The best way to easily start mobile shopping app development

According to a GlobeNewswire report, “the global e-commerce market will reach 24.3 trillion by 2025 with a CAGR growth of 11.1%”. 

Many product companies such as Puma, Samsung, and other brands from different industries have launched their exclusive online shopping platform to earn profit from the online audience.

You can also earn profit from this opportunity by starting your mobile shopping app. If you are wondering how to build your app, let’s check in detail to know the best way to launch your mobile shopping app platform.

How to start mobile shopping app development?

If you don’t know where to start your mobile shopping app development, you can follow the tips to ensure you have created your shopping app platform correctly.

1. Provide an excellent app experience.

Offering the best online shopping experience can help new users understand and navigate your mobile shopping platform easily, which can help you effectively boost your business. 

Therefore try to include the following things in your mobile app:

• Simple and clean mobile layout
• Easy to find navigation
• A simple and effective search function
• A clean and highly navigated home page where you can promote offers and new products
• Push notifications and personalize messages 
• Shopping cart with checkout feature
•  Customer support feature to respond to your customers quickly.
• Integration of advanced features to your mobile shopping apps, such as virtual and augmented reality, blockchain technology, artificial intelligence, and cloud computing 

Users are likely to avoid complicated user interfaces on their mobile shopping apps. Moreover, having a complicated user interface can lower product sales on your mobile shopping platform, which is not good for your business. 

You should go for only the required features at the start; then, you can add new features to your app on every update. Also, you can take inspiration from the best mobile shopping such as Etsy, Amazon, and other e-commerce mobile apps. 

2. Provide easy onboarding

Avoid implementing the annoying sign-up process for new users when they want to purchase a single product from your platform.

Also, if you don’t want to lose potential customers, you must include an easy joining process in your app by prioritizing the following things.

• Let your users use PayPal for product purchases rather than typing their credit card information into your platform.

• Give an option to users to sign up through their social network accounts, such as Facebook or Twitter

• Don’t make a lengthy registration process for your users to create their accounts

3. Let users access their favorite product anytime

The best shopping experience for your customer should be your priority while developing a mobile shopping platform—most people access shopping platforms in their free time.

Therefore, you can provide a wishlist feature in your app so they can bookmark and buy the product when they are ready to purchase their favorite product on your app. 

Many brands, such as Amazon, Urban Outfitters, and Forever 21, have found massive success by implementing the “Add to Wishlist feature.”

Talk over Amazon; the brand found nearly 70% of customers place orders via the mobile app during the 2015 holiday season.

4. Make the “Checkout” and “Add to cart” buttons extremely reachable

What if the user decides to buy the product on your platform but cannot easily find the “Add to cart” or “Checkout” buttons? Surely you will lose a potential customer on your platform.

Make sure to include both “Add to cart” and “Checkout” buttons within reach of your users so they can easily find them on a product page.

You can better create both these buttons on a large size (close to thumb size) and place them on top or bottom navigation where users are most likely to see both buttons.

Also, you can store your user’s information safely so it can auto-complete on future check outs, such as their residence address, pin code, phone number, and so on.

5. Keep your user’s data safe

Protecting your user data should be your other top priority to maintain their trust in your shopping platform. Make sure your users’ payment data would not breach at any cost.

Take an example of the brand name “Target.” The retailer lost 46% of its profit because its users’ credit card data got stolen on its platform. According to the New York Post, the brand has suffered 440 million dollars of loss after this incident.

Therefore you should prioritize in-app security features to keep your users’ data safe on your platform; that can help you make and maintain your user trust in your brand.

6. Be familiar with basic shopping app features

Try to include the following features in your mobile shopping app:

Also, you can check the list of all the required features for the mobile shopping app. Now let’s check the development steps to build your mobile shopping app.

Steps needed to build a shopping app

Once you understand how to improve your mobile shopping app, you can check the steps to develop your platform from scratch.

1. Do market research in the eCommerce industry

You need to understand your customers, their pain points, and the solution you will provide through your mobile shopping app. Also, you can study your competitor’s app to know what features they have implemented that make their app ahead in the market. 

Once you point out the areas of improvement in the eCommerce market, you can try to improve them by adding new and unique features that can help you to get better attention in the eCommerce market. 

Also, staying updated with the latest app developments trends can help you provide a better user experience to your customers.

Take an example of a famous toy maker brand LEGO. The company has done market research on over 3,500 girls and their others to understand the playing habits of female kids. Based on this research, the brand has launched a new toy line, “Friends,” to encourage girls to play with LEGO toys.

