E-commerce App Development – Everything You Need to Know

E-commerce websites have witnessed immense growth in the last decade. Lately, the industry has touched new heights of success with mobile apps. The milestones achieved by biggies like Amazon, Myntra have encouraged many businesses to shift from e-commerce to m-commerce.

If you’re also devising to invest in iOS/Android app development services and create an e-commerce app, then this article is for you. Here, you will find everything you need to know about e-commerce app development like types, benefits, features, process, and cost.

So let’s dive in…

Types of E-commerce apps

E-commerce apps are classified into four business models, which we have described below.

Business-to-Business (B2B)

B2B e-commerce apps are developed to sell goods or provide services. These processes are carried out between enterprises – business to business. For instance, you may create an app that enables manufacturers to advertise their products while other companies purchase what they require.

Business-to-Consumer (B2C)

A B2C model facilitates the interaction between a particular company and the end-consumer. Most of the e-commerce applications fall in the B2C category, and businesses develop B2C apps to sell a variety of products and improve their scalability effectively.

Consumer-to-Consumer (С2C)

With a C2C app, the sale of goods is taken place between two consumers themselves. Examples of such e-commerce models are the apps that conduct online auctions and various P2P marketplaces.

Consumer-to-Business (C2B)

It is not a typical example of an e-commerce app. In this case, consumers sell their products or services to companies. For instance, when photographers or graphic designers share their colorful photos or logos on an app, companies can purchase what they like.

Now, you understand the types of e-commerce apps available in the market. Now, let’s move onto the benefits you can yield with e-commerce app development.

Benefits of E-Commerce App Development

Better Customer Engagement

E-commerce applications are highly optimized and personalized, which significantly enhance customer experience and facilitate acquisition as well as retention of new customers. The apps provide convenience consumers want while purchasing goods.

Here are some deeper benefits of an e-commerce app over a website:

Mobility – Customers can use apps anytime, regardless of their location.

Loading Time – The pages of a mobile app load faster and draw more users. Most visitors leave the app if it takes more than three seconds to load and will likely to turn to your competitors.

Personalized content – Apps can store shopping history of your customers and provide them personalized suggestions based on their preferences.

Offline Access – The best e-commerce apps allow users to access some basic functions like comparing products or checking prices, even when there is no internet.

Thus, you can generate almost 50% of traffic from your e-commerce app.

Enhanced Brand Recognition

E-commerce apps build a strong connection between brands and customers. Loyal customers willingly share apps with their friends and describe their experience on social media platforms. So, you can integrate popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc. into your app to let customers spread a word about your brand.

Besides, you can encourage users to interact with your app regularly by sending push-notifications about special offerings, discounts, and giveaways. It can also help you strengthen your brand and increase your app installation rate.

Detailed Analytics

Nowadays, data collection has become the key to the success of most businesses. With an e-commerce app, you can easily monitor users’ interaction and gather information like feedback, session length, audience composition, and more. This will help you to develop personalized content, update your app, create an advanced marketing strategy and efficient loyalty program. Thus, you can deliver an unparalleled customer experience leveraging data analytics.

Reduced Cart Abandonment

Cart abandonment is one of the biggest challenges of an e-commerce business. An average of 70% of customers leaves products in the shopping cart and closes the app for one or other reasons. These reasons may include high shipping costs, slow processes, fewer payment options, no discount coupons, and more. All these reasons lead to a bad shopping experience, which you can improve by creating an interactive checkout form. It has been observed that a fully optimized checkout form can reduce cart abandonment rate by up to 20%.

These benefits can considerably take your business to the next level and help you stand out. Now, if you are interested to know how to develop an e-commerce app, read further.

How to Develop an E-commerce App

To create a comprehensive e-commerce app, you need to know all the essential aspects. Below, we have shed light on some of the features and process of e-commerce app development.

Features of an E-Commerce App

Registration Process

 Registration is the first step to use your app. Welcome your users by allowing them feed only necessary information and providing them the most effortless registration process.

