How To Begin With Mobile Shopping App Development

Mobile shopping app is the new trend to shift your business online and reach your potential customer at ease. There are various shopping apps already scoring great responses from customers online while focusing on the features that are customer centric. It’s high time for you to step out in the market while following the trend and staying up in the competition. To attain the winning factor for your business, all you need is an application that sells all your products and services to the customers globally. Now that we have briefed the need, let’s focus on “how to..” 

How To Make A Successful Online Store?

You can bring your business to reach customers outside your region by bringing your product on a platform accessible to many and globally. Approximately 90% of global users carry their mobile phone with them and depend on the mobile application for their daily needs. Based on this nature, you can create an application for your business that sells your products and services, offers discounts, accepts easy payment, provides delivery and after sales services and more customer centric features. Although several giant businesses have already occupied the market with their applications, with your extensive market research, you can always spot a loophole and work to deliver what differs from “the giants”. 

There are three basic steps involved in making a successful online store:

1. Market research for loopholes and trends.
2. Mobile shopping application development.
3. Marketing and promotions.

Here, we will outline all the aspects you need to know regarding the development of Shopping Application for Mobile and its benefits.

How To Create A Mobile Shopping App?

Following the basic steps in detail, you can get a developer to develop an application for your business. After determining the market trend, you have to analyze how you want your  application to be and what features you would like to include. This initial phase will include budget planning, development related factors and marketing strategy that will contribute in deciding the direction of your project development. 

Steps involved in the development process include: 

1. Create A Clear Concept For The App

It may seem like coding is a crucial part of app development, however, that’s where we make our first mistake. First and foremost job is to formulate an idea about the app because that affects the designing, execution and budget of your overall application.

Coding is an expensive process since the developer charges per hour or per project may come around as high-fee so it is crucial that you have your research and idea mapped to avoid waste of time on iterations and amendments.

This phase of project, application development, demands extensive market research that helps in drafting execution and development strategy, determining loopholes, gathering feedback, while ensuring to include USP to stand out in the market at the time of your launch. 

You can plan for MVP (Minimum Viable Product) or can utilize BMC (Business Model Canvas) when drafting your high-level idea. Planning is the first and crucial step in app development.

2. List The Features That Are Most Important For The App

After the initial planning process, you must decide the features for your mobile shopping application. One factor must be considered here which is to include at least one feature that your competitor is not targeting. 

3. Start The App’s Development Process

It’s time to put that research into practice after deciding on the prototype and features you can include in your application to make it successful and stand out from competitors. Your idea will take shape during this phase, and the development process will start. At this point, determining who will be on your development team should also be done – whether you plan to hire a freelancer, an employee from within the organization, or outsource the work to a third party. But because outsourcing ensures easy, within budget, and on-time development, we advise doing so for your project.

Aside from this, in this phase, you will determine the tools, platform and technology you will be using for your application development. 

Your considerations may include the followings:

3.1 Designing Process

The success or failure of the software is directly related to the design of your application. You can avoid several changes or iterations during the development process when you plan the application design before coding. This technique helps you save money and time. By prioritizing the design concept for the mobile shopping app, you can also accelerate the process of market validation for your application.

The following are some of the main justifications for why you should set aside some time to design your application.

• Designing may be exciting and engaging.
• The application’s design is completed significantly more quickly than the actual coding.
• You can complete the task without hiring an app designer yourself.
• You can hire designers for less money than developers, who can be expensive.

Utilize app templates to streamline the design process and save time and money where it isn’t necessary. The source code for these templates is available and can be customized to meet your needs. 

3.2 The Backend Code

You can move on to backend development and coding after designing. The effectiveness of an app’s backend coding determines how well most of its components function. The backend is responsible for developing APIs, managing data storage and retrieval, and carrying out most business rules.

When creating the backend for the app, developers can choose between two methods:

3.2.1 Using Backend Service Providers (BaaS)

You can benefit from automated tasks, social network logins, data backup automation, user authentication, etc. 

