10 things to look at while developing an eCommerce App

Like every field that associates itself with the terms Mobile and Internet, the e-commerce market has also witnessed a dramatic turn of ways in which it functions. The reason being the technological advancements that took place over the last decade. The digital world is going more and more Mobile, and so does the e-commerce market need to. The emergence of smartphone usage has led many e-commerce businesses to turn their heads to the mobile market, and rightfully so.

Upon inspection, It can get noticed that most successful mobile e-commerce platforms have some things in common. In today's saturated market of mobile applications, these are the common factors that lead to the success of e-commerce businesses.

Factors

In this blog, we intend to cover Ten such factors to look out for when developing an e-commerce app for your business:

General Research: One of the first things to undertake before developing and launching the application is research. While exploring the technology helps utilize it to its full potential, market research helps understand what can help your application stand out in the market.

Exploring the technology to be used can be done in various ways. There is an ample number of resources available to start developing the application: from free courses to paid services that help you build your application from scratch.

For the market, you could search for keywords on Google to find out about a market gap waiting to get filled, or you could search or run surveys on social media platforms to find out the market needs waiting to get fulfilled.

Competition Research: The market can often be ruthless. And thus, it is crucial to know your competitors to sustain a business in it. Such knowledge can get acquired by conducting a proper analysis of the competition. Not just that, a business needs to be prepared to be as agile as it can to overcome challenges in the ever-changing market.

Conducting proper research and analysis for your application has the following benefits:

- Opportunity to capitalize on market potentials and competition's weaknesses.

- Ability to learn from the competition's successes and failures.

- Gaining a deep understanding of the market to help position the brand.

- Gaining Awareness of every kind of competition to prepare for any upcoming challenges.

Hosting Platform: The impact that Android and iOS have had on the mobile industry is quite apparent. These platforms have made highly powered computers accessible from our pockets. With this power comes a lot of potentials. Almost everyone around us owns a smartphone with either one of the platforms. That's the market reach to tap immediately.

In today's market, it is simple to choose the mobile platform to focus on: Both iOS and Android. While iOS only takes up 27.3% of the market, it cannot get ignored, given the behemoth number of users that come with that percentage. Statistica reports that there were around 728 million iOS devices in use in 2017. With that data, one can estimate the number of android devices that might be in use today. To miss out on this market is to miss out on everything.

Target Audience: Know your audience. It is better to get 500 targeted downloads than to get a million irrelevant ones. That is why it important to consider targeting your audience directly. Your audience must be someone who requires the service and the product provided by your platform.

Without such a target, an e-commerce platform will never be able to garner and develop a grounded business environment with its customers.

Application Workflow: When a customer opens up the application, they expect to understand the application theme and the features and facilities present in the app. Application Workflow determines where the application moves from space to space. That gets done by designing how various elements of the displayed screen interact with other application elements. A proper workflow ensures a smooth app-experience and hence helps increase conversion rate.

UI/UX Design: A proper application workflow determines a sleek user-experience (UX). A sleek UX gets determined by a well-designed user-interface (UI). A mobile application can become the face of your business. If the application is not user-friendly, likely, a customer will never come back to it. This is why it is important to pay close attention to the experience of the e-commerce application.

The Back-end: Without a Backend developed, there is no service to provide. Backend support ensures consistent service quality and security of user data. Most applications today are API-driven, making it a matter of using the most efficient APIs an e-commerce business can use for their application. This Backend support could either be hosted locally (as a cheaper alternative) as a database or by using services such as AWS. Some of the factors to look at when developing the backend are:

- Data Structure

- Data-Size

- Speed and Scalability

- Data Accessibility

- Security

Mobile Analytics: Ignoring mobile analytics can cost the business big-time. No application is perfect and can be riddled with invisible flaws. To stand the test of time, developers need to keep a tab on the application's analytical data. By doing that, developers can make timely rectifications to any future problems and challenges that may take place.

Monetization: Since the app developed is of an e-commerce nature, there will be certain monetization methods in place. As an e-commerce business deals with products and services, presenting those products and services in a clean and easy-to-access fashion can go a long way in ensuring that the customer understands what the business is all about. Besides that, there are some other monetization methods, such as In-App Advertising and In-App Purchases.

Payment And Security: As for the payment, it is advisable to grant the ability to pay using various means. This diversity helps the customer be comfortable with the application and feel safe.

As for security, implementing two-factor authentication and getting SSL certified further strengthens the secure framework of the application.

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Conclusion

With the pandemic, this surely is the right time to get started with your e-commerce endeavor. All in all, the above-mentioned factors, if taken into consideration are likely to help you kickstart a safe but thriving e-commerce application in this market-jungle with the likes of giants such as Amazon, Alibaba, etc...