Multiple Payment Options

Most users are skeptical about payment as it involves personal and bank account details. Provide them secure and trustworthy payment options like debit/credit card, PayTm, Google Pay, PayPal, Razorpay, etc.

Push Notifications

Push notifications act as a constant reminder when you launch a product or when customers leave products in the shopping cart. Studies have shown that most users visit an app when a notification is sent them. This feature also helps in generating more sales as it informs customers about various events and offers.

Social Media Integration

As mentioned earlier, social media is a powerful tool to improve your brand awareness through word-of-mouth. Users can also directly sign up on your app through integrated social media platforms like Facebook or Google account.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics can help you to know about the most sold products, the time frame when your app has the maximum users or the reasons they leave the app. Precisely, you can analyze everything to improve your services and thus measure your app’s potential.

Rating and Feedback

Customers’ ratings and feedback can be used as a guide to improving your e-commerce app. Always keep in mind that the app is for users’ satisfaction and should have everything that enhances their experience.

Wishlist Button

With a wishlist button, users can save their favorite products for later. This feature is like the bookmark for the product, which users can check any time they want. You can also notify users when there is an offer on the product they have wishlisted.

Easy Checkout

Easy checkout can act as a boon for your business. Your app can store the customers’ payment details and locations, allowing them to checkout in a jiffy.

Synchronization

For iOS/Android app developers, matching the app with the website is quite tedious. This is why synchronization is the best way to save time and effort. It automatically makes changes in the application that are made on the website, eliminating the need for doing the same work twice.

Filters and Search Options

Filters can narrow the users’ search and help them find the product they want from a plethora of products. It saves time and boosts their satisfaction.

Seamless Navigation

An e-commerce app with complicated navigation is a quick turn off for the users. Make sure to provide smooth navigation and showcase all the products in a highly impressive manner.

Fewer Clicks

App conversion rate increases drastically when users can perform each activity like sign up, product search, checkout, etc. with the fewer possible clicks. The lesser, the better is the new trends, and e-commerce apps are taking it seriously.

Having an idea of the features of an e-commerce app, you can partner with a reliable company that provides high-quality iOS/Android app development services.

E-Commerce App Development Process

Generally, the process of developing an e-commerce app includes the following stages:

Research – The first step is to find out the latest trends and assess the competition level in the m-commerce market.

Prototyping – The next step includes creating a prototype to illustrate each screen of the app and have an idea of its look.

Design – Your e-commerce app development team should have experienced designers to create an intuitive and interactive app interface.

Development – Figure out the technology stack to create an e-commerce app that will operate seamlessly on all platforms. Professional iOS/Android app developers can help you create the best app aligning with your business goals and requirements.

Quality Assurance – A QA team will meticulously test each functionality of your e-commerce app to ensure the quality of the final product.

Launch – App release is the last but not the least important stage of your e-commerce app development process. The app launched correctly is equivalent to the half success achieved.

E-Commerce App Development Cost

The cost to develop an e-commerce app varies depending on various factors like:

App Specifications – The cost of e-commerce app development is directly proportional to its size, features, backend, Admin panel, and complexity.

Development Team – The size, experience, and location of your iOS/Android app developers make a huge difference in its development cost.

Tech Stack – The programming language, tools, and elements significantly impact the e-commerce app development cost.

Additional Costs:

  • Support
  • Marketing
  • Advertising
  • Updates

All these factors can help you determine the cost of developing your e-commerce app. Roughly speaking, the development cost of a native app may range from $20k for an MVP to $50k for a complex model. If this price doesn’t suit your budget, you can turn to a cross-platform e-commerce app. Its development cost will be 30%-40% lower than that of a native app.

Final Words

If you need more information about e-commerce app development, feel free to book a consultation with our experts. We can also provide you end-to-end iOS/Android app development services to turn your app idea into reality. Our experts will decode your idea intelligently and code it into an exceptional e-commerce app that can potentially disrupt the market.

Adopt Top Android App Development Trends to Witness Massive Growth

Android, since its inception, has come a long way with a market share of about 86% Android-based smartphones globally. The adoption of this operating system has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years, increasing the demand for Android applications.

