The whole world is buying things online. The trend has fascinated both customers and retailers. On one the hand, customers have built a greater reliance on e-commerce. They are buying everything online; from clothes to groceries, to gadgets, to appliances, to furniture, to everything else.
On the other hand, retailers are seeing enormous opportunities in selling online, through a mobile app. Of course, they would have extended reach as more people are using mobile devices in the comparison of laptops or desktops.
But will every retailer succeed in its e-commerce application development? Will to succeed with an e-commerce mobile app be as easier as to get it built? Unfortunately, it’s not.
An e-commerce app will not be successful unless it’s developed to be successful. Let me share 10 vital tips helping you come up with an e-commerce app that lives up to your customers’ expectations and also caries every possible attribute to beat competitors.
1. Make a neat and well-ordered UI
What’s the first thing a user experiences when he launches an e-commerce app? It’s neither the brand behind the app nor is the range of products available. It’s also not any offer or discount that the app is providing. The user interface allows users to move into an app, explore all its categories, and make searches in it.
When designing the UI, make sure you are focusing on how smartphone devices are used. There is a little screen-real estate available in a smartphone, and everything has to be displayed on it only.
Every button, menu, and content has to be set in a way so that they look uncluttered and well organized at their places.
Doubtlessly, UI and the design of an e-commerce app are the true customer-drivers. Good UI and design invite users to explore the app more and ultimately, to make purchases on it.
UI is the real attention grabber. Make it as perfect as possible.
2. Consistent navigation with minimum steps
You can show large menus and their submenus on an e-commerce website, but you cannot do this on an app. Again screen space is the constraint and there no choice but to go by it.
You cannot show everything in a single drop down like a website. You will need limiting things to make your app effective for mobile devices, instead.
You can simplify the discovery of products for users by constantly sticking the menu throughout the app. Make sure that the menu lists only the most important categories, sub-categories, and sections.
Each of the menu items should be named just with a single word, like, Clothes, Accessories, Style, T-shirts, Jewelry, Accessories, etc.
In fact, you have to be too creative to create a menu. Things in an e-commerce menu need to be compacted and condensed.
3. Make log in / sign in and checkout quick and simple
Don’t make users feeling irritated while logging or signing in and checking out. A simple reason is that screens distract users when it comes to inputting information. Touch-screens are more distracting for writing something on them as they lack physical keyword.
Now if you make a long login process, which asks users to put their name, surname, address, number, email, security question and a captcha, you are in fact trying to irritate your users.
Similarly, don’t make a multiple-step checkout process because users don’t like it. They just have patience.
You can make social media login / signing such as via Facebook and Gmail, instead. Because almost all users owning a smartphone do also use Facebook and Gmail, customers will easily be able to logging / signing in without inputting any sort of information.
4. Give cart a prominent place
You have to give the cart a prominent place. After all, it’s what every customer will use to buy from you. The cart should always show up as clearly as a product itself. It should add the product without taking users to the cart page so that they can continue with other purchasing.
Again, the motive behind putting the cart along with a product is to minimize the steps and deliver better shopping experience.
5. Make loading quicker
Smart mobility has made computing faster. Users too have become impenitent as I already mentioned above. They want no delay in images not uploading on time. They do not also want to see that loading circle that takes more than 5–4 second of time to load the app and every page users enter.
To stay in the mobile e-commerce world, your app needs to load as faster as possible. Every element, various images, and pages should load just in the matter of 4–5 seconds. This is the attention span time of online users. Go by it.
6. A progress bar is enough to make users have patience
Mobility isn’t restricted to one-size-fits-all. Maybe your business requires a strict authentication of users and, thus they need to put their details in fields. Maybe, you cart requires users to go through a multi-step process before they pay for their purchases.
If some processes are longer and you cannot do anything to make them short, you can use progress bar that lets users see how much they have filled up and how much is left to do. This is a creative way to physiologically influence users and keep them with the login or sign-up process, and from adding products to cart to making payment.
When users see a green progress bar in whatever action they perform, they want to complete it even when they have to provide every input to it.
7. Don’t forget adding add product to Favorite or Wish list feature
Customers like to browse every possible alternate before they actually make a purchase to a particular product. They come across more than one product fulfilling their needs and, they want to keep them all together to decide the specific one later. The feature ‘add to favorite’ or ‘add to wish-list’ lets customers put all their choices in one place before they purchase a specific product.
It helps them choose the best among their own selections.
8. Creative use of smartphone capabilities
Smartphone devices come with a number of sensors, capabilities of identifying gestures, and wireless connectivity. Apps can use them all. Creative mobile developers know how to use different sensors and come-up with a creative feature that excites users.
Every smartphone, for example, comes with an accelerometer sensor, which can detect its own movements. App developers can create a feature that shows deals of the day when users shake the phone. This is one creative example of how app developers can use the inner capabilities of a device and merge them with an app to devise something unique.
9. Make a secure app
With mobility becoming popular, apps are also becoming the target of internet hackers and attackers. A poorly secured app can easily be breached to get the personal information and financial data of users.
This is why you should always provide the high level of security in an app as well as make every transaction encrypted with the best possible security features.
10. Auto recommendation
When users browse an app and go from one page to another, the whole activity can create data logs, which can be used to understand the behavior of individual users. Apps having analytics provide data for user-behavior and other patterns. This data helps in understanding several things about users, and allow you to provide better recommendations based on their behaviors.
Bonus Tip
11. Considering Fusing modern tech like AR and VR
AR and VR are gradually becoming a part of mobile development too. Many developers have started to fuse these modern technologies with mobility to build unique features. You can consider your app with AR and VR possibilities.
Do consider these tips if you are going to get your app developed in today’s time. They will help you get an app that really makes a difference in your retailing business and make you successful in your e-commerce expedition.
Author Bio. :- Sofia Coppol is a digital marketing expert in Rapidsoft Technologies which is a leading IT consulting company providing full range it services including, IoT app development, Blockchain development, and big data app development solutions.