Hitting That Ecommerce Business Jackpot with Mobile App Development

Indian ecommerce businesses are jumping on the mobile application bandwagon happily, and they have every reason to as well. With mobile usage dominating 72 percent of web traffic and 86 percent devoted to apps, ecommerce businesses made over $500 million in just 2012 alone!

Indian retailer Myntra’s shift from a website to a mobile-only application is an example for the popularity of mobile ecommerce, paying off as sky rocketing profits. If you are now wondering about how to strike gold for your business, look no further than our .

But before that, here are some takeaways on the benefits of an ecommerce mobile app:

Usability anywhere

The portability of a smartphone is very important to its attractiveness and wide use, with apps beingthe star of the show. An ecommerce shopping app can be accessed from the office and home, with options for saving in the cart and even one-click checkout process. All you need is an internet connection and you’re good to go!

Visibility

Smartphones have a very high global presence and functionality, and almost all retailers are takingthe app route owing to this. When your business decides to make its debut on the mobile app store, rest assured that there will be customers all over the world looking at it and for it.

Inexpensive

Creating a mobile application is a cost-effective and profitable investment for any business today, because most users find m-commerce convenient. You do not have to invest as much on an online store as for a physical store. Statistics even say that 87 percent of Internet enabled sales will happen through mobile devices. With ease of transactions and maintenance, choosing ecommerce apps for business is a good bet.

HTML5, CSS and JavaScript are the best options for ecommerce app development. While approaching or anywhere in the world, here are the features you should focus on developing in your mobile app:

Offline availability

This is an option that can be integrated into the app, allowing users to save products to the cart when there is no internet connection. They can check the availability and checkout the product only after they go online. Enabling such a feature in your app will ensure that users can have access to products of their interest at any time and tab them.

Personalization

This aspect of mobile app development works on interest based marketing, showing up as personalized preferences for customers based on previous searches. Access to user’s GPS for location-based marketing, and camera for code scanner integration and customer trial/styling options. A good example for this aspect is Amazon, who offer recommended products on interest based searches.

Social media

With custom apps and plug-ins to integrate social media such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram buttons; social media on ecommerce apps can be used to generate traffic, boost sales, increase conversion rates, collect customer content for brand, support social media log-in and connect with customers through reviews/testimonial sharing.

Notifications

Push notifications in mobile apps are very helpful in notifying the user of order details, updates and even promotional activities such as sales. Additionally, they can be combined with a GPS tracker to alert of any store nearby stocking their products. Notifications such as SMS can be enabled to deliver messages on the delivery and tracking of the product order. Basically a sense of immediacy is conveyed with the help of this tool, but should not be overused. (that’s spamming!)

Scalability

When the customer base and traffic expands, your application should be developed well enough to handle the load and expand further. A strong architecture can comprise of a cloud based foundation (bandwidth), a strong API framework (cross platform and larger scaling) and analytics to track and monitor the database. Similarly, scalable mobile apps have a sound control management system to monitor the servers, good user experience and bring high Return on Investment (ROI).

Speed & Network

An ecommerce mobile application has the advantage of being independent of the server speed or internet connection after download. This is because the application will be dependent on the processing power, and should be developed to function on all networks and bandwidths.