How to Develop an Ecommerce Mobile App – Cost, Features, Technologies

Everyone who dreams of running a business of their own has this great desire for their shop being crowded with customers all over, isn’t it Well, if you are some with this dream then you can just go ahead and try attaining your goals and ambitions with an eCommerce mobile app. For many reasons, an eCommerce app can just be your dream come true business. It allows the businesses to target their audience from all around the globe, without the need to travel places to market and promote their brand. This is just one added advantage. Lately, a huge rise was witnessed in the demand to develop eCommerce apps by businesses with most of the startups getting into the eCommerce business. The motto of all of them is to target mobile-first and website-second.

Amazon is the one holding the reigns with it enjoying the status of being the biggest player in this e-Commerce game along with its counterpart eBay, Snapdeal, Myntra & Snapdeal. These platforms have successfully captured the heart of the audience and now malls & supermarkets are simply considered as food zones, check-in hangouts, window-shopping, and another cult selfie-zone. Today, with people leading super busy lives, no one desires to spare this precious time of their holidays and weekends in long queues to get their items billed. With eCommerce apps for their rescue, they can shop whenever they want and make easy payments instantly.

For the unbeknownst, presently 125 million consumers in the United States own smartphones, while 50 million consumers in the United States have tablets. Now, in the last six months, 62% of smartphone users have made online purchases using their mobile devices. Meanwhile, e-commerce dollars account for ten percent of the entire retail revenue. Even inside the physical retail store, 80 percent of the shoppers have used their smartphones to either search product reviews, to compare prices, or to find alternative store locations.

Which Are the Two Popular e-Commerce Mobile Apps in the Market?

When we decide to enter the market with a competition of any big application, it becomes important that we study our competition well. Exploring the market you would see that there are hundreds of such applications that you need to surpass. But when speaking of the most prominent e-Commerce mobile apps across the world, they are:

Amazon: It is a renowned e-Commerce website providing a spectacular shopping experience to its users. Super light and fast, it enables the users to search & filter wide-ranging products with few taps on the screen. Users like the multi-payment gateway offered by this platform for easy checkout as well as it offers complete updates on the order status. Besides, Amazon enables its users to shop without registration, or even register at the end of the checkout process by just entering their email address or mobile number. eCommerce mobile app

eBay: This platform has great offerings such as online bidding to its users across the world. It offers search options to enhance buying & selling experience, along with features such as barcode scanning to compare prices, guest checkout, auto-complete search, linking PayPal accounts for faster transactions, etc. Also, it sends notifications regarding bid status, time remaining in the auctions, and the latest auctions.

These two applications have transformed the way the world shops. From everything being available at a place to your order being delivered to your doorstep everything has become quite easier and simpler.
Entering the market with such efficiency is surely going to be a great challenge and you would need to think of solutions that can help you make your identity and build a strong customer base.

Next, let’s explore the future of the applications like Amazon and eBay in the market.

Future of Ecommerce Mobile Applications in the Market

Well, we all know that Amazon entered the market in the mid-1990s simply as an online book store and within a short span of 27 months since it was conceived, the application had the chance to serve around 1,000,000 clients. They accomplished this through no wonder, yet through similar essential standards.

So now we should discuss those achievement standards Amazon follows:

1. Comprehending the Customer Needs

Ever since it was conceived the application had been covering the pain points of the market. When they began as an online store they had something effectively up to their sleeves. They entered the market with zeal and had explored well into what their clients required. The booklists, the organizations that they will like, the standard advanced speech of perusing a book and beginning, stopping again and wanting for a similar sort of class, and significantly more. The capacity to hit on the core of client needs was something that furnished them with incredible progress in the opposition.

2. Make Customer Life Easy

Laziness and ease are human tendencies. Your customers don’t like to delay buying the products they need but often it is delayed owing to the laziness in bringing things up. Customers need everything in their grasp at all points in time. This was the main point where Amazon perfected their application plan. The clientele they earned by providing simple ease with their applications is just stunning. One can simply show up at the correct presentation screen with a couple of snaps. What’s more, when it’s simple clients come back over and over.

3. Bring Something New for Your Customers

Amazon has never failed to surprise its customers with new technology and interesting products. They play amazingly with the push notifications and alerts by sending you the correct sort of notices more often than not.
The question is, how would they know your preferences? The Predictive Analytics tool that Amazon has integrated collects data through your browsing patterns with designs the things you need or may require soon. Furthermore, when the message pop-ups hit you one fine morning you feel shocks. The offers and game coupons are likewise something amazon utilizes a great deal to extend its span.