Android app developers believe that the future of app development is quite promising, thanks to emerging technologies and trends. Businesses must incorporate these trends into their apps to experience massive growth and deliver the best customer experience.

Now let’s dive in to explore these Android app development trends and how you can make your app better than ever.

Instant Apps

An Android instant app isn’t a new kid on the block but has been gaining momentum since its emergence. The core idea behind these apps is to allow your users to test out a portion of your app without installing it on a device. It helps you to boost the installation rate of your app.

This is particularly a powerful technology for e-commerce businesses and game developers. Android instant apps enable users to play a game to a particular level. If the users find it interesting, they can download the game to their device. 

The same goes for an e-commerce business. When customers search for a product on Google, they are redirected to instant apps that provide all the necessary product-related information. Thus, businesses belonging to the e-commerce industry can provide a better customer experience with an instant app.

From the Android app developers’ perspective, an instant app is relatively is easy to create. They can develop an app from scratch or transform your existing app using Android Studio, an integrated development environment (IDE).

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Nowadays, almost everybody has experienced the benefits of AI in various aspects of life. However, when it comes to Android app development, artificial intelligence has a lot more to offer.

AI in Android applications allows you to improve customers’ experience by providing them with personalized offerings. You can quickly analyze customer behavior, product preferences, and interactions with your app, allowing you to devise better engagement plans.

Simply put, you can gather, store, and process a vast amount of data by integrating AI and ML into your app. Besides, you can also perform tasks like text recognition, face recognition, landmark recognition, barcode scanning, image labeling, and more.

TensorFlow Lite, Firebase MLKit, Google Cloud Vision API, and Neural Network API are some of the tools to develop such functionalities in your Android application.

Internet of Things (IoT)

IoT apps allow users to track their daily activities and processes. It has been anticipated that the IoT market will reach $1.6 trillion in 2025. 

Being the biggest player in the market, Android is the preferred choice of businesses and Android app developers to build IoT applications. The combination of IoT and Android is quite useful for industries like healthcare, energy, e-commerce, Agriculture, and more.

For instance, a lot of IoT-based healthcare devices now track health conditions and transfer collected data to doctors. It helps doctors to diagnose their patients remotely.

Besides, IoT also plays a significant role in education. A lot of learning projects like C-Pen, Edmodo, and Nymi have integrated IoT to facilitate learning across the globe.

Android Jetpack

Android Jetpack is a suite full of libraries, tools, and guidelines for developers to build advanced apps. The primary goal of this suite is to facilitate regular app development tasks.

Google provides structured documentation, making it easy for Android app developers to use this tool. Mainly, there are four main components that we have outlined below.

Foundation – This component offers cross-cutting functionality like testing, backward compatibility, and Kotlin language support.

Architecture – It helps in developing robust, testable, and maintainable Android apps.

Behavior – These components allow developers to incorporate standard Android services like notifications, sharing, permissions, and more into the app.

UI – UI components provide widgets and helpers to make Android apps user-friendly.

Thus, the all-encompassing Android Jetpack expedites and facilitates the app development process.

Beacon and Location-Based Services

Google launched the Beacon platform to make apps and devices operate smartly due to timely and contextual information. This technology is used to define the precise location and contextual cues within applications and help users navigate the world. In brief, when a device comes in the range of a beacon, it gathers the users’ information like current position and what’s around.

Besides, a myriad of Android app developers shows inclinations toward location-based services (LBS) as they enhance users’ experience by providing real-time information. The huge success of Pokemon Go, a location-based augmented reality app, has elevated the demand for such apps or games.

The LBS can be implemented in various areas such as retail, marketing, indoor mapping, navigation, payment portals, tourism, and more.

Final Words

While Android app development trends continue to come and go, it is vital to quickly evaluate the latest technology updates and identify and seize opportunities.

These are some of the key trends having to potent to revolutionize your business and foster its growth. Though we have missed on many other Android app trends, but remember that not every trend is going to add value to your business. So, only adopt those that you think can take your business to the next level. 

