How to Build Up a Superior E-Commerce Mobile Application
What is the best advice to enhance an e-commerce mobile application? Originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
Mobile commerce applications are becoming more and more popular despite what many may think about the rise and fall of mobile apps.
The reason is that as the phone becomes more and more powerful, we can use it in new, intriguing and ingenious ways to gather data, provide services, observe behavior, and present relevant things all in a moment’s notice. So, what are the big things to get right when creating a mobile commerce application?
Have A Purpose for Your App
If you are looking to make the app just another version of your website, probably not work the investment. Since this post is about enhancing an existing mobile application, it’s likely most people are in this predicament, not finding much success with their mobile app. Include some badass functionality that the mobile phone can provide your app (geolocation, scanning, accelerometer, AR, camera, etc.)
Make Users Lives Easier
No clunky interfaces, no hard to spot buttons, no font’s and images too small, large, bulky pieces that make it easy to navigate are best.
Understand The Purpose of Your App
This goes with point number one in that when building the app, you should have a reason, and that reason should be something unique. Do you want your app because you will detect the location of a customer, offer a coupon at your store, and provide sizing charts via AR as a cutout of the customers’ body figure? If so, you need an app. That purpose may just be as simple as offering your employees the ability to search and find similar items to one the customer has simply by scanning the tag.
Have Viral Loops Built In
If your app isn’t automatically working to drive users, it isn’t doing it’s job. Referrals, codes, scans, invites, social shares, etc. should all be used to get one user to drive another user.
Connect The Website and App
Your customer should be able to switch from the app to the website and not lose anything they’ve done. Their cart, sizing, location etc. should all be saved on the backend, and presented everywhere.
Personalize Each Users Experience
As you’ve probably noticed, Android and Apple devices are presenting more and more customized options for us depending on our personality. This makes it easy for developers to include this type of functionality within your application. Using machine learning algorithms, and with the right data, your app can make present options for customers based on implicit or explicit data input from the user. Amazon estimates 30% of purchases are based on their recommendation algorithm.
Retarget
Use tracking pixels and ad platforms that can detect actions within your application and serve these up to the customer as they browse the internet.
Use Event Trigger Messages
Again, the app should draw users back into it. A good way to do this is to notify (via email, text, push, FB, other) that they have X waiting for them in the app. Whatever the message, again it should be relevant to the user. If your app over spams with notifications that aren’t relevant, don’t bother, you’ll lose them.
Contributed by Alex Senn, Delivering #retailtech to grow retailers store sales – orkiv.com