4. Offer Room to Customers to Express

A lot of business owners doubt confronting basic feedback. They are only expecting to anticipate words of praise from everybody. Or on the other hand that is the thing that Amazon feels. Since Amazon truly treats its clients appropriately. The remark and audit segments are quite often very much joined in. Truth be told, it is this segment that makes Amazon more legitimate as the organization permits the popular government to win here.

These are the few points that clearly reflect what made Amazon the most loved eCommerce brand in the short span of less than a decade. The app has been leading the market for long enough to turn its owner into the Richest Man on Earth.

It is not just the business model that makes Amazon the most loved eCommerce mobile application, it is also the technology that they have integrated with the application and the way it has grown over the years.

Technology for Ecommerce App Development

In the mobile application sector, it becomes quite difficult for business owners to stand out. Over the years Jeff Bezos has made it quite significant how the use of technology can change the current working picture.

VR and AR Integration in Shopping App

When talking about technology, augmented reality technology is growing quickly in various ventures. The technology is not only upscaling games and entertainment, AR/VR is ordinarily applied in medical care, instruction, auto industry, and obviously retail. Increased reality shopping offers an interesting scenario to customers where they can see as well as a few pragmatic benefits for a retailer application that you may create. A virtual show area can permit you to “take a stab at” any piece of clothing or adornment, from glasses to tennis shoes. You should simply point the camera at the body part and see how the product looks on you.

With such simple to integrate tools your eCommerce app development team guarantees that the client will take a gander at items that they probably won’t have initially expected to purchase. This prompts higher change rates than any business wants. AR can be applied not exclusively to apparel, yet additionally furniture, inside plan things and makeup. Retail buyer patterns appear to show that clients in numerous specialties react well to this tech.

Visual Search for Easy Purchases

Amazon, Pinterest, etc. are making use of the innovation of visual hunt significantly lately. It becomes easier with images to the possibility of ​​a search more than strong keywords where you need to be very specific to reach any particular item. Online search engines likewise cooperate better with visual parts, which prompts more precise outcomes. For organizations, the visual search process can be valuable in:

• Lessening the hole among search and buy
• Promoting benefits, for example, conveyance photographs of an effective buy by customers
• The capacity to effortlessly follow the prevalence of specific items among clients

Today, this innovation takes into account dependence on the picture and incompletely on the utilization of the camera for continuous pursuit.

Single Click Purchasing In-App

Until 2017, a patent for this technology was claimed solely by Amazon. According to the current scenario, this tech is very simple to carry out when developing your application. One can utilize the REST API technique to cooperate with the worker, where the fundamental information is sent. Its coordination additionally delivers certain dangers, however. A client may unintentionally arrange pointless items, which will prompt discount demands and bother on your part. To keep away from this, you ought to give an instrument to the self-dropping of a request.

Advanced Wallets and Crypto-Payments

Google Pay, Apple or Samsung Pay, and PayPal are a portion of the advanced wallets you ought to present for your eCommerce business. Other than making the installment payments simple, you need to think often about coordinating the most well-known instalment stages for your focused crowd into your shop application.

In 2019, with the development of digital currencies and cryptographic money exchangers advancement, this sort of instalment has become an inexorably mainstream instalment technique. Consequently, perhaps you should begin to consider combinations with them.Ever since Elon Musk has declared that Tesla would make transactions in Bitcoin the technology is only expected to grow.

Voice Search In The Shop Application

Like visual, voice search is also clearly aimed at improving customer interaction and expanding deals. Because of discourse acknowledgment innovation, however, a voice search can be completed 1.5 occasions quicker than the visual one. This makes shopping faster, less difficult, and more advantageous. Voice search requires little fixation and should be possible moving, which makes it a definite formula for progress. Such retail advances flourish as a result of how helpful they are.

It becomes easier for the clients to buy their products by simply calling out the name. The technology is appropriate just for showcasing and offering some specific items. Its market presence is as yet generous, however, which implies you ought to, at any rate, consider it for your application. Retail industry patterns lean vigorously toward applications that element voice search.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Integration

We all know there are various sectors that have explored the possibility of integrating AI/ML-based Solutions like medical services, business activities automation, 3D explanations via AI, etc. But Amazon and eBay have a better deal. Our Ecommerce mobile app developers have used the technology for improving your mobile shopping application work and making it more astute. That outcome results in better client experience and quicker deals.

With strong technology in the picture, you would already get way ahead of your competition. The other aspect of taking your application way ahead of others is integrating interesting features in it that would make it stand out from the competition.