Choosing BaaS versus a custom backend has the following advantages:

• Speedier development leading to a sooner market debut
• Businesses don’t need to manage cloud resources
• Saving money because your engineers won’t have to work as long on tedious tasks

3.2.2 Constructing A Custom Backend From Scratch

It gives developers more flexibility to incorporate new functionalities. However, because of the high cost, most businesses refrain from going over budget only to have more freedom in backend development.

In addition, backend service providers are the only ones you should use if you want to build an app similar to Amazon and other big names in the market quickly.

3.3 The Frontend Code

The term “frontend development” describes the creation of user interfaces and engagement points for consumers. It is the most crucial component, requiring flawless coding in addition to being aesthetically pleasing and giving users a sense of usability and cleanliness. However, before beginning frontend development, you must decide if you want to create a Hybrid, Native, or Web application.

We advise using hybrid apps when creating mobile shopping applications for the following reasons:

	Web App	Native App	Hybrid App
Quick Time To Market	Fast	Slow	Regular
Access To Device Hardware	No	Yes	Yes
Third Party Integration	No	Yes	Yes
Performance	Low	High	High
Usability	Regular	Best	Good
UI/UX	Regular	Best	Good
Security	Regular	High	High

4. Obtain Feedback For The First Iteration Of The App

The most accessible approach to determine whether your application is successful is to observe how users react to it. As a result, you must provide users with a beta version of the program so that they can provide feedback based on their own experiences. Before the application’s official launch, you can use it to improve a number of its features.

5. Make Your App Search Engine Friendly

SEO is appropriate for optimizing both your website and your application. Your application will perform better when compared to other comparable ones. The following elements affect the SEO of your app: title, backlinks, and keywords. Moreover, the app’s final SEO in the online marketplace is influenced by reviews, ratings, and download volume.

6. Deploy The Finished App

Your program is prepared for release in the Google Play Store or the App Store once all the other steps listed above have been finished. Better assistance is provided by the Google Play Store, which makes it simpler for developers to list their applications there.

Features Of An Excellent Mobile Shopping App

Some useful features for your shopping app are: ratings, customer feedback, notifications, easy checkout, etc. 

Let’s have a look at the sections below for better understanding:

1. Ratings And Reviews

As a business owner, you must incorporate and embrace the feedback and reviews to improvise yourself. Since the online marketplace everything to be customer-centric, including features for rating, review and complaints can encourage a long-term success plan for you. Your old customers’ critics can help you grow and re-work for betterment and their compliments  on the other hand can do the promotions.

2. Options For Making Payments

Wide range of payment gateways across the internet provides consumers with a choice to make payment through their preferences. Incorporating multiple payment gateways in your application makes it convenient for customers to perform transactions while eliminating the hassle of downloading various applications just to pay. Multiple payment options ensure that customers stay and don’t leave just because their preferred mode of payment wasn’t available.

3. Using Push Notifications

Push notification is an effective means of generating sales and communicating with your users. It provides an easy way to promote a new product, offer a discount, remind users of items waiting in cart and most importantly for brand awareness. You can use notifications to generate direct revenue by providing customers with other important updates and changes to the application.

4. Incorporating Social Media

Online shopping applications are ideal for generating direct sales. You can incorporate various social media platforms to spread words about the new product, your company, offers and about your application. This is a crucial factor for a long-term success plan and you can reach new customers every day globally. You can also include some features or links of your application on the social media account for easy user signup/login. Another additional benefit of incorporating social media is a mouth-to-mouth promotion when the user shares your offers across social media platforms.

5. Wishlist

Wishlist allows customers to save their favorites for later due lack of need or finance at the moment. It’s a useful feature to generate definite sales as you can use push notification to remind your customer about their favorites and most likely the user ends up buying them. Aside from benefiting users, you, as an admin or your backend team can also track the user interest to target suitable and similar products to your customers. Wishlist can help you keep a track of users’ spending habits and preferences.

