Building Your e-Commerce App? Doing These 5 Things Will Put You On The Top!

Ever since the deadly global pandemic has stripped the world of the simple pleasures of shopping while strolling, the internet came to the rescue with scrolling.

Seeing the growth of e-Commerce in these recent years, it has become apparent, nay obvious that mobile app development for your e-commerce business is the need of the hour. Not to forget it beats having just a website by providing more conversions at a significantly faster rate.

But here’s the tricky part, since everyone knows it’s the best thing to do, everyone is doing it! Which further breeds tremendous competition and can make it cumbersome to keep your business on top. 

So, here’s a brief guide on 5 things you can do to stand apart from the rest by providing an incomparable user experience.

1. Augmented Reality

What most consumers miss about shopping IRL, is not the products or services, it’s the experience. It’s the ease of trying things on, the touch and feel experience. Alas, technology hasn’t come so far but AR has brought us pretty close!

With Augmented reality, buyers can look at things from different perspectives. It allows them to view the product from all angles as if it were in front of them. They can also visualize how a certain space would look if that product was placed there.

Imagine someone is buying a Couch or Sofa Chair for their living area and is not too sure about how it would look with the pre-existing decor. With AR, they can simply scan the room and a visual representation of the chair in the desired area can be easily computed. They can further also estimate whether the dimensions will be adequate as per requirements and whether they should go for a bigger/smaller model. 

This isn’t even possible in offline shopping!

So equipping your application with AR technology can be your ticket to success. After all, it is futuristic, convenient, and FUN at the same time! 

With this, your customers can make quick and well-informed decisions about their purchases and get a better shopping experience with your app. This helps you retain them and build a large, loyal customer community, thus profiting your business. 

2. Onboarding & Design

When a user opens an app, he is met with the onboarding screen that introduces the business and illustrates how to use it and all the features available. This screen can make or break the user’s interest in continuing with the application, and so it becomes exceedingly crucial to optimize it to the maximum extent. Here’s how to do that.

1. Keep it Short, Simple, & Crisp- everyone is eager to use the app as soon as they download it, so they don’t need a lengthy paragraph telling them what to do. Keep your instructions clear and concise, and remember to keep them casual. A good salesman knows when to sell and when only to tell!

2. Show rather than say- Nobody likes reading, and with whatever’s left of our generation’s attention span they wouldn’t remember it anyway. So utilize visual aids and graphics as much as you can. Show your users where an icon is, or what it does in pictorial form so they can grasp it better and quicker.

3. Let them Skip the Tutorial- Your app is very cool indeed and all its features must be extraordinary, but sometimes people don’t need all that info upfront. Making your tutorial skippable doesn’t frustrate the user and allows them to explore it at their own time and pace

3. Augmented Reality

One of the most prominent rules of sales, both online and offline, is to make the consumer feel valued, appreciated, and most importantly acknowledged! This can be done effectively by customizing functions according to consumer behavior. How? Let us explain.

Let us suppose a user is browsing through a clothing app and has ordered Blue denim of waist 32 a couple of times. With good mobile app development services,  your app would learn from that behavior and suggest more items in the same category so that the user can find what they are probably looking for without much hassle. Further, the application can suggest similar items in the same size so the user has options as well.

This makes the shopping experience much more convenient for the user by presenting them with options that would have taken too long to explore had they not been prompted.

On top of that, it fastens the entire process and increases the chances of the user going forward with the transaction. They can easily find what they are looking for and buy it quickly.

4. Gamification

With any application, the main goal is to retain customers by creating an engaging and worthwhile experience for them. This can be done effectively by implementing some fundamental psychology ideologies. 

Various researches suggest when people are rewarded in any manner or form, their minds release happy hormones that gradually cause them to repeat their behavior leading to being rewarded. 

So, as a business owner, you can program your app in such a way that interacting with it becomes rewarding for your customers. This can be done by in-app games, contents, or by modifying regular procedures to feel like games.

This also helps you improve your app by collecting data from your consumers without being nosy, by asking them to register quickly with minimal details.

For instance rewards schemes that can unlock discounts/offers upon registering, confirmation pop-ups or congratulatory popper animations upon completion of a step, graphic representation of the order tracking process, and many such actions can make an application more interactive encouraging consumers to complete the transaction and return after their purchase.

5. Marketing

Your app needs marketing. Despite being common knowledge, it is very very crucial for your app to do well. How you market your app makes all the difference in how widespread it becomes and how well people receive it.

For it to work, you will naturally need to rely on traditional online forms like creating a website, optimizing it according to the search engine, promoting it via Ads, and what not. But what more can you do that’s specific to applications?

1. Notifications- Apps have the added benefit of being in mobile phones and so even when the consumer is not browsing through them, they can still be enticed with notifications. Make use of that! 

Broadcast fun, quick, frequent yet not excessive notification pop-ups regularly so your consumers stay in the loop. Make sure not to spam your users as they might turn your notifications off, and always give them an incentive to click on the notification. It can be discounts, offers, and what not!

2. Referrals- Giving out coupons and offers upon sharing the application with friends and family can be a great way to increase your reach. You can further add offers like mutual discounts to both the sender and receiver to make sure the receiver also uses your application. This lures in consumers who are likely to stay when they discover your application and its features.

3. Social Media- Last but definitely not the least, create an active and engaging social media community. Today, Social Media is speedily becoming the fastest and most effective form of marketing, and every business must use it. 

Promote your app on social media and keep your audience informed about your features, updates, and offers. Keep them hooked by posting interactive and humorous content that appeals to them and also corresponds to your brand image.

But most of all, hire an exceptional mobile app development company like us to create a solid app with an excellent interface to build an audience that stays.