How to Develop Your Own E-commerce Mobile App?

With e-commerce businesses growing leaps and bounds these days? It’s not a surprise that more and more businessmen want to develop an app for themselves in the pursuit of achieving big in the e-commerce field. And the work of the businessman looking to get an app developed has been made easy by all the latest tools and technology available on hand. To the already cruising business of e-commerce, VR and AI technologies have provided more fuel via their tremendous features in the form of the virtual changing room. It is a no-brainer that e-commerce is going to rule in the future and aspiring businessmen should get an app developed to achieve big.

Your perspective regarding your e-commerce app has to be loud and clear from the beginning of this adventure. What type of app you want to start your business with – iOS or Android What is the type of your product Who is the target audience Which type of brands you want to target After getting all this done, the next basic step for you would be to define the correct features required for your mobile app. Features are the most important factor that makes or breaks your app. Target audiences are hugely influenced by the features and if they are not to their liking they will turn to some app. This directly will hamper your revenue growth.

Key aspects for developing an e-commerce app

Market Analysis and Buyer Personal: Developing a Buyer persona will help you big time in making your business work. You have to develop your products according to the audience you are indulging with. Do work on getting to know your target audience, their likes, and dislikes, the digital age they are dealing with. Get to know their behavior and daily patterns and that will certainly help you out in creating an app in accordance with their basic demands.

Knowledge of your competitors: Having knowledge about all the competitors that are involved in the market is a must in the business arena. Get all the details about your competitors, their functioning process, how they attract the customers, their methodology. We are not asking to blindly follow their working procedure but to take notes and build a work ethic around those notes to get maximum results out of it.

Choosing technology: Track down all the basic knowledge of the business and that will help you in deciding the technology that will create the e-commerce app for you. Calculate the budget required, collect inventory information, select CMS, framework, database, and backend front-end languages required in coding the app. You have to decide whether you want your app on the Android version or on the iOS version keeping the device usage of your audience in mind.

UI & UX Design: You are tasked with providing your app the fame it deserves and this can be done in the form of soothing color schemes, smooth transitions, and appealing visuals that customers can find moving from one page to another. Design various types of logos and after consulting with experienced campaigners leverage the selected one to the maximum. This logo is going to be your identity with your target customers. You need to plan to outsmart branding tactics to get into the subconscious mind of customers.

Product Image Quality: Your app must have the feature to display a high resolution image of the products as customers will get attracted by the image of the product as they don’t have the leisure to see the product before ordering. So in order to completely convince the customers you must have to provide a high-quality picture of the product in your app. Embedding the zoom feature onto the pics will help out customers in taking a closer look at the product. Next, let’s explore the features that need to be present in an e-Commerce mobile app.

General Features of an e-Commerce Mobile App:

Additional Features for eCommerce Mobile App:

Registration: Nobody got that extra time to go through a long list of demands on your registration page, everybody wants to experience the features as soon as possible. So in order to attract more customers, enable the option to log in with two or three clicks via people’s social media account.

Support multiple payment options: If you don’t provide your customers with their preferred payment options then you are running in dangerous territory of losing your regular customers. You have to open all the doors of payments whether it is a credit card, debit card, net banking, or e-wallets.

Push notifications: These are one of the features that directly influence the success of any mobile app. They are important as they keep the customers updated with the referrals, discounts, promotions, sales, and offers and lure them back to the app. This, in turn, will directly improve the revenue collection of your app.

Social media integration: Social media integration is required not only because it provides one-tap login but also because it ensures that your app is available to the customers at all times. Whether they are using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Pinterest. This, in turn, will help them in sharing their special discounts on social media accounts.

Dedicated discount features: Abandoned carts can be pointed out as of the major issues for e-commerce as 70% of carts are abandoned to turn into a significant amount of revenue loss. So what to do? You can start by retargeting those customers by providing them special discounts on those specific products they left behind in the cart. Going by the survey, 61% of the 18-24 aged people tend to buy the products with the number going up to 72% for customers in the age group of 25-34. This shows that you can somehow retrieve lost sales just by offering the customers special discounts.

Product search with QR codes: QR codes have become the new normal. You can use them in order to gather information about the product you are looking for. You can create a feature of your own that will allow the users to scan QR or bar codes of any product they really like.

Complete synchronization: If you come up with a great feature that will certainly excite your customers and you need to launch that feature before your competitors do then you can use complete synchronization. This will help in speeding up the process by synchronizing the app with the website. This will help in saving plenty of time, beat your competition and increase sales.

