The pandemic is catalyzing ecommerce businesses to launch their own line of smartphone applications. As people are advised to stay home to fend off the virus, it has become challenging to hire and buy essential products and services. E-commerce app development effectively solves this problem.

Customers are taking a large liking to using apps as they are user-friendly and extremely convenient to operate. For entrepreneurs, apps are great business tools to not only provide excellent services, but also to generate more revenue and scale up. Let’s take a look at how you can develop a successful e-commerce mobile app in 2020.

Prerequisites for launching a successful mobile app

Scope of the app

Firstly, you must analyze the current market trends. Know who your competitors are, what business model they use, what is the scope of launching your app and more. This will help you get an idea of important business factors like what challenges you should be prepared for, how much profit you can expect and what are the leading features in your app segment.

Target customers

You must assess your average customer’s traits. Ask yourself questions like what your average customer’s age is, what are they interested in, what are the common problems they face and where are they mostly from.

Mobile platform

Pick the right mobile platform for your mobile application. iOS or Android app development? They have different types of customers – iOS apps are known to have users who spend a lot of money on in-app purchases. Whereas Android apps are mostly free and use an in-app advertisement model to generate most revenue. Weigh in similar factors and choose either iOS or Android, or both of them.

Design and content

You must ask yourself how you want your app to look and feel like. What color theme do you want to implement in your mobile software? How do you want users to navigate through your app? How easily will your customers be able to checkout, apply coupons and more.

Industry-leading features to implement in your e-commerce mobile app

Quick registration

There are numerous e-commerce mobile apps on app stores. If your customer feels that registering on your app is time-consuming, he/she will not hesitate to switch to another app. To prevent this from happening, it is important to implement an easy registration feature in your app that requires the most basic customer details. Alternatively, you can also provide social media logins for easy access.

Responsive navigation

Customers want to be able to browse products and services to their heart’s content, uninterruptedly. By allowing them to seamlessly navigate to different sections of your app, they will be more likely to make purchases.

Social media integration

Customers love to share what they are doing on social media. By integrating easy Facebook, Instagram and Twitter share buttons, your e-commerce app can garner more customers.

Instant checkout

Enable customers to quickly checkout with just a click of a button. Let customers save their payment details for easy checkouts. Furthermore, display important checkout-related information like price breakdown and product quantity. The easier it is to checkout on your app, the more sales you will be able to make.

Multiple payment options

During mobile app development, ensure that you have a payment feature that accepts cash, credit/debit card and mobile wallet payments. This way, customers can choose to pay through a payment option that they are comfortable with.

Live tracking

Keep your customers informed about the status and whereabouts of their orders with an accurate GPS-tracking feature. Display the location of delivery agents on the map, calculate Estimated Time of Arrival (ETA) and more.

Feedback system

Understand how your app’s users feel about your service, what they think about your products and more with a robust feedback system.

Reports and insights

This is a crucial feature that helps you improve the prospects of your e-commerce application. It records and consolidates every transaction, user behavior, number of clicks and more into comprehensive easy-to-understand reports. On studying these insights, you can find key areas in your e-commerce app that can be optimized for better results.

CRM integration

By integrating a CRM in your app, you can efficiently send custom notifications such as offers, discounts and new arrivals messages to your customers. You will also be able to manage customer accounts, edit content, change prices and more.

Cloud storage

Cloud storage helps you create regular backups of your business data in addition to systematically storing data. Moreover, cloud technology secures confidential information using the latest security protocols.

Additional emerging features you can implement in your app

Search with voice

Advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have made it possible for customers to search for products and services using their voice. This technology eliminates the need to type in queries. This is an intuitive and futuristic feature that is rapidly picking up pace in the e-commerce segment.

Search with image

The image-based search feature is a new and emerging disruptive technology. By implementing this in your app, customers will be able to upload images to find the products they’re looking for. The most popular image-based tool that you can integrate in your e-commerce app is Google Lens.

AI chatbots

AI chatbots are increasingly becoming a must-have in e-commerce mobile app development. They offer excellent assistance to customers by reminding customers about their items in the cart, suggesting better products and more. Chatbots can perform these functions by seamlessly communicating with customers in a human-like manner. They also play a significant role in processing refunds and returns instantly.

Augmented reality

This is an attractive feature that more and more e-commerce apps are installing in their software, especially fashion e-commerce apps. Using this feature, users can try on different products and see how they look on them using augmented reality technology.

Benefits of launching a successful e-commerce app

Increase in revenue

E-commerce mobile applications are immensely easy-to-use. Customers can make purchases by performing a few taps on their smartphone screens. With the right functionality and features, you can amass a large customer base and boost your profits in a reasonable amount of time.

Analytics

E-commerce applications can comprehensively track user actions. From which region they are using your app from to what products they are most likely to buy, all of this information can be efficiently analyzed. Following this, you can optimize your app to develop effective promotional campaigns, create personalized content and more.

Loyal customers

By offering excellent shopping and app-user experience to your customers, your customers will  choose to keep visiting your app to make future purchases. Moreover, you can issue personalized offers and coupons depending on the number of purchases they make. This results in both higher customer retention and higher profits.

Conclusion

It is a great time to launch an e-commerce app. The onset of the unexpected pandemic has skyrocketed the use of smartphone applications. There are numerous apps being launched to make everyday activities such as shopping a hassle-free task. If you’re ready to launch a spectacular, reliable and feature-packed e-commerce app then give us a call. Our mobile app development services will help you deploy a great app in no time.