For more information or figure out which trend suits the best to your business, approach our Android app developers.

How a Mobile App Can take Your Retail Business to the next level

It is now apparent that the world is going mobile and no other industry than retail is taking the maximum advantage of this continuous advancement. Research says that an average US consumer is spending about 3hrs and 50mins on mobile devices in 2020. Furthermore, we are likely to witness that 85-90% of the time on mobile is spent on exploring apps.

From the same source, it has been reported that retail m-commerce sales will reach $338.02B in 2020, which was nearly $207B in 2018. Online retail businesses also have a higher customer retention rate as compared to all other industries. Thus, we can presume that a mobile app offers enormous benefits to a retail business.

Now, let’s try to understand how mobile apps have revolutionized the retail industry, along with its impact on your business.

The mobile apps have transformed the way retailers sell their goods and run their businesses. They have eliminated the need for billboards and printed materials to advertise special offers and discounts. Additionally, applications have significantly impacted the buying habits of the customers. They can now compare prices, save items, track and receive them to their doorstep with just a few taps on smartphones.

Today, mobile commerce is maturing rapidly as apps are gaining mainstream adoption in the retail industry. If you want to increase your customer engagement as well as revenue, collaborating with iOS/Android app developers to create a future-proof app is a good idea.

Key Benefits of a Mobile Application to your Retail Business

Improve Online Shopping Experience

Smartphones have been progressively relied on for shopping. A lot of consumers utilize mobile apps for discovering new products, exploring product reviews, saving items in a wishlist, and more. Sarcastically, you can call it online window shopping.

There are ample ways you can improve customers’ shopping experience and encourage them to buy products through your mobile app. Some of them are:

  • Offering multiple filters to narrow the product’s search
  • Giving loyalty rewards as a token appreciation
  • Allowing users to track the real-time status of orders
  • Providing re-order feature to save their time

Enhance Business Recognition

Brand awareness is an essential factor for your business as it can influence the purchase decision of your customers. Since customers spend most of their time using mobile phones, a mobile app will enable you to attract their attention in a way that no other traditional marketing tool can do.

Also, the continuous in-app advertisement will boost your business visibility and bring your brand to customers’ minds whenever they are searching for a product that your company deals in. Ultimately, the increased brand visibility will improve the overall sales as well as the revenue of your business.

24*7 Availability and Automation

A mobile app allows you to operate your retail business day in, day out. Besides, you can fully automate your business so that you don’t have to oversee all the in-hand transactions taking place on your retail mobile app. Automation also allows you to offer enhanced services to your customers using technologies like chatbots, virtual assistants. Thus, you can increase your new as well as repeat sales.

App features that can help you to step in the online retail market

Swift Responses and Registration Process

This is a fast-paced world. Customers need quick responses from the app they use, or they will switch to another app instantly. Unresponsive apps or apps with complicated and time-consuming registration process are entirely a turn off for the users. So, create an app that loads quickly and offer seamless registration via Google or a social media account.

However, if you need more users’ information, make sure to trim down insignificant details to keep hold of their attention in your app.

Multiple Payment and Currency Support

The primary concept of a mobile app is to localize your online business, which, in turn, can help you reach a broad user base. An application with multiple payments and currency support can localize your retail business easily.

Besides, every user looks for a secure and easy payment method. With various payment gateways like Paytm, PayPal, Debit/Credit card, Stripe, etc., you can boost their confidence to proceed with streamlined transactions. It also eliminates the issue of late payments and enables you to monitor all the transactions hassle-free.

Customer Loyalty Programs

To boost your customer’s loyalty, implementing a loyalty program into your retail app is the best idea. You can integrate your mobile app with a loyalty program platform to gather valuable data about your customers and give them special discounts or coupons based on their purchase history.

Using an application, you can also send points for social media likes or coupons, birthday coupons, and many other actions. Such an approach will considerably increase your customer retention as well as sales.

