Nowadays e-commerce Industry has become the attractive areas of both web and mobile app development. Internet Retail is one of the booming Industry to reach around 1.5 billion dollars worldwide. According to US customer satisfaction Index, Online shopping Mobile applications users are satisfied when compared to retail customers. The mobile world is even more promising because today people are searching for online shops with their phones other than PCs.

Many of them are looking for a business opportunity but don’t know where to initiate. So how the successful startups were created in this competitive field?  To answer this answer let us a take a look at the process of mobile app development from the developer’s view. Before an app is ready to launch it goes through many stages. The stages are,

1.Perform a Market Research

Each and every software development company begins its work on a project by identifying the customer’s business requirements and needs.  Make a research on what type of goods you were intended to sell, whether it is physical or digital?. Once it is decided,  perform market research.

Make a look at the apps and services that are selling the same type of goods that you are planned that is take a look at your competitors. This helps in better understanding of all the important features.

We can take a look at Amazon, the leader in both the sales and in customer satisfaction. It is initiated as an online bookstore and then turned into a successful startup. Amazon offered a large database of books to its customers at very reasonable prices. With more discounts. And this way makes them become the most popular book website in the world. Now it is turned into an e-commerce giant.

Thing that made Amazon a successful Internet retailer

Amazon featured a more powerful search engine, that offers various categories and lists to help all its customers with their own decision and a recommendation center where people can select books based upon their preference, mood and reading history. It also offered customer review sections and ratings.

2.Select Essential features

Determine the scope of your Project. Don’t just make an Amazon App clone rather create a more outstanding Online shopping mobile app. The ecommerce industry is one of the biggest competitive area, so launch your app as soon as fast.

Some of the essential features are,

User login –  Make log-in a pleasant and more user-friendly experience, allow your users to sign in with options like Facebook, and other Social media.

Product Search –  Use high-quality indexing and different filters that will help people to find more quickly what they want from the app.

User review –  This feature will improve sales by 18%. A place where customers can give their review about both product and about the shopping experience.

Smooth experience – Customers will eagerly fill their cart with the products they like, but as per a research around 71% of these carts were rejected in the end, this may have many reasons.

More safe and reliable Payment gateway – use a good payment system.

Shipping –  One of the main success of Amazon is its fast delivery of products.

  1. Apply Professional Design

To attract more customers, Design is another powerful tool. Good Design will help in improving the brand recognition and mobile apps popularity. Design an attractive Logo, one of the important thing. To make your images perfect follow,

  • Make use of white background
  • Use more quality pictures
  • Enable zoom option if necessary
  • Display large photos
  • Provide Videos of the products if possible
  1. Select the right Platform

Decide the platform that you want to launch your mobile app. Make a research on the market and on your target customers. iOS are preferred in Europe and America while other parts prefer Android. Make a good research and select your platform based on your target audiences. Form the developers view iOS Consumes less time and more convenient because you have to optimize only for the recent and the previous versions of Apple.

As in case of Android development, developers need to optimize for the greater number of devices and screen resolutions that takes more time. Save your money and time by making it available for the popular devices.

  1. Maintain Product growth and support

After launching your shopping app concentrate on improving your products. This includes researching, feedbacks and implementing new features. A research shows that  25% of users leave the website without performing an action which takes more than 4 seconds to load. People are expecting the same performance as such of the website. So, optimize the speed of your website. Provide excellent customer support.

It is more necessary to have a detailed page for propositions and complaints. Have FAQ page, a staff to deal with customers and a list of contacts. Promote your mobile app, many of the shopping apps fails here without knowing the power of marketing. It is highly recommended to market your shopping app more than the time taken to develop it. Include the activities of social media in marketing your shopping app. Engage your customers directly, offer discounts and loyalty programs. Create a blog and promote 50% knowledge base and  50 % promotional.

  1. Check out the cost of building your shopping app

Have an outline for your shopping app. The cost to develop a shopping app will not be able to answer by any company, it is one of the tough questions and the answer all depends upon the requirements. Before initiating the development process conduct a research and interviews to know about the scope of your project. Include the following features while developing your shopping app,

  1. Customer Sign up
  2. Search option with more filters
  3. More reliable payment systems
  4. Optimize in a User-friendly manner
  5. Users reviews and ratings
  6. Shipping Integration
  7. Customer support and feedback

The hourly fees vary from company to company and also from countries to countries. In America, it may take up to $250 per hour and in Europe, it is around $30 – 50/hr.

Identify your target customers and follow the above steps to develop your outstanding e-commerce mobile application.

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Contact Us Smarther