6. A Quick And Easy Checkout Procedure

Since selecting a suitable product while going through unlimited options is actually a time taking procedure. So an easy checkout procedure at the end guarantees immediate purchase and customer satisfaction. Complicated checkout procedures might cause you to lose customers since you already have Giants like Amazon, Etsy, Target, Aliexpress, Wish, etc. as a competitive disadvantage. You can advance in this regard by offering your customers to add credit or debit card details during the first transaction and saving them for later purchases. You can also enhance the e-billing process because again, waiting for bill generation is not a good experience.

Tips: Avoid unnecessary notifications because you don’t want to annoy your customers and focus on building a feature-rich customer centric experience to prevent loss of customers. Never hesitate to address your customer’s complaint and thus you can elevate your business with the help of your application to new heights

Tips To Create A Successful Mobile Shopping App

Here are some tips to build a shopping app successfully for a long-term business:

1. Keep It Simple

Although the size of mobile phone screens is increasing, most users still only have a few inches on their smartphone screens. 

Due to this, your mobile application demands the following features:

• A simple, clean design
• Navigation is simple to use
• A quick and efficient search function
• A neat, minimalist site that highlights your special offers and top products
• An online payment system accepts safe payment methods like Apple Pay and Stripe
• Promotional updates and tailored communications via the push notifications
• Components of customer service are designed to answer questions from customers quickly

Users won’t adopt a difficult, crowded, and perplexing app. A concise, clean user interface and an intuitive search and navigation system that directs consumers to the products they want to see can increase sales significantly. Choose less when in doubt for a better user experience.

2. Long Signups And Checkouts Will Kill Sales

Do you understand what draws in a customer? Impulsive purchasing, when a customer wants to buy a single item from you, don’t make them go through a lengthy, unpleasant sign-up process. An uncertain buyer will be less likely to purchase if they have to wait longer to complete the checkout process. The likelihood that a buyer won’t return increases if they put off buying the item because of time constraints. Consider the following to expedite the checkout process:

• Allow clients to utilize a third-party payment gateway at the checkout to save entering their credit card details manually.
• Accept Facebook or other social networks as a form of user registration.
• Don’t make it compulsory for users to register.
• Save user data so that future checkouts can use it automatically.

3. Make User Data Secure

One of the most crucial things you can do for your customers is secure the data. Users are often reluctant to shop if their payment and personal information are not safe.

Take Target as a reference. Many years ago, due to the retailer’s credit card data breach, it is believed that Target lost 46 percent of its profits, which was a $440 million loss, according to The New York Post, which is exactly $292 million higher than they had anticipated.

Avoid letting this happen to your company. When creating an online shopping app store, if extra money is required to ensure its security, spend it. That investment will undoubtedly generate a profit. Avoid taking any chances.

How Profitable A Mobile Shopping App Can Be?

Always begin with a market analysis when in doubt. According to the report, the majority of applications fall under the categories of gaming, social networking, business, and education. According to Statista, just 5.26% of the market is made up by the proportion of shopping apps available on the Apple Store. However, as noted by Forbes, there is a significant increase in demand for online shopping apps in the US and the UK, France, and Germany.

Statistic Supporting The Need Of Shopping Application

• Global retail eCommerce sales will total $7.4 trillion by 2025. This prediction of $4.9 trillion represents a rise of 50% over the following four years.
• By 2025, eCommerce is expected to attain a hike of 25% of all retail sales, up from an estimated 19.6% in 2018.
• 2.14 billion people made online purchases in 2021, a 162% increase from 2014.
• Mobile-related eCommerce sales have reached $3.5 trillion, or 72.9% of all sales.
• According to estimates, mobile retail in the US will reach $430 billion in2022, growing by twice as much as it did in 2019.
• Walmart had over 25 billion registered user sessions in 2021, followed by Amazon and the SHEIN and eBay shopping apps, which were considerably behind.
• The Wish app came in second with 5.49 million downloads in the US alone, while Amazon’s online shopping app was loaded on more than 25 million devices.

