E-COMMERCE APP DEVELOPMENT GUIDE- DEVELOPMENT PROCESS AND FEATURES

Today, with people living super hectic lives, no one wants to spare their time of holidays and weekends in long queues to get their things billed. With E-commerce apps, people can shop whenever they want and make payments at ease. According to a study, more than 79% of smartphone users download and use one or even more E-commerce apps like eBay, Amazon, and many more. Ali Express app with a user base of 500 million downloads and eBay with 255 million users globally are the most famous E-commerce apps in the world. 68% of users assume that E-commerce apps help them save their money using offers on goods they’d like to purchase. E-commerce app development allows businesses to target their audience from all around the world, without the need to travel place to place to promote their brand. Creating an E-commerce app is the tool to respond to buyer’s needs better, save customer’s time, and provide them with amazing user experience. What you need to analyze about E-commerce app development is that the variation it needs to have like a unique marketing idea, audience, and competitive environment. If you have a clear concept of what you are selling to your customers, with proper planning and analysis, you’ll easily accomplish your business.

There are three phases of the Discovery stage of E-commerce app development:

1. E-commerce app development idea

To make your E-commerce app development stand out in the market, you need to make sure that your business idea is unique and demanding. Generally, there are two ways of what kind of E-commerce app development you’d like for your business. If you’ve got an established shop or you produce goods, you can choose to develop an E-commerce app as a tool to attract more buyers (like H&M and Ikea apps). The other way is to design a platform that lets others sell their products in your E-commerce app development (like Amazon, Flipkart, eBay). Make a S.W.O.T (Strength, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threat) analysis for your business and list the key issues that are to be solved for your users. No matter whether it is a shopping app or a platform for online business, the initial task you need to perform is to write down your idea and develop a website first. Proceed with the general idea along with the entire functioning of the business and find a relevant E-commerce app development company to develop both the website and app for you.

2. Target audience research

Make a draft of your app features and analyze the benefits of the usage of the features according to the audience. Determine your target audience under the categories like their age, gender, region, job, and interests.

Lastly, as per the categories of the target audience try to ascertain if the audience is willing to pay money to sell their products on your E-commerce platform. Another alternative is that your E-commerce app can be developed for an existing business to sell products from your offline store.

3. Competitors analysis

The E-commerce market is full of competitions. So set your niche accordingly and conduct a competitor analysis using data from Google, Google Play Market, AppStore, and the latest trends on E-commerce.

Find out the competitive advantage of your market and list every aspect of the opponents like their methodology, promotion tool, business model, app features, and many more. This will serve you to surpass the competitors and gain a huge customer base and get the best results out of it.

Process of E-commerce App Development

E-commerce is a broad field with many niches. Half of the shopping and other E-commerce app users say that their apps provide them with access to a wider range of products. PWA (Progressive Web Applications) is another reason why online shopping is gaining popularity. Such apps provide desktop users with a perfect experience like the mobile app. E-commerce app development needs to be convenient for users, spontaneous, and responsive, as well as you need to keep its project base updated. A well-chosen platform and technology stack can help facilitate the solution of almost all of these tasks.

The complete E-commerce app development process is classified into certain stages.

• Preparation and planning

At this stage, you need to plan the development process, the budget, the general technical requirements, find team members, and set working rules and timelines. Decide the platform(Android, iOS, Windows), data frameworks, programming language, and technologies you want your app to be developed with. Select CMS, database, and the programming languages required in the development of the app.

• Design

Developing an app with soothing color schemes, smooth transitions, and appealing visuals and illustrations can provide your app the fame and recognization it deserves. Designing a logo is the first and foremost thing in the designing process since it is going to be the identity of your app to the target customers. Focus on the user experience design and develop an interactive and simplified UI/UX for your E-commerce app development.

• Development

At this stage, developers develop your app as per the features with API integrations and work out the back-end structure of your app keeping in mind the security, stability, and scalability of your product. Payment method integration is a critical concern in this stage. The development process is the one that takes time since developing apps require precise coding and integration of functional components.

• Testing 

Testing an E-commerce app development is not an easy task as the app needs items to sell (updated database) and there is an endless number of payment conditions that could occur. Conduct all the app testing according to the features integration, users, and then start fixing the bugs and errors. Conducting several rounds of testing will help you to make sure that everything is working properly as planned for the project.

• Deployment and maintenance

Launch the app to your corporate website, and on different platforms for which the app was developed like AppStore or Google Play Store. At this stage, the marketing tact should already have been started.

E-commerce App Development: Key Features

The basic E-commerce app functionality may vary as per your requirements, profit plan, and the type of product or service you sell.

