificial intelligence, by which they can learn from experiences and can resolve your highly advanced queries on the spot.

2. Voice Search

Voice search is one of the best outcomes of Artificial Intelligence. It gives a smooth experience to users to find products and shop them. The customer who finds typing quite a hassle can easily shop through the voice search. If you have a smart voice assistant such as Amazon Alexa, you just need to find the product by speaking to it and then can make an order. Orders for the Echo were seven times more on Prime Day (Amazon’s biggest shopping day) in 2017 than they were the year before. Since smartphones and people are now hard to separate, a voice interface can be the next leap in ecommerce evolution. Ordering and shopping using natural speech is faster and allows people to do other things instead of focusing on texting.

3. IoT

Internet of Things or IoT is a new concept of which not everyone is aware. IoT technology is getting implement into different gadgets, household objects, etc. making our life easier. These gadgets come with integrated artificial intelligence to perform certain functions that even a human can’t. Some of the common examples are IoT home lights, speakers, etc. The Internet of Things has monstrous potential in online retail. Amazon is among the organizations that join IoT. They use it for progressively secure conveyances that don’t open your bundles to hoodlums, for example.

4. AR & VR

Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality are changing the way of ecommerce. Using AR & VR, the buyers can place the products on their body or in their home or can see the effects of their use. It is the result of using technology to superimpose information such as sounds, images, or text — in the real world where we can see and feel. Some common examples are: Ikea Place app lets their buyers place the company’s furniture wherever they envision it in their homes, L’Oreal Makeup Genius by which you can try different hair colors and cosmetics on your body before making a purchasing decision. The customer gets a realistic idea of how the color will look on her/him.

Team Required for developing a successful ecommerce application

For developing an application that can meet all your requirements, and customer expectations you must require an expert team like us who can turn your idea into the mobile reality. We are fully aware of how to implement the required technologies for developing an ecommerce application. Here are some of the essential team members you will require in the project…

• Project Manager: Project Manager analyzes the requirement, pass the requirement to developers in technical language, and manages the project.
• Mobile App Developers: Mobile app developers would be responsible for the core development of your app. They have expertise in the underlying technologies and languages of mobile technologies.
• Front-End Developers: These developers are responsible for the attracting user interface and design of the app.
• Back-End Developers: These developers are accountable for the plugins development, database management, APIs, and other backend features.
• QA Expert: A Quality analysis expert checks the complete app, make sure all the required features & functionalities are working, along with the design of the app.

Technologies for developing the app

• You can choose Android or iOS or both for mobile platform
• For Real-time analytics: IBM, Hadoop, Cisco, Spark
• Database Management: MongoDB, Postgress, MySQL
• Payments: Paypal, Stripe, Braintree
• Voice & SMS: Twillio, Nexmo
• Notifications: Push.io
• Cloud Infrastructure: AWS, Google Cloud, Azure

How much mobile app development will cost?

The approx rate of developing the mobile app development would be in thousand of dollars but there are many factors which decide the actual cost. Some of them are:

• Choice of mobile application platform i.e. Android, or iOS or both
• Features and functionalities you want to include in your application
• Advanced Features you want to integrate
• Experience of the developers you are hiring
• Size of the team

Conclusion

Developing a mobile application for your ecommerce business will definitely cover up all the investments. We, at Emizentech, are highly experienced in developing ecommerce mobile applications. If you have got an awesome business idea, then we can help you in developing a robust and feature full app for your business.