Enabling New Age Push Notifications

 Using a retail app, you can send push notifications for communicating information, exclusive offers, and discount on users’ mobile phones. The more they stay updated, the more value they will feel. Thus, you will not only attract their attention to your products but also empower customer engagement.

Additionally, you can send real-time alerts to inform customers about every checkpoint of the order, including received, picked up, dispatched, delivered, etc.  

The other value-added features of a retail app are in-app GPS, Beacon technology, mobile point of sale (POS), and QR-code scanner.

Key Takeaways

Considering all the above factors, you can easily take your retail business to a new level. Ordering products using an application is more prevalent than ever. A quality retail application will help you to provide a personalized online experience to your customers and increase your revenue exponentially. So, if you want to customer-friendly app for your retail business, we suggest you invest in iOS/Android app development services.

3 Factors to Consider for Successful Beauty and Salon App Development

On-demand applications are gold mines that give assured returns to all the businesses. From booking cabs to booking online appointments, users can perform everything with just a few taps in a mobile app.

Being in the beauty and salon business, you might be encountering certain obstacles like messing up with appointments in busy days, missing phone calls while attending other clients at the salon, unable to prepare special gift cards for your regular clients or offering them discount coupons.                                                                 

With an iOS/Android app development for your salon business, you can get a comprehensive solution from bookings to payments and also enhance your customer base. Apps like Glamsquad, Stylebee, Priv are the leading salon apps in the US, which provide the best on-demand experience to customers.

The on-demand salon apps not only save customers’ commute time but also eliminate waiting in a queue for their turn. Probably, everyone can now easily avail beauty services in their four walls using a salon app. So, if you’re devising to create your own salon app and offer a remarkable customer experience, consider these three factors that can add value to your app as well as business.

Provide a Versatile Menu to Users

To develop a salon app, consider all the needs that users might expect in an online beauty service. So, you need to curate a versatile menu that comprises every beauty services right from manicures and haircuts to every other body rejuvenating therapy.

Additionally, looking for more options is a human tendency. Even while scrolling an app, users would like to explore more beauty services and packages that are pertinent to their needs and budget. Thus, create a user-friendly design for seamless navigation from one menu to another in your application.

Provide Convenient Scheduling/Rescheduling to Users

When you aim for a scheduling app for your salon business, keeping customer convenience in mind is of utmost importance. Customers have shifted to online services because of their instant availability and other perks like:

  • Schedule or Reschedule a service
  • Select a date, time, and location as per their convenience
  • Choose their professional service providers
  • Book more than one service at a time
  • Cancel an appointment anytime for minimal or no charge

Online appointments serve as a boon for your business as well as customers. You will be able to give a personalized treatment to every client, avoiding misunderstandings that usually happen over a call. Additionally, with an automatic scheduling and rescheduling feature, you can easily manage multiple appointments using your beauty salon application. Also, you can scan through available slots and appointments through an in-app calendar.

So, to develop a salon app in 2020, it is essential to bear such an intriguing factor in mind. With the help of iOS/Android app developers, you can have an idea of the scope of an online beauty app and also cross-verify your salon app idea.

Provide Shopping Experience to Users – An Additional Benefit

Besides providing beauty services via the app, you can sell your own beauty product line. Using your app, users can buy their desired products whenever they want. Furthermore, you can offer exclusive discounts and offers as a gift of appreciation to your loyal customers in order to encourage them to make more online purchases.

Now, let’s go through some key features that you must integrate into your app to engage and retain more customers to your beauty platform.

Features of Beauty Salon App

  • Login/Sign Up
  • Catalog of Beauty Services
  • List of Professionals
  • Book an Appointment
  • In-built Calendar
  • In-app GPS Tracker
  • Schedule/Reschedule Appointments
  • Multiple Payment Gateways
  • Push Notifications
  • Automated Cost Calculator
  • Photo Gallery (To showcase your work)
  • Customer Ratings and Feedback
  • In-app Chat/Call System

These features are more than enough to survive and thrive in the market.

