How to Build an Awesome M-Commerce App: Top 10 Features to Consider
Since it’s inception, mobile commerce or popularly known as m-commerce have been a booming business. The number of mobile commerce users is increasing with the number of people being able to access the Internet on mobile devices is increasing.
According to the statistics released by OuterBox, 79% of the total smartphone owners in the US have purchased products online via their smartphones. Out of 230 million smartphone users in the US, 182 million uses their smartphone to make an online purchase. These numbers are enough to identify the importance of m-commerce app development in this day and age.
Have you ever heard of Progressive Web Apps? No? Well, they are websites which look and feel precisely like mobile apps. If you have a full-fledged e-commerce website up-and-running, and you’ve heard recommendations to go with a PWA development rather than an Android or iPhone app development, then please consider these aspects before making the final decision.
If you’ve identified that m-commerce app development is your way-to-go to boost your retail business, then here are a few features that you must consider to make your app stand out.
Below are the top 10 features for m-commerce app development
#1 Smooth Registration and Login
One of the first actions that a user performs is the registration or login. Including a lot of information in the registration process will ruin the customer experience. It is not necessary to take all the personal data from a user in the first go. You can take them later (probably, at the time of check out) once you have the basic information such as name, email, and phone number.
Registering users through their social media profiles is also a great hack to onboard new customers.
After the registration, a user should directly be redirected to the landing page or product page.
#2 High-quality Product Images
The image quality of your product can either make or break your retail store. Especially for the customers who just moved from offline shopping to online shopping. If these customers receive a realistic shopping experience similar to a brick and mortar store, then they can become your lifelong customers. In the case of regular customers if you want to increase customer retention showing high-quality product images should be your way-to-go.
#3 Full-length Product Description
Similar to your e-commerce site, your mobile app must also consist of a detailed description of your products. But, there is has to be slight variation in it as the mobile screen size is small the description length must be adjusted accordingly.
While creating descriptions for your mobile devices, you must remove all the unnecessary paragraphs which are not related to the product. Also, you must consider writing information in bullet points rather than paragraphs as it will increase the readability in mobile devices.
#4 Simple Navigation
A lot of times, customers will come to your app looking for very specific products. At that time if a customer will find it challenging to navigate through the app, it will ruin his/her experience. Organize your products properly, based on categories and keywords. Including a search bar with proper search optimization can immensely help a user as they usually don’t have time to browse through various products to find the one they have been looking.
#5 Personalization
Personalizing the app for customers is one of the critical elements which will deliver an excellent user experience. Personalization can be done in two ways:
Customizing the home page or landing page of the app based on the shopping activities of a user.
Showing offers and products based on the season or the location of a customer. For example, Let’s say you own an online cloth store and you sell clothes starting from shorts to winter coats. Now, to increase sales, you must show winter coats in the home screens of customers living in Manhattan and Shorts in the home screens of customers living in Southern California.
Contact our experts now to get answers to all your queries about m-commerce app development.
#6 Show Discounts and Run Flash Sales
Despite providing fantastic user experiences via an intuitive user interface, you need to give your customers a reason to buy from your store. Of course your products are the first reason they are here, but giving discounts and offers on your products will motivate them further to make a purchase.
Adding a separate section during the seasonal sale will upscale the customer experience instantly as they will no longer have to ponder here and there in the store to search for products with the offer.
#7 Retail Integration
The term “omnichannel commerce” is getting popularity nowadays, and for a good reason. Even though your customers are physically present in your retail store yet, they can virtually wander around in your competitor’s store via their mobile app and compare your products with yours. Because according to Retail Dive, 54% of the customers use their mobile phones inside a store to check and compare prices of products.
To deliver an excellent omnichannel experience to your customers, the simplest thing to do is to provide them free wifi inside the store so that they don’t have to rely on mobile data to access your app.
You can also provide a feature in your app that’ll help customers identify where (which aisle of which floor) is the product that they are looking for is located in the store.
To deliver true omnichannel commerce experience, your app must have a reverse feature. It helps customers to purchase something from the offline store that they have viewed on your app and vice-versa. This feature will help you get more app downloads.
#8 Smooth and Secure Checkout
After putting all the efforts and money to deliver a great digital experience to your customers via an app if the checkout options aren’t user-friendly, then it will ruin the entire customer experience till then.
So, whenever you decide to go with m-commerce app development, make sure that your app has faster checkout options, integration with popular mobile wallets, and multiple card saving options. Following these basic practices will help you to increase customer retention.
#9 Push Notifications
Push notifications are an essential element to awake your customers if they haven’t shopped from your store for a long time. It is also one of the most vulnerable features to have in an m-commerce app. According to Kahuna, the CTR for Retail industry is the least at 12% among the eight sectors.
One of the primary reasons for this is the number of push notifications per day or week. Sending too many push notifications can overwhelm the customers even during festive seasons. Therefore, even though, push notifications are a great way to engage with your customers; it is recommended to understand your customers’ shopping behavior and send personalized push notifications to each customer in the apt amount accordingly.
#10 Simplified Customer Service
Despite providing amazing product images, detailed product descriptions, simplified search, and FAQs, customers are always going to have questions in their heads. They are inevitable. As your store will grow, these questions are only going to increase. If you succeed in addressing all these questions, you’ve won the war.
It is recommended that you provide multiple customer support options such as live chat, phone call, or email. The main agenda behind providing all these options must be to solve queries of your customers at any cost.
Conclusion
All the features mentioned above are quite useful to create a good m-commerce app. However, if you want to achieve massive success through m-commerce app development, always listen to your customers. It can be in the form of feedbacks or analytics. Leverage this data to identify the features which are lacking in your app. Include those features in an update and repeat the same at every fixed interval. It can be a month, a quarter, or six months.
Don’t get too confused as to who will you be able to do all these things. Start by including these features into your app and leave the rest on your customers. They will be your ultimate guide throughout your entrepreneurial journey.
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