10 Key Elements to Consider While Building an eCommerce App

The eCommerce sector is evolving with the massive growth in the mobile app development industry. Every prominent business is pushing itself to build its own eCommerce marketplace.

Most interestingly around 85% of smartphone users prefer using a mobile app instead of an ordinary website. Therefore, an online shopping business should consider investing in eCommerce app development to build a high-performance, secure, and reliable application.

In this blog, we are going to tell you about the 10 key elements that you must consider while building an eCommerce app. 

Before we learn about these critical elements, we must learn a few things about eCommerce app development

eCommerce App Market Overview 

• The mobile eCommerce market revenue had touched $3.56 trillion in 2021. This amount is more than half of total eCommerce revenue. 
• The United States alone contributes to almost 10% of the global mobile e-Commerce business in 2021. 
• The global eCommerce app sessions have increased by 92% between 2017 to 2021. 
• Surprisingly, less than 10% of the retailers and small businesses actually provide a mobile app. 
• Around 58.4% of the online audience buys something from online shopping sites every week. 
• Consumer electronics and fashion products fall under the most sold products online. 

What is eCommerce App Development?

eCommerce app development is the process of developing mobile applications to build online stores to sell products and services. An eCommerce platform becomes a medium for trading online goods online. Thus, businesses are able to break geographical boundaries and minimize their operating costs with an effective eCommerce business model. Moreover, to maximize their market presence, business often develops their eCommerce mobile apps for platforms. 

The eCommerce industry has grown massively with technical advancements, globalization, and people’s aspirations to live a better lifestyle. 

The Growing Importance of Mobile Apps in the eCommerce Industry

In today’s hectic lifestyle. People actually don’t have much time to visit retail stores for shopping. For this reason, there’s a huge demand for eCommerce marketplaces where people can shop without leaving their homes. Businesses have also realized the importance of eCommerce app development after the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus, building a well-performing mobile app has become a fundamental component of a successful business. 

Building a mobile app for an eCommerce business is not an easy task. In fact, you have to be very analytical about the customer experience in your UI/UX design.

Let’s learn the important elements for eCommerce app development

10 Key Elements to Consider to Develop an eCommerce App

1. Understanding Your Target Audience 

One size doesn’t fit all! Thus, building an eCommerce platform is not just about developing technical infrastructure for your users to shop online. In order to ensure proper eCommerce app development, you must understand your target audience and their needs.

By running an eCommerce marketplace, you can capture a wide geographical area with your market presence. However, you have to understand the individual customer persona and provide personalization with your services. These are some key points that you must consider while expanding your business to a much wider audience; 

• The applicable taxes in different regions 
• Excise duties on goods and products 
• Shipping costs 
• Complying with the best trade practices 
• Income group of the target audience 
• The cultural impact of online shopping 
• The shopping habits of the consumers 

2. Easy and Consistent Navigation

When the user is coming to your eCommerce portal, s/he might be expecting the easier and most fulling shopping experience. Therefore, overcomplicating the user interface and experience might leave a severe negative impact on the user’s perception. In fact, there shouldn’t be any learning curve to understand the features and navigation flow of your eCommerce application.

It is highly advisable to hire skilled and certified eCommerce app developers who can create the most consistent navigation flow and simple user experience. During the eCommerce app development, you have to focus on visual, functional, and external elements. Ultimately, this focus on design and experience also improves the performance of the app. 

3. The Design Should be Highly Intuitive

The purpose of an eCommerce mobile application is very simple and straightforward. Thus, the scope of innovation might be limited and it is not necessary to go beyond the limits with functionalities. However, the design will be the first thing that your users will notice. You have to be very analytical and careful while applying your branding rules and design methodology to your eCommerce marketplace. 

The design should be simple and should accommodate all the necessary things for the app. Moreover, remember that your app must fit into different screen sizes of smartphones and tablets. Having an eCommerce app development company by your side will help you avoid common mistakes while designing an eCommerce app. Anyway, these are some important tips that you must consider while designing the UI and UX; 

• The user interface must be user-friendly to help the users to navigate with ease. 
• Do not overcomplicate your app with a lot of texts and animations. It will only diverse the audience in making a purchase decision. 
• You must focus on proper content management to make the online shopping experience easier for the customers. 
• The needed number of clicks or taps to purchase a product should be low as possible. 
• The UI of your eCommerce platform must adapt to different devices and operating systems.

4. Guarantee of Security for the Users

Security becomes a major concern for users in online shopping. Any eCommerce platform would ask the users for their financial credentials like credit card details, bank account details, etc. Thus, there’s always a certain risk of security breaches and hacks with websites and apps.

You must invest in proper firewall settings during eCommerce application development. It will help you ensure the security of your customer’s personal and financial data. Moreover, a secure payment gateway and safe wallet are always welcome to improve the security of your eCommerce marketplace.