Final Words

The mobile app allows the salon business to have as well as offer everything under one roof. This way, you don’t have to list down every entry, follow-up the clients, and calculate the payment. All-in-all, a salon app almost eliminates the manual handling of tasks and facilitates business management even in your absence. You can manage cashless payments in the database, track the billing details of clients, send real-time notifications to clients, and more. 

So, to have a head start, partner with a reliable company that provides end-to-end iOS/android app development services for salon businesses. They will not only code your app idea but also guide you in penetrating the market and gaining a competitive advantage.

7 Key Features of a Mobile Wallet App – An Expert’s Take

In the past few years, we have witnessed a steep rise in the online payment system. From shopping to paying bills, digital payment through a mobile app like Google Pay, PayPal, Paytm is nothing less than a boon. Owing to this digital advancement, people don’t have to hang out with wallets full of cash and cards or wait in ATM lines.

According to the reports, the e-wallet market is anticipated to rise at a CAGR of 15% and reach around $2100B by 2023. Following the momentum of mobile wallet apps, many startups are investing in app platforms to penetrate this market and foster seamless transactions. The success stories of apps like Google Pay and Paytm are an inspiration for almost every entrepreneur or iOS/Android app development company.

Let’s have a look at the significant features that have contributed to the success of wallet apps.

Features of a Mobile Wallet App 

Seamless Transaction

Making a payment via a mobile wallet is very easy and smooth. The users just have to link their debit/credit card and a document with the digital wallet application. The app then stores the information for authentication to offer a secure and seamless transaction. Additionally, users can sync their data with multiples devices to use the e-wallet anytime and anywhere.

An Intuitive UI/UX Design

UI/UX design plays a significant role in increasing the app’s user base as well as popularity. To ensure that the app is interactive and user-friendly, one must deem UI/UX as a crucial part of their iOS /Android app development. It contributes heavily to the success of a mobile wallet app.

Cloud-based Technology

This feature secures and expedites the transaction process. The cloud-based technology provides customers a complete suite of capabilities to turn their smartphones into e-wallets. For example, a payment done with a simple tap at Point of Sale (POS) terminals is facilitating the transaction process for vendors, issuers, as well as buyers.

GPS Tracking & Navigation

Nowadays, everyone can accept payment via mobile app no matter where they are. With GPS tracking and navigation, users can easily find people on their devices and proceed with the payments just by tapping on the specific username. This feature considerably saves time as no account information is required to make transactions.

Wearable Device Integration

Earlier, wearable technology was just limited to smartwatches, fitness trackers, or smart jewelry. But now, it is the next logical step for digital payments. Similar to contactless debit/credit cards, wearable payment devices comprise a Near Field Communication (NFC) chip. This chip contacts the card reader’s chip at the point of sale, enabling the seamless transaction.

Spending Analysis

This is an additional feature you must integrate into your wallet app to allow users to monitor their spending. Thus, they can plan their spending in a better manner and limit their expenditure whenever needed.

Privacy and Security

Users have to enter their card information and create a password to use a digital wallet. So, the app should have an additional layer of security to protect their data. As wallet apps are more prone to hacking, mobile app developers must create a password-protected application having features like OTP, QR Code, and fingerprint scan. These security features not only authenticate and validate the user’s identity but also enable secure, quick, and efficient transactions.

Rewarding System

Since rewards attract users in a more engaging way, incorporating this feature into your app to add more value to it. You can opt for different rewarding techniques, including cashback, discounts, or points.

Backup Facility

Developing a mobile wallet that automatically creates a backup of the files employed in every operation is an additional benefit. It will allow the application to save all the essential information added by users for future preferences.

Final Words

In this tech-driven era, mobile apps have transformed the way transactions take place. Biggies like PayTM, PayPal, and Google Pay have elevated the overall economy as well as the financial sectors of various nations.

The above-mentioned key features emphasize the importance of developing a customer-centric wallet app that fastens transactions. If you want to create a mobile wallet app and penetrate the e-wallet market, avail our end-to-end iOS/Android app development services.

×

GET YOUR FREE QUOTE

loading

Let us give you our honest opinion.

Book your FREE 30 minutes consultation with