Software Development Insights | Daffodil Software

Building an Engaging ECommerce App? Don’t Forget These Essential Tips

Written by Team Daffodil | Mar 29, 2016 10:01:32 AM

It’s never easy to create an enduring customer relationship and brand loyalty in the world, choices are endless and competition is tough.

Let us take a look on following stats -

* Did you know that a recent study suggested that more than 20% of apps are used only once and abandoned thereafter?

* Google reports mention that about 79% of respondents claimed that they would switch to a competitor’s app following a bad app experience.

* Most smartphone users have more than 50 apps on their phones and it’s easy for your app to get lost in the saturated and competing marketplace.

Here are some of the best tips to develop an engaging ECommerce mobile application.

Clean and simple: To connect with your visitors in your eCommerce mobile application, you should keep the design spotless and simple and straightforward. In the event that you top it off excessively, it will give it a vainglorious look, which nobody prefers nowadays, as simplicity is the new advancement. In this way, ensure your application is spotless and straightforward. Lesser the confusion;lesser are odds of losing.

Develop Replica Of Website: This feature helps your existing customer who has been shopping from is your website, not to feel lost while going through your application. For this, it is important to replicate the design of your website in your app just to give familiar experience.

User - Oriented : Customers opens app to make a purchase and they look forward for an ease of finding what they want. So, Make sure you have proper product categories, filters, search bar and add to cart button. If people are not comfortable browsing through your store, they will not use your app further.

Social media: Mobile users contribute twice as much social content as desktop users. They like to share if they are buying something amazing. So, to let them socialize, Add free Facebook social plug-ins to make it easy for visitors to share products, see what their friends have liked, and get recommendations. This will increase conversion rates and product promotions.

Test It Thoroughly: This is an important step to be taken before app is to be launched to prevent any major glitch. You should evaluate and test the design thoroughly from the beginning so that you can rectify the errors in the early stages of developing the app. It is also advisable to have A/B test for the app to know whether app will work for users or not.

Personalized Experience: It is beneficial to give personalize experience to engage your visitors or customers. Product suggestion should be the way they had searched, browsed and shopped earlier. This will result in repeat customers.

No Pop Ups: It is not a good practice to throw pop up as soon as a user opens an app. This will hinder one’s shopping experience, shrink your sales and customer will go away being extremely frustrated. Thus, app would be uninstalled and user would switch to some other app.

Easy Checkout: Guest checkouts should be allowed to increase and retain existing customers. Also, keep one step checkout and don’t ask for information which is really not necessary. Ask minimum information and let them checkout quickly and easily.

Build a Native App: Native apps, however, may perform better, run faster, and have better access to phone features like cameras, speakers, or similar. Many native apps also do a better job of following operating system conventions, such as appearance and behavior that the user expects.

Create Prototype : Prototyping is crucial to the process of mobile app design. Fully interactive and high-quality prototypes can help clients and development teams understand the workflow of the app. Moreover, it will also allow you to make necessary changes in order to have a successful app.

Push Notifications - Push notifications feature is a good way to grab the attention of customers even when they are not actively using the app. Below are a few helpful tips to optimise your usage of push notifications:

# Send reminders to users who haven’t been actively using the app much
# Use them to inform app users of any upcoming sales or promotions
# Send personalised and substantial content

Engaging Home-Screen Content - The opportunity to grab and maintain the instant attention should be used efficiently through landing page content. It can be used to highlight your app’s top features or to emphasise the value of opting ­in to push notifications. You should also use it to feature any promotions or sales that are happening at the time.

Use mobile Deep Linking- Deep linking in mobile app term means, it’s URL equivalent for mobile Apps which helps in sending users directly on a specific page/screen inside an App when it's opened for the first time.This improves the user's experience, saves valuable time and engages the user. Like this ecommerce app takes the user directly to the product they want to buy, rather than wasting time in navigating through content.

Smart retailers will not produce an app just to have an app, and frankly, an app that shows a seller’s catalog is probably a total waste of time. Following these tips, can improve app to garner loyalty, delight customers and just generating brand lovability.

A mobile app should be a tool to help online and multichannel retailers better engage customers and ultimately achieve their goals. While having a mobile app development team, it is very important to understand what app is supposed to accomplish and whats mindset you want your customers to have through your app.