While considering the internal security of your eCommerce app, you must comply with your country’s data security law. Otherwise, you might face huge monetary penalties and even lawsuits. Data security is the responsibility of every successful eCommerce business. Thus, you must be prepared to take the proper measures to secure your customer dat

5. Building a Strong Customer Support

Successful retail stores have a dedicated customer support desk in their stores. In contrast, the top eCommerce businesses also have a separate customer team to resolve the grievances of their customers. No matter how good your products and services. Good customer support is always necessary. 

Providing multiple channels for customer support is always a good strategy. A user might be comfortable communicating through emails, calls, chats, etc. Having a dedicated chat feature in your eCommerce marketplace could be a sensible decision. Thus, the users will be able to resolve their issues within the app with a chat option. You can also develop a chatbot that might solve simple problems without actually requiring any human intervention.

6. Work on High-Quality Product Images, Videos, and Descriptions

The eCommerce app users don’t actually care about the app and its functionalities. They only care about the products and services that you are offering in your store. Thus, if you want to make a successful sale and ensure proper communication with your customers. You have to put more effort into adding high-quality product images, videos, and descriptions.

The images should be in high resolution, the videos should be very detailed, and the descriptions should cover every point about the product. Thus, intent should not only be sales-oriented, you also want to provide some knowledge and value through your content. In fact, the users should be able to draw comparisons based on the images, videos, and descriptions. Having high-value content is an important part of eCommerce app development.

7. Advanced Search Options

The search options in a website or a mobile app are meant to provide the most relevant results against each query. In the eCommerce development, you need to consider an advanced search engine that will help users to find the most relevant products. Having auto-suggestion facilities in your eCommerce app could be a very user-friendly approach for search options.

The users should be able to use their own keywords or phrases to discover a product. Moreover, you should include multiple search filters to improve the global search settings in your eCommerce platform. Even using random words related to the product should help them discover the product. Ultimately, more relevant searches would translate into better sales and increased revenue for your eCommerce marketplace.

8. Proper Product Categorization

When a user comes to your eCommerce platform, they don’t have much time to go through your entire product catalogue to find a product. Thus, it becomes important for eCommerce business owners to properly categorize all their products.

You should pay extra attention while listing the products on your platform. It would help the users to find the relevant. A mobile app development company can help you create sub-categorizes under primary categories to make the online shopping experience more organized. Furthermore, it would also help you build a more relevant recommendation system for your eCommerce mobile app.

Customers suggested with the most relevant items are more likely to spend more online shopping. Ultimately, categorizing the products properly on your eCommerce store brings long-term benefits for both users and your business.

9. Social Sharing Options

People like to share or get the opinion of others before making an online purchase decision. Thus, it would be if you include social sharing options in your eCommerce marketplace. The sharing feature creates short links that enable others to learn about your product listing or services. 

Social sharing creates amazing branding and marketing opportunities for eCommerce businesses. The sharing options can spread the word about your business like a wildfire. In fact, if people find the products interesting then they would share the products through any social media site or even SMS, email, etc.

10. Persuasive Wishlist

A Wishlist is a common feature of an eCommerce website or application. It allows the customers to save products for the future when they have finally made up their minds to buy them. However, with effective eCommerce app development, you can smartly use the Wishlist feature to launch custom marketing campaigns to encourage more sales and conversions. 

A Wishlist is just like a bookmark to save a specific product. Thus, you can use this feature to send the customers gentle reminders about exclusive deals on your online store. You can even add some interactive elements to the Wishlist to make them more attractive for the end users.

Technical Aspects That You Should Consider While Building an eCommerce Platform 

Building an eCommerce store would require extensive knowledge and technical skills. These are some of the most critical things that you need to consider in your eCommerce app development process;

• The Right Domain Name: A mobile application would also need a supporting eCommerce website to work effectively. Thus, you have to choose the right domain name for your eCommerce platform. 

• The Right eCommerce Technologies: You have to make the right choice between the tons of available eCommerce technologies. 

• Hiring the Right Development Team: The skills and experience of the development team can also impact the final quality of your eCommerce store. 

• Platform: Either you build a native application for each platform, or decide to go with a cross-platform app development approach. In fact, both approaches have their own benefits and drawbacks. 

• Ensuring Compatibility: If you want a wider reach in the market, then you must ensure good compatibility even with the older devices. Moreover, your eCommerce platform must be scalable on devices with different screen sizes.
• Continuous Support: you must ensure continuous technical support for your eCommerce mobile application to maintain and upgrade its features

How MobileCoderz Can Help You With eCommerce App Development? 

The majority of brick-and-mortar businesses have understood the importance of eCommerce app development. For this reason, they are investing in a prominent mobile app development company like MobileCoderz to build their custom eCommerce platform solutions. We have an extensive team of developers, designers, QA professionals, and project managers to develop robust, high-performance, reliable, and secure eCommerce solutions.