How to Get Started with your Online Shopping App Idea?

13 Oct

Today, you use mobile applications to read, listen to music, edit photos or videos, and even quickly book your travel tickets. According to Statista, it is estimated that mobile apps are expected to generate over $935 billion in revenue by 2023.

Mobile applications offer better conversion rates due to the increasing number of smartphone users. A great example of a mobile application focused on creating customer engagement on its application is McDonald’s.

The new application allows users to order food and get promotional discounts at , takeaway,dine-in and drive-thru. The drive-thru plan has been an ingenious idea as, during the pandemic, many customers prefer eating in the comfort of their cars rather than sitting at a restaurant. The App also allows users to share feedback, peruse the menu and get the best deals on their burgers.

The main idea was to create an interactive in-store experience for the customer through developing an online eCommerce store. The ability to offer better discounts and quick payments and the analytics of consumer behaviour online is why businesses adopt online shopping apps to grow their business.

What are the benefits of developing an online shopping application?

1. Builds customer loyalty and creates brand engagement

You can build engagement by providing discounts, running flash sales, or exclusive offers for premium customers. This helps build loyalty, and customers feel rewarded during their consumer journey.

You can go heavy on your content creation to have customers actively engage with your brand. For example, Snapdeal has teamed up with an OTT service provider to provide video content on its eCommerce application. This engages customers with information and encourages them to browse through your website for a longer duration.

2. Personalized marketing

You can easily pitch to your customers based on their locations, interests, and data from past shopping behaviour. Thus, you can create customized strategies according to each target persona.

The best example of this is push notifications. They actively remind the customers about the upcoming sales and offers and create promotions according to their shopping behaviour. eCommerce stores actively use the push notification feature to inform customers about seasonal offers.

3. Mobile applications promote faster checkouts

Mobile web pages tend to load faster when compared to your traditional web pages. Brands need to build on an omnichannel experience as Gen Z and millennials look for a holistic experience when shopping online. If you look at the frequency of the younger generation’s online shopping data, you will notice that it is no longer once a week or once a month compared to the previous generation.

Gen Z and millennials are always on their toes and make split-second purchase decisions. Thus, seamless integration of the eCommerce store for smartphones is vital to retain your customers.

Steps for Setting Up an Online Store that Converts

1. Market Research

This is the most crucial step before developing your online store. You should define the product idea, the regions you want to expand, and look at the market’s present and future conditions.

You can also build a survey for your target audience before the launch of your product so that you can understand the changes to be made and tweak them accordingly before investing in the idea.

You also need to decide which mobile platform you wish to launch your application with first. In continents like Asia and Africa, the Android market dominates the market share. However, for continents like Europe, Australia, and America, iOS leads the market share.

2. Essential Features Required

Thanks to the speed of digitization, many businesses need to differentiate themselves while launching shopping applications. So if you are on the way to build a shopping application that ensures high conversion rates, these are 6 features that are a must-have.

Customer and Guest Login

Customers lose interest in the process of entering their details again and again. You can provide them with a guest login feature offered in Posbytz, the online store software. This allows them to access the essential features that do not require login details. This helps your customers login with ease and browse through your product catalogue without a hassle.

Addition of Search filters with high-quality indexing

Customers like to be specific in their searches, and this helps them search for products based on the size, occasion, or price without going through the whole catalogue.

Integration of predictive analytics

You need to inform your customers of the latest discounts or promotions that they were actively searching for. Using predictive analytics, you can understand your customer behaviour and make recommendations accordingly, thus ensuring high conversions.

3. Design and Development

Design plays a vital role as customers build their brand perception based on the intuitiveness and user-friendliness of the shopping application. You should have a unique app icon so that customers can easily have high brand awareness and association.

In addition, it is essential to upload high-quality images as low-quality images create trust issues for the customer.

4. Monitor the application popularity

Once you become a well-known brand, you will have an overload of traffic, and this will lead to a slowing down of services, images, and frequent crashes. Thus, ensuring that you have continuous customer feedback is essential to provide them with an exceptional user experience through bug fixes on a timely basis.

5. Marketing

After the launch of your application, you should strategically look for ways to increase traffic to your application. It is important to market your product to appeal to a broader market and interactively engage them.

You can conduct contests, write informative blogs and provide video tutorials for your product.

Conclusion

The smartphone penetration has led to the booming growth in the application space. As a business, you need to continuously innovate your online application according to your customer’s preferences to gain customer satisfaction and retention over time.

Posbytz offers futuristic features that provide your customers with an omnichannel experience. So what are you waiting for?