Google Analytics: Google Analytics will help you out in finding out what features of your app people are liking and in which areas they want you to crank it up a notch. It will help you out in finding out the feedback of the customers with real-time data. You perform better in the areas that you are lagging behind with the help of Google Analytics.

Review and Rating: A brilliant businessman is always open to criticism in order to grow and review and product ratings will throw the reality in front of him. Customers should be empowered with the option of reviewing and Rating your app and features included. When the customers will find out that their demands are being heard then they will become a permanent member of your family.

Wishlist Button: A customer likes some product on an app but can only buy it after a week with the arrival of his salary. Wishlist play feature will turn his savior in this case. It helps the users to save their products that they want to buy after a while. Does this feature directly help in increasing sales and getting input from user’s preferences?

Easy Checkout: Users tend to scroll and compare a lot of products before making their final decisions. After this, to pay for their products they want the process to be as simple as it can be. Your app must take care of saving their card and e-wallet details and take them quicker through payment gateways. Customers don’t like to wait in the payment queue so try to cut short the steps involved.

Easy Product Navigation: There are a lot of products being sold on your app, product navigation definitely makes it easier for the users to navigate through all the products and find the one they are looking for.

Live Chat Support: Customers can directly communicate with the support team in order to discuss any form of query regarding some product, order, or payments.

Real-time order tracking: It allows the customers to track down their orders with real-time information. Your users will receive live updates regarding their order whenever ETA or status shifts.

Augmented Reality View: AR view feature will allow the customers to view and observe the product at home before making a purchase. Customers can get the feel of the product in any corner of the house.

Social media integration: Customers like to get a lot of opinions from their friends, family, and relatives about any product they want to buy. So they should be provided with the option of sharing that product through social media platforms like WhatsApp,?Facebook,?Instagram or Twitter.

Ratings and Reviews: Feedback is very necessary in order to improve in any aspect. Customers should be provided with the option of providing feedback based on their experience. This, in turn, will improve the quality of the app.

Personalization: This functionality enables the users to get a particular result based on factors, such as their location, festival, culture. Order history and browsing behavior.
Shipping: Shipping API is integrated into the system to track the shipment from the source to the destination.

Google Map Integration: By integrating maps, the entire store is displayed on the map. Here the user would be able to search the store on the map, which navigates them.

Auto tax calculation: A Tax calculation API is integrated into the system so that it auto-calculates the tax for each of the products.

Multi-currency support: This functionality allows users to convert the currency via currency convertor API, which can be integrated into the app.

Price comparison: To fetch the price of an item from other e-commerce platforms, price comparison API can be integrated into the system.

Reporting & Analytics: This feature will keep the admin updated and allow him to analyze the overall summary of the app, such as registered users, issued cards with a time range, orders, products, etc.

Payment gateway: Payment API can be integrated into the app to make transactions easy for the customers.

Cloud Storage: This functionality allows us to store data on the cloud. This way the system will be able to access data from anywhere and anytime.

CRM Integration: It is useful to enhance marketing through SMS and email. Admin can send notifications regarding new deals and promotional offers. There are already a lot of e-commerce apps in the present-day market and if you want to stand out from the crowd then you need to follow these steps and features. Following a customer’s first approach and providing them with the utmost ease to choose and buy the products will surely allow them to attract and retain customers. Any try to create an app with solid features that won’t fade away with time and keep on working with your app by getting all the necessary feedback from your customers.

Required Team Structure

To develop a basic version of an eCommerce mobile app, you will require:

• Project Manager
• Android/iOS Developer
• Back-end developer
• Quality Assurance Expert
• UX/UI Designer

Cost to Develop an e-Commerce Mobile App

The development cost of an e-Commerce mobile app depends on a number of factors, such as:

• Number of Features
• Advanced and Complexed Features
• Number of platforms (Android or iOS, or both)
• Number of 3rd Party API integration
• Location of the app development company (development cost is lowest in the Asian countries, like India)

When the basic app version is considered with the MVP features and simple UX/UI design, the development cost will be somewhere $20000-$25000, whereas an app with advanced features and more platforms, the cost may reach $50000. However, investing this sum of money ensures a feature-rich and brilliant e-Commerce mobile app.

Wrapping This Up!

The eCommerce mobile app development market is booming thanks to the increased demand for such applications. If you want to enter the market with such an application all you need to do is make sure that each aspect of your product stands out from your competition. Hire best eCommerce mobile app development company and see the wonders they bring on the screen for you.