E-commerce app development has three panels:

1. Customer Panel
2. Vendor Panel
3. Admin Panel

The features of the Customer/User App are: 

• Register and Log in: To personalize the app and provide users with a possibility to add products to their carts, purchase them, users can register with their email address or mobile number verification. 
• Social media integration: Social media integration is required not only because it provides one-tap login but also because it assures that your app is available to the customers at all times. The integration of this feature can also help you in improving your app image and promote it without large investments. 
• Shopping cart: This feature enables users to add products to their shopping bags to purchase them and order delivery if required.
• Search: To make the searching process easier and quicker for the users, you can develop a convenient menu and a search bar. The bar needs to be shown on every app screen for the ease of searching for any product.
• Push notifications: This feature directly influences the success of any mobile app. It lets your users notify about the new offers, referrals, discounts, promotions, and sale, or even the notifications of the status of their orders.
• Review and rating: This feature can help in determining the most purchased product according to the rating as per the quality and other important aspects. Reviews to turn your app into a more reliable platform for potential customers. When the customers find out that their requests, issues, or needs are being addressed then they will become a permanent user.
• Wishlist: This section allows the users to collect and save products and then buy them according to their requirements. This feature directly helps in boosting sales and receiving information from the user’s preferences.
• Live Chat Support: Customers can chat directly with the support team to resolve their queries regarding the app.
• Real-time order tracking: This feature is integrated into the system to track their orders with real-time data and GPS tracking.
• Personalization: This feature enables the users to get precise results based on certain factors, such as location, festival, culture, and their browsing behavior.
• Payment options: It is also important to have multiple payment options that are popular to provide your customers with their preferred payment options. You can have integrations of payment options like a credit card, debit card, net banking, or e-wallets.

The basic features of the Vendor App are: 

• Register and Login: The Vendor can register into the app by providing all the necessary details and listing his store into the app.
• Add Products: This feature allows the Vendor to add/edit or remove products for sale from the app. The vendor can click clear pictures of the product and describe a few lines about the product in this section.
• User review: The vendor can read all the ratings and feedbacks of the users, of the products that were purchased from their store.
• Earnings: This feature allows the vendor to view the overall details of his earnings.

The features of the Admin Panel are: 

This panel allows your company to manage every activity going on with your app and shows the usage statistics and insights. — the admin or the owner of the business can also add and hide products, solve client’s issues, change pictures, and many more. 

• User Manager: To manage all the user activities and add/edit or delete them whenever required.
• Vendor Manager: The admin can manually approve a vendor to maintain in-app security.
• Google Analytics: This feature will help you to find out what features of your E-commerce app development are being liked by the users and in which areas they want you to improve by the feedback with real-time data and also the overall summary of the app.

Other important features of the Admin panel are:

• Payment Manager
• Customer Support Manager
• Content Manager
• Profiles Manager
• Ads Manager
• Subscription Package Manager

Note: The features may vary according to the requirements and the level of customization you want in your E-commerce app development.

Additional features:

• Product search with QR codes: Integration of QR codes can be a game-changing feature of your app. This feature is used to gather information about the product that a user is looking for by scanning the QR or bar code of any product they like.
• Cloud Storage: This functionality will allow you to store data on the cloud and you will be able to access data from anywhere and anytime.
• Multi-currency support: This functionality will allow a user to convert the currency by the integration of currency converter API into the app.
• Augmented Reality View: Te integration of the AR view feature is pricey. But this feature will allow the customers to view and observe the fit and look of the product before making a purchase. The integration of this feature has led to higher sales as there is a lesser risk of customers not liking any product after a virtual trial.
• CRM Integration: It is useful to improvise marketing through SMS and email. Admin can send notifications regarding new deals and promotional offers to both the user and the vendors.
• Price comparison: This feature allows the users to fetch the price of a similar item from other e-commerce platforms, which makes it easy for them to decide and visit your e-commerce platform.

Team to Develop an E-commerce app

To execute your idea of an E-commerce app development you need an identical team that should consist of a Project Manager, UI/UX designer, Mobile app developer for dedicated platforms, Back-end developer, and Quality tester. You can also choose several forms of interaction with the team like in-house development, team outsourcing, or work with freelancers.

Conclusion

E-commerce app development is a beneficial thing in the upcoming years. As per a calculation, it is estimated that the E-commerce app transaction amount will rise to 53.9% as compared to 2017 and will generate 79% of profits in the E-commerce sector globally. Although of your business plan — to promote your goods or to create a platform, the mobile app is the most promising product to develop compared with regular websites. Security, Stability, Scalability are the three major principles that cannot be ignored while developing an application that deals with economic data. E-commerce apps deal with a large number of users as it is the only means for a business to gain profits out of it. The more users you attract with your unique market value, the less is the price you need to pay for gaining the attention of each of them.

E-commerce app development is not much different from any other mobile app development. What differentiates an E-commerce app from other products in the market is launching a product with special requirements of the consumers and hiring a dedicated E-commerce app development company. We are ranked amongst the best e-commerce development companies in the USA by the Top E-commerce development companies. If you have any idea or any queries regarding the E-commerce app development please fill the form below and avail free consultation for better clarity.

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