Following are some additional statistics that further demonstrate the need for creating a shopping app:

• The biggest statistic is the 21% conversion rate from shopping applications, compared to 6% from mobile web.
• Mobile shopping applications have the lowest cart abandonment rate, at 20%, compared to desktop and mobile websites, which had rates of 68% and 90%, respectively.

To summarize: Demand for shopping apps like Wish is rising. In contrast to the congested social networking and gaming marketplaces, your chances of success are incredibly genuine if you choose to develop a retail app right now.

Top Players In The Market Using Mobile Shopping App

You can build a robust mobile shopping app for your business after a detailed market research and beat the competition. Here are some generic information about the Top Players of Mobile Shopping Application who can be your potential competitors:

Mobile Application	Global Net Sales by 2021	Expected Growth	App Download (2022)	USP Of The Top Players
Amazon	$469.8B	one trillion dollars by 2026	> iOS: 100M+ > Play Store: 500M – 1B	> Ease of use  > Alexa voice ordering > 1-click ordering  > Wishlists > Order tracking  > AR view > Scanning barcodes and pictures for product availability > Automatic shipment notifications > Cross-platform integration
Target	$104.6B	3.8 percent by 2026	> iOS: 700K+ > Play Store: 10M – 50M	> Loyalty program > Discounted price > Wide range of products > Private-label brands
Walmart	$559.151B	675.2 billion U.S. dollars by 2026	> iOS: 100M+ > Play Store: 50M – 100M	> Easy shopping experience > Voice command > Real-time Price estimation > Weekly discount and notification > Receipt scanning > Sells medicine and vitamins with other products
Costco	$192.1B	25.5 billion U.S. dollars by 2026	> iOS: 436K+ > Play Store: 10M+	> Low pricing strategy > Wide variety of product > Exclusive membership > Private label
Alibaba	$109.48B	1.4 trillion dollars by 2026	> iOS: 100M+ > Play Store: 100M-500M	> Improved search tool > Coupons > Discount features > Shipping notifications > Personalized product feeds
Zulily	$750M	$2.4 trillion by 2026	> iOS: 1K+ > Play Store: 50L+	> Coupon > Hot-deal notifications > Gift recommendations

WrapUp!

A quick and simple way to give your shopping business the boost it needs to stand out in the market is to build a mobile shopping application. All you need to do is bring on a team of experts who can handle all your research and application deployment needs without any last-minute surprises. You may acquire the skill sets you need at Idea Usher to make your project stand out from the competition. Our skilled team here guarantees and completes the project by the set deadline and price. Don’t hesitate—reserve your consultation right away!

Contact us to take your business a notch higher with our backend development services.

E-mail: [email protected]

Phone Numbers : (+91) 946 340 7140, (+91) 859 140 7140 and (+1) 732 962 4560

FAQ

1. How to build a mobile shopping app?

You must first build a project plan before bringing in the necessary developers. You must also specify and establish the infrastructure and channels of communication for your developers as part of the development process. Set up sprints, create an MVP, and then tweak it to meet customer demands.

2. Where to find mobile shopping app developers?

The top developers can be found at Idea Usher. They employ seasoned developers who are masters of the most recent tech stacks and development techniques.

3. What distinguishes m-commerce from e-Commerce? 

People use online shopping portals like eBay to visit eCommerce websites. M-commerce enables customers to utilize apps on their mobile phones to access services. The feature of offline product browsing offered by these mobile apps is frequently unavailable on eCommerce websites.

4. What characteristics does a mobile shopping app have?

It can have features like ratings and reviews; options for making payments; push notifications; integration of social media; wishlist; a quick and easy checkout procedure.

5. How should your mobile shopping app be promoted?

You can promote your application using these methods:

• Create a blog and make a video about the app.
• Marketing and promotion on social media
• Responding to questions on Reddit and Quora
• Making Indeed job postings and creating a visually appealing Slideshare presentation.