Like LEGO, you can also perform market research to understand what services, products, and app features you can offer to make your business more profitable.

2. Select native or hybrid shopping app development 

It becomes challenging for app owners to choose from a native app or hybrid app development to build a mobile shopping app. If you have a tight budget, you should go for hybrid app development, where you can develop your platform once and deploy it on multiple platforms, such as the web, Android, and iOS. 

But in hybrid app development, there will be limitations to accessing the hardware and exclusive features of separate devices. You can use ReactNative, Ionic, and Xamrian for hybrid app development.

While in native app development, you will have to develop your app separately for different platforms. But in return, you can get performance and memory-related benefits to your app, which helps provide a better user experience to your customers.

3. Create app design for your eCommerce app

After choosing a preferable app development methodology, the next step is to create a design for your shopping app. You can follow the design guidelines of different platforms to create a highly engaging design for your app.

Creating prototypes for your app will also be beneficial to experience how your app will look once it gets entirely developed, along with having an implementation of all the features that are fully functional and working correctly.

4. Build features for your shopping app

It is a back-end development process where you will work on creating the decided features for mobile devices and your official website. Also, you will be working on creating an API through which your mobile app and website will work effortlessly together to provide a smoother user experience to your customers and app users. 

Many e-commerce brands, such as eBay, Etsy, and others, have included valuable features, such as inventory tracking, product rating and feedback, product details, etc. 

Moreover, one of the most well-used eCommerce platforms, Amazon, has implemented a voice command-based virtual assistant known as Alexa, which helps customers shop through voice commands such as exploring products and making purchases.

5. Perform app testing to check the working of all the eCommerce features

To ensure your users will not face any technical bugs and drawbacks in your eCommerce app, you must do mobile app testing multiple times until you are satisfied with the performance and quality of your app.

You can categorize mobile app testing into multiple categories: functional testing, performance testing, usability testing, and memory testing. 

6. Integrate cloud computing in your shopping app

Cloud computing offers flexibility, security, and scalability features that benefit your mobile shopping app. Your app development team should be familiar with the latest cloud computing services, such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Cloud Services, to seamlessly integrate and add third-party functionalities to your shopping app.

7. Integrate the latest technologies to the eCommerce app

Adding advanced technologies to your mobile shopping app, such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, augmented reality, etc., can help you build innovative features for your mobile shopping app.

Also, adding advanced features to your app will give you a competitive advantage so you can capture a significant user base for making huge profits in the e-commerce market. 

Amazon’s virtual assistant, “Alexa,” is a perfect example of artificial technology they have added to their app, which works on users’ voice commands to explore and purchase products. 

Also, you can take IKEA as another example that uses Augmented reality technology in their app where users can access and test a wide range of furniture virtually by placing the 3D model select furniture in their room.

Training your employees to build your mobile app will consume too much time and capital, which is unsuitable for your business. Moreover, hiring freelance developers is also risky as they might leave your project in Midway. 

So what is the right way to build your app from scratch in less time? Let’s check.

Build your eCommerce app from IT experts 

Knowing how to build your shopping app is not enough to create and launch it on your desired platform; you will need a team of app developers who are already experienced in developing mobile shopping apps. The best decision you can make is to partner with skilled mobile app developers who will guide you in building your app or creating your mobile shopping app from scratch.

Moreover, choosing freelancing services might be a good option but not the best compared to hiring skilled app developers for your platform from IT companies. The primary risk associated with working with freelancers is they might leave your project midway, which costs you both capital and time loss.

You can easily manage your platform after outsourcing your project to experience software developers from the best IT companies, such as Idea Usher. Their team has experienced app developers and project managers that have already launched and are maintaining many mobile shopping apps for their clients.

Also, their team will help you build and train you or your team on managing your platform once it is ready to deploy and launch on your decided app distribution platforms. 

Contact Idea Usher to build and launch your platform effortlessly:

Email:

[email protected]

Phone:

(+1)732 962 4560

(+91)859 140 7140

FAQ

1. How do I create a shopping app?

You can follow these steps to start mobile shopping app development:

• Planning & market research
• Doing competitor analysis
• Choosing essential features
• Designing an engaging UX and UI Design
• Adding advanced technologies 
• Integrating multiple payment options

2. How much does it cost to build a shopping app?

App development cost depends on different factors, such as 

• Choosing between native and hybrid app development 
• List of features you want to add to your app
• App development charges, which vary for different teams and IT companies